ლოცვა / Lotsva

In March 2021, after two silent years of pandemic, I began collecting chants from around the world for my new acousmatic work. Exhausted by the long period of isolation and lack of contact, my artistic goal with this project was to bring together the voices of people from different countries, cultures and religions and unite them in my musical composition. In the promotional video I posted on my social media channels, I asked for audio recordings with a smartphone and received 26 songs that I used as source material for the piece. The audio files ranged from intimate solo recordings made in a bedroom, to polyphonic folk songs and chants professionally recorded in a studio, to songs accompanied by various instruments. As I listened to the recordings, I realized that my task as a composer was to find ways to connect the voices that were recorded in different acoustic environments, with different keys, tempos, and languages, and to create a sound world in which they could all coexist. Considering the time in which the recordings were made and the work was composed, I consider this piece a collective prayer, hence the title ლოცვა (Lotsva). The first version of the piece premiered in Oslo on September 9 and subsequently toured other Norwegian cities and international festivals. In the meantime, I kept receiving new recordings, so I added a new contribution from a different country at almost every performance. The final version of the piece was presented at Kulturkirken Jakob as an 8-channel sound installation as part of VoxLAB VårFEST.