Stonemired (part V)– for Kirkos Ensemble & Electronics by Barry O'Halpin

Composer: Barry O'Halpin
Performers: Kirkos Ensemble & Barry O'Halpin (guitar).
Image: Rouzbeh Rashidi

Written as a companion to a 24' silent film by director Rouzbeh Rashidi, as part of Wilderness Notes, a collaborative project between Kirkos Ensemble, 3 Irish composers and 3 directors from Experimental Film Society. Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland.

Premiered September 2017 in a live performance/screening at Filmbase, Dublin.

Recorded Sept 2017 at Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin.
Mixed by Barry O'Halpin & Rian Trench
Mastered by Rian Trench.

www.barryohalpin.com
www.ensemble.ie/kirkos/
www.experimentalfilmsociety.com/

Notes on the Music:

"Much like Rouzbeh Rashidi’s accompanying film, the character of Stonemired is not linear or ‘narrative’, but abstract and dreamlike, as if wandering through rooms of the subconscious with starkly contrasting colours, images and emotions that are potent yet intangible. The figurative is fleeting amid a quietly churning and constantly evolving texture of drones and swells.

Just as the film embraces the distorted texture and grit of aging technologies, its sonic counterpart revels in noisy artifacts of vinyl, cassette and digital sampling, alongside the delicate acoustic impurities of barely pitched air and whispering bow hair.

Stemming from a deep curiosity in the hidden musicality of nature, the harmonic palette is built from the sonified electromagnetic spectra of 5 chemical elements prevalent in organic cells; carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous and oxygen. Each ethereal tangle of vibrations is like a fully formed musical organism, with moving parts and uncanny harmonies pushing beyond equal-tempered familiarity.

These sonic characters –the frosty anxiety of phosphorous, the triadic warmth of nitrogen – alternately appear in distorted, intermingled and pure elemental forms, having close kinship with the haunting recurring imagery of the film." (BOH)

Notes on the Film:

“Rouzbeh Rashidi troublingly intertwines a dark variation on a home movie full of implications of isolation and toxic relationships with the memory of a nightmare of a nuclear holocaust to come. Making vivid use of the textures of outdated video technology, he questions the boundaries between personal and universal anxiety as they mesh in the charged resonances of a technology that has itself taken on the attributes of memory.” (RR)