by Gagi Petrovic

Premiere
Rewire Festival, April 2025, Den Haag, Nederland 

Image credits: Gagi Petrovic & Modelo62, Rewire 2025. Top and bottom right: Jan Rijk; Bottom left: Sabine van Nistelrooij.

Pay To Destroy is an interactive performance about how consumer behaviour is harming our planet, and we are (unwittingly) contributing to it. Visitors are invited to use their mobile phones during the performance. Through a website, they can make online ‘voting’ that affect the music in real time. The audience thus acts as polluters of the music that changes because of their actions.

Gagi makes electronic music, including his self-developed instrument GEST. He composes PTD for ensemble and himself as a performer. 

Pay To Destroy is a clear rhythmic and harmonic story to touch people emotionally. As the composition becomes increasingly polluted, the piece also becomes more distorted, and the musical idiom shifts from conventional harmony and rhythm to a more polluted sound world. Gagi plays with the listener’s expectation. As a rule, he allows changes in harmony, timbre or rhythm to take place unobtrusively, but in PTD, the changes become audible in the music and thus traceable even to the less experienced listener.

→ Supported by
This project was made possible thanks to the financial support to develop our activities given by Fonds Podiumkunsten NL, Gemeente Den Haag, Konrad Boehmer Foundation and Stichting Reinbert de Leeuw.