brian eno/ben frost - music for solaris

i posted about this a bit in the thread in upcoming releases, but new shit has come to light. also, this actually happened four days ago, lol:

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MORE DETAILS OF BEN FROST AND DANIEL BJARNASON'S "MUSIC FOR SOLARIS" REVEALED

“WE DONT NEED OTHER WORLDS. WE NEED MIRRORS.”

MUSIC FOR SOLARIS

BY BEN FROST AND DANIEL BJARNASON

WITH SINFONIETTA CRACOVIA

FILM MANIPULATIONS BY BRIAN ENO AND NICK ROBERTSON

 

With the 50th anniversary of the publication of Krakow writer Stanislaw Lem’s novel Solaris in 2011, Ben Frost and Daníel Bjarnasson are creating an ambitious project with Sinfonietta Cracovia, one of Poland’s leading orchestras.

For 29 string players, 2 percussionists, prepared piano, guitars and electronics, MUSIC FOR SOLARIS has its beginnings in both Lem’s original novel and the 1972 film adaptation by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky.

It is a re-imagined soundtrack for a film so still as to become almost absent, a story in sound, and an exploration of an interior cosmos. It is music written by human beings, removed and mutated by machine intelligence, then translated once more by human beings. It is strange and unique, filled with and borne of concepts.

Integral to the project are a series of "film manipulations" by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson, drawing on moments from the original Tarkowsky film to create a visual parallel to the music composition process.

 

FROM NOVEL TO FILM TO MUSIC: A UNIQUE EXECUTION OF AN IDEA

The seed of MUSIC FOR SOLARIS began simply enough with Ben Frost’s dissatisfaction with the original score for the Tarkovsky film.

“I always felt that Russian composer Eduard Artemyev's score compounded the external, science fiction elements of the story rather than exploring the internal, the human,” he says.

With a commission from Krakow’s Unsound Festival – based in the very birthplace of Stanislaw Lem’s novel – Frost found himself with the opportunity of working with Sinfonietta Cracovia. Soon enough, he had also recruited his friend and Bedroom Community labelmate, Icelandic composer / conductor Daniel Bjarnason.

The basis for the work is originally a direct dialogue with Tarkovsky’s Solaris, with Frost and Bjarnason improvising to film images on prepared piano and heavily processed electric guitars. Reacting to one another, they also remained tied to Tarkovsky's realization of the narrative – which, in turn, was of course drawn from Lem’s book.

In the story the planet Solaris brings the characters' innermost traumatic fantasies to life in material form. “It occurred to me that an interesting way to approach the orchestration of the work would be to mirror that materialization,” Frost says. “I started playing around with music software designed to recognize tonal and rhythmic structure within polyphonic – that is, complicated - recordings.”

Frost literally asked the software to act like Solaris, creating a sort of ghostly facsimile of their original recordings in digital form, but without the full story.

Ideas behind these experiments were often a subject during Frost's conversations with Brian Eno, who selected Frost as his protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative.

Frost says, "Conversation between Brian and me often gravitates to the idea of relinquished control in art and specifically digital composition. When machines attempt to be human, the question arises of how you can forcibly manipulate situations to encourage error, mistranslation and loss of control... non-linearity and chaos within systems and within music is definitely a fascination we share."

“As such, in MUSIC FOR SOLARIS the software didn’t see the chain of processing that I fed my guitars through or see Daníel prepare the piano,” explains Frost. “The results were essentially the same, but lacked an indefinable humanity, with missing and added elements, glitches, irregularities and holes."

At this point, via what he describes as a “deciphering act,” Bjarnason transformed this material into a form that could be faced and dealt with on a very human level, “something that would work for the string players.”

The pair brought various movements of the music to Krakow in August 2010, for several sessions with Sinfonietta Cracovia. Eno was also present.

These were performed and tested in a kind of laboratory situation to see how they worked. "We experimented with various incarnations of the same material over two days, toying as much with textural and spatial issues as with melody and harmony," says Frost.

With “proof of concept,” they returned to Iceland to create a unified piece of music.

"What was totally fascinating to me was watching these people interpret something with no frame of reference except Daníel’s score,” says Frost. “Listening to them perform ostensibly 'digital' effects and voicing ghost harmonics that all of a sudden existed as written notes and phrases - it felt extremely alien.”

Daniel speaks of having the musicians “play in a slightly ‘electronic’ way. For example to ask each player to imagine that they were playing through a delay effect, so they had to actually play the delay themselves.”

Talking about both the novel and the film, Frost refers to the challenges of responding to a narrative. “Lem’s text conjours all kinds of imagined spaces, while responding to the film essentially presents a series of structural and linear narrative problems.”

Yet it’s the idea of film that fires Frost most – especially the concept of removing the original film from the equation once the music is set on its own course. “You’re left alone with a skeletal composition of twists, turns and dynamic shifts which are often quite in contrast to purely instinctual 'musical' choices.”

 

FILM MANIPULATIONS

A visual element created by Brian Eno and Nick Robertson has now become a crucial part of the whole.

"By the time we had a musical response to it, the idea of screening the film with the music was no longer interesting,” says Frost. “At the same time the idea of a blank screen also troubled me. But as soon as Brian saw the screen in the Krakow cinema, I could see his mind started ticking over the problem too, and a few days later he laid out this elegant visual solution that mirrored everything we were trying to get at aurally.”

The ingenious solution is ultimately one that again explores non-human interpretation. Eno explains the process as follows:

"Instead of showing bits of the [Tarkovsky] film, we've taken individual frames and morphed between them, so that the very slow changes would appear more like a gradually changing painting than a movie. We've taken fractions of a second out of the film and extruded them into long sequences.

“This seems to me a parallel to the composition process. The music doesn't try to make a literal soundtrack to the film, but uses it as a starting point for a set of moods. Similarly, we have taken isolated images and created a fictional connection between them.

“Specifically (and for the technically minded) in each piece we've used a morphing program to generate a whole sequence of hybrid images that join a start image and an end image. Only those two images actually occur in the movie. The rest is new."

 

NEW WORK

The resulting work will be performed for the first time in Europe at Unsound Festival on the 24th of October 2010 in Krakow Poland. It will then be recorded in Krakow, for release as an album on the Icelandic label Bedroom Community.

The North American premiere of the piece and launch of the album will take place at Unsound Festival New York at the start of April 2011, marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lem’s novel.

where my bootleg at?

I want it now.

  On 10/28/2010 at 2:36 AM, kaini said:

i posted about this a bit in the thread in upcoming releases, but new shit has come to light. also, this actually happened four days ago, lol:

 

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Eno was also present.

did he charge everyone else that was in the room £250 for gracing them with his presence?

was a real copper plate embedded in his spine?

oscillik, you are barred from this thread.

sling yer hook or stop moaning.

anyway as far as i can tell the audio is ben frost sorta going along with video manipulations which are partly by eno.

lol

  On 10/28/2010 at 2:36 AM, kaini said:

The ingenious solution is ultimately one that again explores non-human interpretation. Eno explains the process as follows:"Instead of showing bits of the [Tarkovsky] film, we've taken individual frames and morphed between them, so that the very slow changes would appear more like a gradually changing painting than a movie. We've taken fractions of a second out of the film and extruded them into long sequences.“

Wouldn't it be a lot more "ingenious" to dig up Tarkovsky's corpse, rip out what's left of his heart and paulstretch it all over the cinema screen?