SORRY FOR BEING SO PATHETIC (2026)
FOR MODIFIED DRUMS, FEEDBACK AND TAPE
Commissioned by Lorenzo Orsenigo
SORRY FOR BEING SO PATHETIC is a seven-minute piece for modified drum set and electronics written for percussionist Lorenzo Orsenigo. The work explores the relationship between sound, language, and the absurdity of contemporary discourse, combining acoustic percussion, amplified resonances, feedback, and fixed media. The drum set is constructed from unconventional objects, including large metal pots, grill plates, ping pong balls transforming everyday materials into a fragmented and unconventional percussion instrument. A transducer attached to the snare drum and a self-built rotating microphone system generate feedback, allowing the instrument to become both a source of sound and a site of electronic interference.
The electronic part incorporates excerpts from a podcast conversation by Robinson Erhardt featuring Slavoj Žižek, Marxism, Quantum Mechanics, and Artificial Intelligence (October 2025), alongside a click track transmitted through the transducer. Through the juxtaposition of spoken discourse, metallic timbres, mechanical gestures, and unstable feedback, SORRY FOR BEING SO PATHETIC creates a space in which the boundaries between instrument and object, control and failure, and intellectual authority and absurdity become blurred. The work's title suggests an intimate and ironic gesture of self-deprecation, setting the stage for an exploration of vulnerability, awkwardness, and the contradictions embedded in contemporary ways of thinking and communicating.
TEXT
Let's openly confront the deep shit we are in. We are really approaching a crazy world.If anything, we are not enough pessimists. I don't like this world because it will be this totally pragmatic world of unprincipled tolerance towards worst forms of crime. I am now even more pessimist than usual. It will be just the peaceful coexistence of horrors. So where are we? Here philosophy enters. Here capitalism enters. Here things get interesting, you know. I am not saying that we have another endpoint. I'm just saying that we don't even know which this endpoint will be. We live in crazy times. And we should ask ourselves, how is this possible that we live in such a time? It's no longer that we are not sure will history move in that direction or not. We lack the measure itself. I, at least I don't know where it is moving. I am deeply depressed. We really live in a times, here comes again reference to quantum mechanics, times which are not only impenetrable for us observers caught in the events, I think they are chaotic in themselves. Here is my other paranoiac suspicions that at some level don't underestimate the perversity of the human mind. So let's go to crazy political events. Self survival is not the ultimate horizon of human experience. There is death drive. Can a machine say, I know it sounds pathetic, but something like, I would prefer that we all die than to lose our freedom. Sorry for this pathetic thing. Can a machine do this? You know what the other thing that depresses me is? At some level, maybe we are caught in this matriarchal dream. Wouldn't it be nice to live like in a matrix, protected by a benevolent mother mega machine? We hope. Benevolent, Totally controlling us. It still leaves open the idea. Controlling us in what sense? To make us happy. What is happiness? What if the machine judges in a way that it keeps us half dragged in a kind of a pseudo orgasmic blissful state that that's okay?