Heinali - "Beatrice"

(do álbum Madrigals, na íntegra aqui)

 

"It was my deep love of Late Medieval and Renaissance polyphony that inspired this album. It is based on generative counterpoint — several independent self-playing melodies performed at the same time on a modular synth. I've been working on the patch since late 2017. After I had enough of recorded improvisations I contacted musicians who specialize in Early Music to look if we could combine period instruments with electronic polyphony on a modular system. On Beatrice, you can hear a brilliant violist Igor Zavgorodnii, from Kyiv, improvising on a baroque viola. Initially, I thought it to be the easiest piece to record but it proved to be much more difficult. At some point, I even considered discarding the piece altogether and changing the material. What helped, I think, was the mythology that gradually and miraculously emerged during several years I spent working on the patch. Generative voices turned into bird-like creatures inhabiting electric gardens of polyphony. One is tiny and full of vigour. It loves to sing high during the day but at night it dives deep under the water, where it hums her deep whale song. Another bird is a shadow. It flew into the garden straight from Elizabethan England, bringing melancholy, a fashionable malady, in its beak. Igor's task was to imagine himself as a different kind of bird in this unfamiliar garden, a caged one. His song dissents, he plays an old, period instrument, a baroque viola, but the microtonal technique he is applying comes straight from the 20th century. It is something that he improvised on the spot during the rehearsals and we just decided to go with it during our recording session".