Artificial Paradise was commissioned by The Royal Academy of Music in London for The Manson ensemble. The premier was given by The Manson ensemble in The Duke’s Hall, conducted by Christopher Austin, the 9th of March of 2017

The piece explores sonorous territories parallel to the sensory prose of Baudelaire in his essay on narcotic trances: Paradis Artificiels[1]. Allegorically, my interest focused on interrogating the idea of instrumental resonance as a means of expanding its individuality.

Baudelaire writes in Les Paradis Artificiel:

…The most ordinary words, the simplest ideas assume a new and bizarre aspect. After a few minutes, the relation between ideas becomes so vague, and the thread of your thoughts grows so tenuous, that only your cohorts can understand you. Next your senses become extraordinarily keen and acute. Your sight is infinite. Your ear can discern the slightest perceptible sound, even through the shrillest of noises. The slightest ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. In sounds there is colour; in colours there is music. You are sitting and smoking; you believe that you are sitting in your pipe, and that your pipe is smoking you; you are exhaling yourself in bluish clouds. This fantasy goes on for an eternity. A lucid interval and a great expenditure of effort, permit you to look at the clock. The eternity turns out to have been only a minute.