Remix Rendition

As well as donating the 'Internment' mix of Rendition to us as a free download, Bob Dickinson has also passed on the separate elements of the original piece. We'd like you to get involved with the continuing evolution and democratisation of the piece by downloading these elements and creating your own remix. Once you're done, let fourier transform know, and we'll pass on the results to Bob in order to keep the piece growing.

Download the separate elements here - cello, harp, marimba, and two violin parts (170.9 Mb).

About Bob Dickinson

Bob was keyboardist in Magazine in the late seventies, contributing the song 'Motorcade', to the first album Real Life. This followed work with a number of European avant garde composers including Dieter Salbert and Jean Yves Bosseur, alongside projects with Cabaret Voltaire and Richard Witts (of The Passage). In the eighties, he devoted his energies to educational work alongside collaborative projects with dancers and artists from other disciplines. The nineties witnessed an increasing involvement and interest in music, ritual and nature, culminating in the publication of Music and the Earth Spirit by Capall Bann in 2001. In recent years he has composed pieces for 10-string classical guitar and small chamber ensembles which have been performed in South Africa and Canada. An album of recent work, Logic, Beauty and Chaos, has been released on the JNN netlabel based in the Netherlands. Alongisde the chamber work Rendition, for the Komposit ensemble, he has completed a set of songs, Pictures of a floating world for the mezzo-soprano Siobhan Mooney and the pianist Ezra Williams (premiered at Schotts Music, London, January, 2010). His current projects include an extended music-theatre piece for Siobhan Mooney, employing Aramaic texts.

About this work

The original version of Rendition was composed for The Komposit Orchestra, and was perhaps representative of a post-9/11 response to recent global events, yet at the same time setting these against previous historical precedents.

The title has a dual reference:

• the enforced movement and handing over of suspected terrorists by the US government to other jurisdictions and possible torture;
• ‘rendition’ in the sense of a realisation of a musical score.

At the same time, the work references the forced movement of peoples against their will from their home to an unknown and unwanted place. In this context, the reference points are the Holocaust and the Palestinian situation. The original piece took the form of an arching, symmetrical lament for ensemble in which the main player is the cello pitted against forces outside his/her control. From the opening section through to the violent central section, and the subsequent return to stasis at the conclusion of the work, the cellist becomes the object of various forms of external and unwanted pressure from the other participants. Within this structure, there are a range of transformational processes in operation, giving rise to music which traverses a spectrum from minimalist simplicity to more complex chaotic processes.

The original version of Rendition can be heard at www.bobdickinson.org. The players on that recording are Emma Williams (marimba), Laura Zobel (violin 1), Sarah Stuart (violin 2), Ailee Robertson (clarsach), Adrianne Wininsky (cello) and Rudi Araphoe (electronic sound design). The conductor is Huw Thomas.