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

MASK - Bitcrush of Phantoms  ( 2025/26)

An immersive mini music theatre for tenor voice, keyboard and Voice-clone derivatives

MASK is an immersive micro-theatre duo, composed for live tenor, keyboard and “deepfake” voice environments. It unfolds as a real-time stage feedback system in which the self is no longer stable, but continually reconfigured. The voice, split into three simultaneous layers – live, spatially resonant, and cloned – emerges from a single body. Yet through repetition, frequency modulation and digital mirroring, it gradually fractures into three psychic planes: the core self, the unconscious self, and the replicated other. These voices do not replace the subject – they coexist with it, pull it apart, reassemble it. Control slips, returns, and slips again. The self becomes less a centre, and more a state in flux.

At first, a clear dichotomy is set: the keyboardist exerts control, while the singer appears controlled. But over time, the live tenor is overtaken by a clone of his own making – a deepfake voice that begins to speak in his place. This synthetic presence grows stronger, autonomous, unnerving. Drawing on Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, the piece explores how acoustic resonance once used for healing becomes here a mechanism of destabilised cognition. The work's pulse shifts from 1Hz to 528Hz, triggering moments of perceptual overload whenever the voice-body begins to feel safe.

In Part Two, the shattered mask becomes a field of mirrored shards. Fragmentation is not the end, but the method: a survival tactic. The remnants of resonance and distortion might be reassembled – not to return, but to generate a newly fractured self, one fit for a world of algorithmic ghosts.

Inspired by deepfake technology, phantom memory, and digital doubling, MASK asks: when voices are no longer recognisably human, what does it mean to listen to oneself? Beneath the mask, is there still a face – or only a more elaborate disguise?

YW.25/26, Berlin

Composed in 2025 at the invitation of Sebastian Bewerck
Created for Mathias Monrad Møller (tenor) and Sebastian Berweck (keyboard)
Concept, composition, sound design, costume: Ying Wang · 2025/26 · Berlin

Duration: approx. 20 min.
World premiere: 17 Jan 2026, Halle - Radialsystem, Berlin (Ultraschall Berlin Festival)