INCOHERENCE

COMPOSITIONS

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ONKALO - NICOLINE SOETER

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Onkalo for soprano and violin is a message for future Earthlings. Deep in the rock bottom of the island of Olkiluoto, in southwestern Finland, a grave is being dug. The tomb is an experiment in post-human architecture and is called Onkalo, which means "cave" or "hiding place" in Finnish. From 2023 onwards, Onkalo will store highly radioactive nuclear waste, perhaps the darkest matter we have ever produced. As long as we have been producing nuclear waste, we have been unable to decide how to dispose of it. Around 1990 the field of nuclear semiotics arose. When plans were made to store radioactive waste underground, the question arose in America as to how to warn future generations of the great, long-lasting danger below.

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The text in the composition is based on sentences formulated in a 1993 report by the Human Interference Taskforce. These are sample sentences that can be communicated in various languages ​​at a storage site for highly radioactive nuclear waste. The Finnish tomb has one of the most secure preservation protocols ever devised: more secure than that of the crypts of pharaohs.

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The composition Onkalo is at the same time a monument of shame and a kind of siren song. The realization that if we mark the place as a forbidden area, future Earthlings will actually be attracted, presents us with a big problem.

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SIE WAR SCHON WÜRZEL - FRAN BARAJAS

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Perspectives on a fragment by Rilke.

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"faltering, gentle, and without impatience.

(...)

She was inside herself, like a great hope,

and never thought of the man who walked ahead

or the road that climbed back toward life.

She was inside herself. And her being dead

filled her like tremendous depth.

As a fruit is filled with its sweetness and darkness

she was filled with her big death, still so new

that it hadn't been fathomed"

 

In this fragment, Rilke portrays Eurydice in her interrupted journey through the path back to life. These six perspectives explore different ways of saying-articulating the same text, relating vocal and instrumental sound, and relating sound gestures with meaning. Musically, a journey is also traced -not necessarily linear - from a relatively conventional situation (1) to its disintegration (6).

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CANTARELLA DIABÓLICA - XIMO TARÍN MICÓ

 

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Cantarella Diabólica is a disturbing song, in which the voice tries to persuade the idealistic violin into following the nihilist path. The voice provokes, misleads, flatters and manipulates the violin till they both fall into madness.

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Ei, ei, em buscaves?

T'escolto...

Vinga, deixa la cantarella de sempre.

A qui vols enganyar?

Cantes per mi, cantes per mi.

Per què t'abraci, per què et condemni.

O no vols tastar l'eternitat?

Axí, així, molt bé.

Deixa la maleida cantarella!

Per que fas riure, riure RIURE!!!

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RE:WINTERREISE - JESÚS CASTAÑER

 

 

RE:Winterreise is a modern interpretation of Schubert's Winterreise in all its existential anguish. In this brief cycle of four lieder, Castañer puts us in the shoes of the wanderer's lover from Schubert's original work, who, at the beginning of the cycle, is furtively abandoned by him with an abrupt and icy “good night”. As if she had embarked too on her own, particular winter journey –one of a sleepless night–, she tries to cope with the contradictions of her own loneliness but entering into multiple contradictions with herself along the way. At the end of the piece, we are left wondering whether she has faced a new, more synchronous dawn, or an extension of the suffocating insomnia in which she is trapped –perhaps, eternally.

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