In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope opened its lens on a nondescript patch of sky — about one ten-millionth of the total sky area — and over ten days recorded light from ever more distant objects. The resulting image, the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), included some of the most distant objects ever seen, some over 12 billion light years away. This, and subsequent deep field images, evoke a kind of cosmic melancholy at the incomprehensibility of the wheeling field of matter, space and time around us.
Deep Field II is the second in a series of works or solo instrument/voice and electronics, in which all electronic sounds are generated in real-time from the live sound. The electronics are conceived as an ‘extended, abstracted virtual space’.
This work was commissioned and premiered by Barbara Lüneburg in 2015, with funding from Victoria University of Wellington.
The live electronics patch is available from the composer.