Festival - Contemporary Music Days
The embrace of the Serpent with the Devil, Eve’s dream of the loss of Paradise, Nature’s lament for the Bacchic massacre of Pentheus. John Milton’s extreme iconoclastic and practically blasphemous Renaissance language and Euripides’ archetypal Bacchic figures of extravagance are turned into amorphous sound clouds, chained grooves, sonic confluences, and collisions. The words’ semantics are substituted by their acoustic and visual imprint.
A transcendent vocal trio, a voluminous choral mass, interactive lights and projections, along with the electronically processed sound of a classical harmonium and a double bass, set up an audiovisual machine of verbal transformations. The machine will be rammed by a violent voice rooted in extreme metal music, which will first demolish and then set new terms of balance within the ensemble, seeking a space to coexist.
Nikos Galenianos’ work is a peculiar oratorio, based on the allegorical power of two universally significant texts. Audience members are immersed in a succession of conflict, violence, hovering, and acceptance, free to interpret the facts through their own mental connections and conscience.
