"Has/Had" is a live performance computer piece that uses the "lady's glove" controller of my design to map my hand and body gestures to the control of sound material and rhythmic structures.
The musical core of "Has/Had" is based on unstable rhythms; a playful wink at the stability and predictability of techno music and its variants which now dominate the popular music scene. These rhythms are on the verge of collapse and go through various transformations until they finally disintegrate, only to reappear towards the end as a vague memory passing by and accompanied by broken words ("a/avait" in French for "Has/Had", a reference to the impermanence of perceptions) and followed by remnant messages which gush in as a final and desperate attempt to say something and imprint messages when these are irrelevant and empty. The same way the mind tried to re-create stability in the rhythmic material, it tries to hold on and perceive meaning in these empty messages. The form of "Has/had" is a long structural decay. The energy at its beginning is the spring board that launches the unraveling in time of its disintegration.

Laetitia Sonami (F), born 1957. She studied with Joel Chadabe at the Electronic Music Studio in Albany, NY, and with Robert Ashley and David Behrman at the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College, CA, where she received her MFA in composition in 1980. She has since been developing her own electronic musical Instruments for live performance. She lives in Oakland, California, and is currently working in France.