Скачать или смотреть Yana Shliabanska / Post_Muzica_58: Grain

GRAIN by Yana Shliabanska / Live electronic set ///

During the war in Ukraine, the topic of grain became important. The theft and export of grain by the russians from the Kherson region, the blockade of the export of Ukrainian grain with subsequent socio-political consequences, burned fields... All this shows how Russia is trying to use grain as a weapon, as a means of influence.

Grain has also been a well-known metaphor since biblical times. It was there that the expression "separate the wheat from the chaff" was used for the first time, which became a phraseology and means separating the good from the bad. This process of separation is one of the key trends in Ukrainian culture today.This was the reason for my choice of process for the performance - sifting through the grains. There are also stones inside the vessels and a chain that sticks out at the end. These findings can also acquire symbolic meaning.

The electronic set is built on reading impulses from falling grains, that is, musical time, musical rhythm depending on the picking process. The received information is tied to the prepared sounds and variable modulating parameters in the software environment. The canvas is pre-selected sounds.

This is one of my instrumental pieces, the sound of an air-raid alarm, the melody of the famous Ukrainian song "Nich yaka misiachna" played on a violin in a bomb shelter, the melody of the Ukrainian dance "Arkan" played on a pipe by a Ukrainian soldier, the poetry of Vasyl Stus, read in his voice, the song of a girl from the AZOV battalion, sung during the blockade of AZOVSTAL in Mariupol and the song-symbol of Kyiv, recorded in the 60s. I'm using the simplest setup, including the built-in computer mic, which makes the set look a bit rough and tumble, but I like those imperfections.This is not a ready-made work for 30 minutes, but rather a filmed process of sound search among fragments – the sound grains.

  / yana-shlyabanska