A-AW3: Stefan Prins

For the third installment of Anti-Anniversary Week (explanation here), I'm reposting Stefan Prins's Generation Kill, which I encountered at the 2012 Donaueschingen Festival and chose as one of my events of the year. It's a musical meditation on video-game technology, social media, and drone warfare, in which live performers undergo instant manipulation by way of Playstation devices. "Meditation" is, in fact, not quite the right word; this is a work of fierce, unsettling tension, one that got under the skin even of a seen-it-all German new-music audience. Performing above are members of the Nadar Ensemble, with the composer himself (far right) supervising the sound mix.