Ragnarök
A battle language for sound.
You choose your timbre.
You choose your traits.
Then you find out if your sound survives.
ABOUT THE WORK
Ragnarök explores timbre as a primary musical language. Rather than organizing performers around pitch and harmony, players inhabit sonic identities built from texture, breath, resonance, and noise. The result is an improvisational system where character emerges through sound itself.
Ragnarök is a sonic combat game for 1–21 instrumentalists. The system was invented on a single November evening in 2010 and has been developed ever since. Through extended technique instruments produce sounds of a creature in the world. Each performer chooses a timbre and up to three sonic traits before the piece begins. Then the battle starts.
HOW IT WORKS
Two instrumentalists meet in a round. Silence separates one round from the next. When their timbres collide, one of three things happens: they coexist, one adapts, or one is defeated (occasionally they swap). The system - encoded in an algorithmic logic and realized in Pure Data - determines the outcome based on the relationship between their traits. A defeated timbre gets to explore what that death sounds like. And if a sonic idea is defeated three times, the recessive sound returns. The form scales from a single performer to an ensemble of twenty-one, across eight rounds minimum, with at least one death required.
THE SOUND
This is not tonal music. There are no melodies, no harmonies in the traditional sense. The performers sound like animals - giant beasts occupying space, breathing, snarling, retreating, holding ground. Extended technique is not a stylistic choice here; it is the only language that fits.
Ragnarök has been realized as a 16-channel electroacoustic acousmatic work and performed live with ensembles of up to four instrumentalists. It sits in the lineage of game-pieces - Zorn's Cobra, Oliveros's deep listening structures - but its central invention is unique: a fully developed grammar of timbral conflict, where what your sound is determines what it can survive.
