MIDI Sans Frontières by Deerful

UPDATE: This is now available as part of a charity release for the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants here: https://deerful.bandcamp.com/album/without-borders

This is my contribution to Squarepusher's MIDI Sans Frontières collaborative project, detailed here: http://www.squarepusher.net/.

I want to explain a little about this piece here. I spent the 19th to the 23rd of June this year at Stanford CCRMA, learning to begin to program music in SuperCollider. That's not a very long time, and the sum total of what I've learnt is used here; I could perhaps have done something more ambitious using another method, but I didn't want to, and here's why. The night of the referendum vote was the last full day of my classes at Stanford, and unlike my friends at home, and my partner who had dutifully acted as my proxy voter earlier in the day, I wasn't able to sleep through the counts; as my lecturers spoke I kept the BBC website open behind SuperCollider on my laptop, refreshing and refreshing until all the counts were done and I knew 52% of the population had voted to leave the EU.

I've never stayed up to the end of a count before and never want to again. There is a powerlessness to it I couldn't have anticipated. As the only UK-based student in my class it was hard to make my American classmates and lecturers understand my distraction and upset at the referendum result, but their kindness even in the face of something comparatively unknown to them will stick with me for a long time. I worry about my friends who are people of colour in the wake of the reported rise in racist attacks; I worry about being unable to visit Germany, where my entire maternal family live without dual citizenship; I worry about a return to the depths of austerity; I worry about friends who are unemployed and my own employment prospects when I graduate; I worry about the NHS. There's a lot to worry about. It piles up like the phrases of this piece.

It's hard not to feel, now, like the country is more in ruins as a result of this referendum than any other vote in the course of my lifetime so far. As I write this we are essentially in governmental stasis with little we can do to change the situation except to exercise our democratic right when we can by voting, joining parties and unions and demonstrating if we are able, but in a smaller sense, to look out for one another, extend hands and say, I will stand with you and work with you and support you regardless of borders or government or where we are from or how we identify. In a very small way this is one attempt at doing the latter.

Code (and vague instructions for live performance) available at http://pastebin.com/rhHAexVh.

Special thanks to @christa_lee for making me aware of this project and for her own inspiring contribution to it, and to @brunoruviaro for his wonderful teaching.