Three Things is almost aggressively plain as a title, which is part of its charm. It does not promise transcendence, terror, virtuosity, or revelation. It gives a count. Three things. Not three songs, not three compositions, not three performances elevated into art-mystery. Things. The word lowers the stakes while secretly making the whole project sharper. What counts as a thing? A task? A joke? A score? A recording? A behavior performed long enough to become music?
Luciano Maggiore and Louie Rice have built a collaborative practice around score-based works, physical actions, vocalisations, prompts, and rules, moving between acoustic and amplified situations. Their own description, repeated across release and event contexts, is beautifully exact: “two people, in a room, doing something.” That phrase has the strength of a good Fluxus score because it removes almost everything except action, relation, and attention. It sounds stupid until one realizes how much art is hidden inside the question of what people are doing, why they keep doing it, and what happens when the doing is framed as listening.
Released in 2023 by adhuman, Three Things consists of “Hissing for White Shoes (#6),” “Phone Work,” and “Pocket Fascinator (#7).” Each piece begins from a simple premise that is funny before it is anything else. In “Hissing for White Shoes,” a drive around London is interrupted by loud hissing whenever the performers pass someone wearing white shoes. In “Pocket Fascinator,” Buchla synthesizer material from EMS Stockholm is played through mobile phone speakers placed in the performers’ pockets as they try to walk in sync with the pulses. “Phone Work” is built from WhatsApp voice recordings exchanged back and forth, each performer mimicking the other until the original source is gradually lost.
That last detail is the secret hinge. These pieces may sound absurd, but they are not casual nonsense. They use absurdity as a tool for studying memory, imitation, public space, timing, embarrassment, and the failure of communication to remain clean. “Phone Work” especially turns the contemporary phone into a folk instrument of distortion. A voice is sent, heard, imitated, returned, misremembered, flattened by compression, and folded into another voice. The original disappears not through violence, but through repetition and care. That is funny, but it is also strangely tender. Two people are listening to each other so closely that the message erodes.
The white-shoes piece is equally smart because it turns urban observation into a private rule-game. Anyone walking through London wearing white shoes unknowingly becomes part of the score. The city is not recorded as neutral environment. It becomes a trigger system. The performers are not documenting the street; they are behaving inside it according to a ridiculous law. The hiss becomes a small anti-social punctuation mark, a snake-note directed at fashion, brightness, cleanliness, or maybe nothing at all. That is where the work has teeth. Its silliness is exact enough to make the everyday world briefly seem over-coded.
“Pocket Fascinator” may be the most physically beautiful idea of the three. The synthesizer does not simply play in space. It rides in pockets, leaking out through tiny speakers while the bodies try to coordinate with it. Large electronic-music history, Buchla, EMS, pulse, synthesis, experimental prestige, gets reduced to little phone speakers near thighs and fabric. The body becomes playback device. Walking becomes choreography. Synchronization becomes both goal and joke. The result points toward dance, minimalism, sound art, and slapstick at once.
The duo’s background with NO PA ON helps explain why Three Things feels so clear in its weirdness. Maggiore and Rice originally came together through an event series at Cafe OTO, performing works by artists such as Alvin Lucier, Robert Bozzi, Ken Friedman, Emmett Williams, and Walter Marchetti before developing their own action-based pieces. That lineage matters because the record is not just “quirky experimental audio.” It comes from a serious investigation into performance scores, conceptual art, sound poetry, minimalist procedure, and the question of how little structure is needed before an action becomes composition.
What makes Three Things work is that it does not dress that lineage in solemn clothing. The adhuman notes are frank about the duo’s embrace of humor and absurdity, while also recognizing the sincerity underneath. That balance is rare. Too much seriousness would suffocate the pieces. Too much comedy would turn them into sketches. Maggiore and Rice let the joke remain audible while still treating the task with commitment. The performance is funny because the performers do not abandon it when it becomes awkward. They stay with the rule. They let the rule make the world strange.
Inside Private Release, this feels especially valuable because it widens the meaning of “experimental.” After noise, industrial, dark ambient, and collage work, Three Things reminds the archive that experimentation can be light on the surface without being light in consequence. It can be a hiss, a pocket speaker, a phone message, a pair of people doing something for reasons that may only become clear after the doing has lasted too long.
There is also a quiet connection to your larger “Fantasy & Reality joining” phrase. These pieces are fantasy systems imposed on ordinary reality. A white shoe becomes a trigger. A pocket becomes a concert hall. A WhatsApp exchange becomes a memory-loss machine. Nothing supernatural happens, yet reality changes because a rule has been placed over it. That is exactly the magic of score-based art at its best: not escape from the world, but a temporary grammar that makes the world misbehave.
Three Things is not grand. That is its strength. It proves that a small premise, obeyed carefully, can open a surprisingly large room. Three things, yes. But each thing is a little machine for making attention laugh at itself and then keep listening.
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