Was/Is/Will Be - Please Close the Gate
Nov 14, 2020, 02:14 PM
Hell Gate created by Christopher Hill.
"It was the idea of the Hell Gate as a threshold, a psychic and spiritual borderland that determined my sonic strategies in representing the despair embodied in Dante's motto, 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here'. The listener, I imagined, would become a third party to Dante's increasingly traumatic passage towards Hell itself.
"As the birdsong of the opening sections becomes more fragmentary and static the listener is brought to the shores of Acheron with its spirits of the selfish, its fallen angels, the permanent hum of hornets and the decaying ordure of its ground to encounter the mythic gate itself.
"The sound sources used are predominantly field recordings I had coincidently made in Italy and live improvisation. As the vista opens up and the antechamber to Hell and its denizens is revealed I wished to embrace the suffering and absence depicted by Dante in my compositional palette.
"The sound of wasps, the persecutors of the shades that occupy the shore, crowd noises, my own recitation of Canto 3 and historic sound recordings of Hitler were all added to the mix and processed using reversal, inversion and reverberation.
"Hell I envisaged is not only the depository of evil but even more so a place of abjection, emptiness and loss. A place in which regret and shame echo and reiterate throughout time and space. The piece concludes with a more formal composition in which slight variations of tonal density may be noticed by the listener; metaphorically the ceaseless repetition of remembering that defines my own idea of the nature of Hell."
"It was the idea of the Hell Gate as a threshold, a psychic and spiritual borderland that determined my sonic strategies in representing the despair embodied in Dante's motto, 'Abandon all hope ye who enter here'. The listener, I imagined, would become a third party to Dante's increasingly traumatic passage towards Hell itself.
"As the birdsong of the opening sections becomes more fragmentary and static the listener is brought to the shores of Acheron with its spirits of the selfish, its fallen angels, the permanent hum of hornets and the decaying ordure of its ground to encounter the mythic gate itself.
"The sound sources used are predominantly field recordings I had coincidently made in Italy and live improvisation. As the vista opens up and the antechamber to Hell and its denizens is revealed I wished to embrace the suffering and absence depicted by Dante in my compositional palette.
"The sound of wasps, the persecutors of the shades that occupy the shore, crowd noises, my own recitation of Canto 3 and historic sound recordings of Hitler were all added to the mix and processed using reversal, inversion and reverberation.
"Hell I envisaged is not only the depository of evil but even more so a place of abjection, emptiness and loss. A place in which regret and shame echo and reiterate throughout time and space. The piece concludes with a more formal composition in which slight variations of tonal density may be noticed by the listener; metaphorically the ceaseless repetition of remembering that defines my own idea of the nature of Hell."
Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno