Postcard
From Mostar (2000)
Mostar was
one of the most beautiful former Yugoslavian cities and visited by many.
The city was torn apart piece by piece: With any war zone there are many
energies……
This piece was written especially for my sister Lis, and exists in two versions.
Version 1: voice and tape. Version 2: electraoacoustic alone.
Lis
spent a great deal of time in Mostar and knowing about my passion for
sound, sent me ‘audio photographs’ of Mostar so I could have
a greater understanding of where she was living (& feel closer to
her). With the sounds she recorded I composed ‘Postcard from Mostar’.
Using musical and geographical characteristics from Mostar, sounds and
melodies are isolated, separated and woven together. I wanted to recreate
the ‘strange energy’ present in Mostar and at the same time
capture and fuse the beauty of the language, architecture and music.
Further
Thoughts...
Postcard
from Mostar (2000) also guided compositionally by the ‘postcard’ structure, presents a completely different
approach to combining and organising environmental sound, by removing
it from recognisable territory or ‘deterritorializing’ the
sound without hiding its identity. With the addition of studio-recorded
vocal source material developed using similar techniques as in Serpentina,
some sound combination difficulties were not ‘resolved’ until
a later attempt in Kamala Kantha (2003).
Mostar, one of the most beautiful
former Yugoslavian cities and visited by many, was torn apart piece by
piece. With any post-war zone there are many energies present, and it
was the complex mixture of energies captured on the source recordings,
that led Postcard from Mostar to be somewhat open and empty in character.
I wanted to recreate the ‘strange energy’ present in Mostar
and at the same time capture and fuse the beauty of the language, architecture
and music using recordings of children singing, a football game, a call
to prayer and interviews with local residents. Using musical and geographical
characteristics from Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic Mostar, sounds and
melodies are isolated, separated and woven together.
A recording of a bird with its environment filtered out opens the piece,
then the listener is led into a ‘real’ environment of children
playing football and a call to prayer over loudspeakers. As tiny extracts
of indiscernible vocal material are gradually introduced, the call to
prayer gradually moves away from the ‘real’ space by delays
and finally freezes, whilst the vocal gestures and a child singing are
presented without the football ambience, ‘hanging’ in an
unreal and slightly disconcerting space. From here the call to prayer
returns and the pace is lifted by the emergence of a Bosnian folk singer
in a bar, which is ended by engine sounds of a Mafia car and a bridge
of vocal material and the processed skittering of a football. The second
part of the piece combines the unprocessed studio-recorded extracts of
folk song lyrics in Serbo-Croat, referenced in the first part of the
piece, with Croatian and Bosnian folk songs sung by women and children.
The translation of the text and the exposure of its meaning gives the
piece more of a ‘documentary’ feel than a ‘postcard’.