Four Movements

"Four Movements" is a music album by NYC-based artist Woody Sullender constructed in video game space.  The project consists of several navigable environments (an empty club, a loft residence, an 'open world' intersected with a modernist grid, etc.) where the virtual participant can perform listening.

As life under COVID-19 has largely been defined by our reliance on virtual rooms to supplant our empty social spaces, "Four Movements" creatively embodies this disjuncture.

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Considering the history of the music album as a medium, the ‘record’ shifted from being a recording of an event to a construction of that performance (ie. “Sgt Pepper”). A huge portion of the ‘recording’ is the presentation of sonic events in a fabricated space (plate reverbs, convolution reverbs, stereo ‘imaging’, etc.). This interweaving of the real and the media construction largely defines our contemporary condition. "Four Movements" is a continuation of this trajectory of artists building artificial spatialized ’soundstages’ for sonic experiences.

“Four Movements” was initially conceived as the media distribution of Sullender’s previous work “Furniture Music” but evolved into something more complex, picking up on numerous themes including modern isolation as computer media supplants human interaction (further highlighted by the coronavirus pandemic).

Frequently, for the mediated music work, the audio has commonly only been a component of the larger complete artwork. The reliance on the image has spanned decades from the gatefold sleeve, to the MTV era, to the age of YouTube. “Four Movements” is differentiated from other albums not by its heavy usage of the visual, but by how it requires the viewer/listener to perform listening.

https://fourmovements.woodysullender.com

Music from "Four Movements" available at:
https://woodysullender.bandcamp.com/