Lamento (2006)

Eight channel sound installation for a forest.

The work Lamento addresses the piano in terms of music instrument and its pre-history of once being a tree growing in a forest. The aim has been to make audiable the material history and transformation from tree to wood. How it, by being transformed from a living tree nature has been instrumentalized to become a piece of wood in a piano. The work thus deals with issues related to transformation from nature to culture.

The sonic material consists of recorded tones and sounds from eight pianos. Emanating from eight loudspeakers mounted on selected tree trunks in a forest each loudspeaker represents one of the instruments. Through the loudspeakers, the eight different instruments are slowly playing a C-major scale, time after another. Tone by tone the pianos are walking the seven pitches upwards in a song of sorrow; a Lamento for all the trees that have been chopped down and for those who will be, to become a part of an instrument .

Substantial part of the work are the naturally situated sounds from the forest itself and the way these sounds interact with the sounds from the pianos in an always changing way. The sounds from the wood of the pianos are integrated with the former sounds from the wood of the piano; the forest. In this way, not only sounds, but nature and culture and layers of time are interchanging, becoming one. By incorporating sounds from the piano in a surrounding in which the instruments once lived as trees, two segments of the same subject for a single moment allowds to interfere.