Voices #26
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
Cells Interlinked
answering some questions. We have already observed their electronic / berlin-school work here.
◦ [Maria and Albert speaking]
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The track from “Within (0045)” that we prefer is “Tree of Life”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► Cells Interlinked: This album of our project Cells Interlinked became for us a kind of contemplative diary of internal states experienced during the war — the invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine. When the war started, it was a big shock for us. In the first months it was simply unbearable for the consciousness to be “outside”, in the flow of terrible external events — missile attacks, explosions, news from the front line… Working on this material, which we began to record partially a year before, became a kind of therapeutic practice, allowing the consciousness to focus and change direction, to turn “within”.
The beginning of work on this track seemed to push apart a narrow slot in the wall dividing our reality into “outside” and “within”. At first we recorded a viscous bass improvisation on a vintage analog monophonic dual-oscillator synthesizer Vermona Synthesizer. At the time, this instrument, released in a limited edition in 1981, was a slightly belated reaction of the East part of Germany, occupied by the Russian army, to the stormy evolution of Moog synthesizers. This layer describes quite well the thick darkness of the waters of the unconscious, into which we gradually sank, meeting with the archetypal flow of symbols of war that burst into our everyday life. Then a simple four-note sequence appeared, played on Virus Snow. With its leisurely looped movement, it reflected the movement of the mind, moving at random in the fog of obscurity and searching for the perspective of vision. And then came the moment when the concentration of this meditative work on the composition became an open door leading from the nightmarish absurdity of external reality — to “within”, to the feeling of true reality, to the hidden root of reality, covered with the husk of random external events. This moment became key for the writing of the entire album and this separate track. It was something that in Greek is called metanoia — a sudden illuminating change in vision, in the very way of looking, a fundamental change in consciousness. It was as if consciousness penetrated inside itself, and the problematic of external reality dissolved. The Virus sequence theme sped up, merging with a hand-played bass arpeggio. A vocal improvisation theme spontaneously emerged.
All of this reflected a deeply internal experience of having found the axis and foundation on which everything external was strung. It was a feeling of discovering an internal dynamic structure that is ever expanding, embracing with its branches, leaves and tendrils everything that appears, lives and disappears in the world of time and space. In the flow of this state, we completed work on this track, which opens the album, is invisibly present in each of its tracks, and ends with a short ambient piece, “Nightfall”.
[2. CREATION]
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