Пикник II (Piknik II)
for nine instruments and electronics
Programme note
Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, STALKER (1979) by Andrei Tarkovsky: two works that deal with the ‘Zone’, a strange and mysterious place that defies all human thinking. The Zone is a place where our heart’s deepest desire can be fulfilled, yet the grant to our wishes is surrounded by deadly traps known as ‘anomalies’ that behave contrary to all human expectations.
This piece is a musical depiction of such a dangerous landscape. We enter a sounding space that is inhabited by sounding anomalies, where the nine acoustic instruments merge into the electronic sounds in unexpected ways. The two melt together into new entities that have a behaviour of their own. We traverse a path in this landscape filled with such sound objects. Hearing several things from different directions becomes a type of polyphony while the path of this journey becomes the form of the piece itself.