MASK - Duo for an Immersive Mini-Theatre (UA)
Alt/voice (Thickets of Love) Mathias Monrad Møller, Sebastian Berweck
Radialsystem, Berlin

MASK - Duo for an Immersive Mini-Theatre

MASK is a staged feedback system for tenor, keyboard, and synthetic voice — a perceptual theatre in which identity slowly dissolves under the pressure of frequency, repetition, and digital mirroring.

Over 20 minutes, the piece constructs an invisible force field: frequencies rise imperceptibly from 4Hz to 4000Hz, pulling the performer into a dense sonic tension. In the final section, the voice drops into sub-bass zones (80–50Hz), mimicking a collapse of presence into silence, inertia, and spectral residue.

But MASK is not a display of virtuosity. It is a slow loss of agency. The tenor’s live voice is gradually overwritten by its own cloned simulation — a deepfake voice that no longer imitates, but begins to speak instead. The performer becomes a visible shell, while the mask — the synthetic voice — becomes the speaker.

What begins as a duet between voice and keyboard turns into a hall of mirrors. Light flickers, faces fragment, and the sonic grid repeats itself with algorithmic precision. Fragmentation is not an accident — it is the aesthetic.

The work draws loosely from Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, yet replaces Lucier’s healing resonance with a controlled destabilization of cognition. The frequencies in MASK are not therapeutic — they are dramaturgical tools that push the brain into unstable zones of perception. When a state becomes predictable, the structure breaks it.

Inspired by the dramaturgy of deepfake, machine hallucinations, and vocal possession, MASK explores what it means to hear oneself after authenticity — and what is left of the voice when its origin is no longer human.

This work was developed in collaboration with tenor Mathias Monrad Møllerand keyboardist Sebastian Berweck, and is currently evolving across different performance formats.