It’s been a crazy week or two. I’ve spent most of them in lovely little Istrian town that locals call Savičenta (but it’s officially Svetvinčenat / Sanvincenti) working on music with Matija Ferlin for his latest solo performance called Staging a Play: Antigone.
It was extremely inspirational and the work went smoothly and fast enough to arrive at final sonic composition with more satisfaction and confidence then when things get stressfuly complicated at the last minute.
I was inspired a lot by the original story by Sophocles, its permutations and stagings through time, but also by Matija and Goran Ferčec‘s way of approaching the text and decontructing it. I went looking for some kind of musical source material and found it in Michael Tippett‘s ‘A Child of Our Time‘, which was written in late 1930s and inspired by events surrounding a violent pogrom against Jewish population in Germany—called Kristallnacht.
The questions of humanity and ethics in the story of Antigone and the events that inspired Tippett drew an interesting and powerful connection across time and space for me. This lead me to a work process where sonic basis is taken exclusively from “A Child of Our Time” but then further processed and reworked into minimalistic but emotional ambiences to fit Ferlin’s ideas of “suspended states” and “frozen masks“.
After feeling this much confidence about this musical material and thinking a bit, I decided to release an mini-album or an EP by the end of this month based on the work that went down in last two weeks. There is still quite some work to do – I also have an idea to convert the music into SuperCollider patches and then offer these as an open source code for anyone to build upon.
But in the meantime, or as some kind of a “private studio visit exclusive to patrons“, in other words an early access, here’s a 18 minutes collage made from music recorded for the Ferlin’s solo “Staging a Play: Antigone” just for you.
Thank you for your support so far. Please tell your friends that you are a patron to the arts and that they can be too!
With gratitude,
Luka
PS: if you are in Ljubljana this weekend, warmly welcome to the Slovenian premiere of Matija Ferlin: Staging a Play: Antigona at Stara elektrarna.
