An Overblown Piece

Area, where this piece has been recorded, the Maple Mountains, is rich in its pastoral and agricultural history. Being only less than 5 miles away from the Slovak-Czech border, these lone settlements in the mountains were mostly built by settlers of Moravian Wallachian background, an ethnicity which is to this day present in both the Moravian part of Czechia and in North-Western Slovakia. Some of them still upkeep traditions and language traits. Maple mountains used to be bare and deforested, an ideal place for Wallachians to live in, as their main domain in surviving hard mountainous and outback conditions was keeping livestock.

Herdsmen and herdswomen out in the mountains often communicated between themselves by singing or using various wind instruments. Later on, during the communist era, on top of urbanizing the population, comrades aggressively forested the Maple Mountains with spruce in pursuit of quick wood mass production. The ecosystem, sonic and visual, has been irreversibly transformed. This piece contemplates various interventions- traditional wind instruments and techniques used to generate sound are altered with recent technology, the recent technology present in a place without electricity or other infrastructure, or, an individual intervening in the silence of the mountain environment, as in the past.

Recorded at Badačovský Grúň, Papradno, Slovakia, 2020

Featured on Trinity Laban’s Tunes From Home covid-time series