So Below

W3W - ///axed.quit.polite Composers: Ugne Makselyte and David McFarlane So Below is the next part of the two-part collaborative work "As Above So Below". This piece is dedicated to a location where the canal does not currently exist - it was once there, but is now deep underground. This Reflection on this situation is inseparable from the fundamental relationship between human (civilisation) and nature. On the one hand, the destructiveness of this relationship is evident (the legal and official underestimation and disregard of society's natural need for green/blue zones in the city is a prime example). On the other hand, it is clear that there is also a lot of love in this relationship, reflecting green activism and the voice of the public calling out to nature, naturalness and organics. The water canal in the city, which was once there and is now buried under concrete, is a tragic experience for society, which is mourned in this work.

This work uses field recordings, vocals and various sound processing techniques. Here we concentrated on playing with the recognisability of the natural sound source in this way, exploring the human manipulation of natural resources. Inherent in this is the emotional response - the vocal melodies inspired by folk laments reflect the individual's reaction to the chaos in nature caused by the whole of humanity, the direction of movement of civilisation. In other words, in this work, nature reflects its own suicide.

The compositional structure is based on a rotation between less processed field recordings with natural sounds and their radical processing, which makes it impossible to identify the sound source. Everything is unified by vocal lines. Some of the vocals were recorded together with water, in a meditation designed to use the recorded flux of water as an accompaniment (at the beginning of the piece). The other vocal part (in the middle of the piece) was created using the sounds of birds as an accompaniment with an attempt to mimic birds or respond to them. This part pales into the heavily processed sound of water, while the transition to the more abstract and textural, "deconstructed" part of the work starts with a recording of fireworks, also reflecting a certain part of the destructive relationship between humans and nature.