I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (1969) I AM SITTING IN A ROOM (2019), 2019 (audio, 1:33 min) Gabriela Communication Department Answering Machine Commission, 3 137 Athens. “This is embarrassing to say. I used to go to see the Judson Dance Group, and Trisha Brown did a piece. I miss-remembered it. I didn’t remember it correctly. I thought she was telling me what she was doing while she was dancing. My memory of that was, I am raising my right hand. I thought, I’ll tell people what I’m doing, that will be the subject matter. I didn’t want to use a poem, or text, or anything. I am sitting in a room, probably not the one you’re in, I’m recording the sound…” (A. Lucier) In 1969 American composer, one of the key figures of experimental music, Alvin Lucier first recorded his groundbreaking composition “I am sitting in a room” (conceived for voice and electromagnetic tape), in which he tells the audience what is he doing and what they will hear. As he explains, recorded voice is played back several times until the resonant frequencies of the room start to dominate the speech, erasing at the end the human component towards dominance of the pure, environmental sound. What would happen if the focus was only on the spoken words, the voice and the resonance and acoustic of performer’s own body (throat, chest and diaphragm)? How the idiosyncratic and uncontrollable activities and sounds it produces can be transformed into music? Thinking of “I am sitting in a room” as of a song or a choreography, “any irregularities […] speech might have” become notations or gestures, the integral part its score.