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Samdà Magna Morfina

from Lands and Genotypes by Emmanuel L. Spinelli

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about

Sandà Magna Morphina

This piece was inspired by a visit of Gross Rosen's concentration camp in Poland during summer 2006. It is a sonorous exploration of the different feelings encountered when I confronted myself with this place which bears traces of the insane industrial murder of World War II, even more when I stumbled upon the Kinder Komando Block, the children's block. The sound material used in the piece is made up of different field recordings around the camp (doors, stones, found objects, outside/ inside the different blocks) and in the city of Krakow. I also recorded Romanian wandering dogs rescued by the Battersea Dog Home in London and caged birds in a shop near by; along with different toys and metallic objects in the studio. All those sounds help enhancing the feeling of confusion and sudden panic, static pauses, puzzlement, and a sense of entrapment, fear and disgust; as well as the notion of play and childhood.

The structure of Sandà Magna Morphina is based upon the interaction between the notions of inner worlds created and acting as defence mechanisms, and the outside world. The piece comprises three main parts illustrating these notions in different ways:

· Gross Rosen Soundscape (outside/inside): 0' 00'' – 4' 10''

· Flying Dogs (outside): 4' 10'' – 7' 20''

· Dreidel (inside/outside): 7'20'' – 11' 05''

The Dreidel is a Jewish spinning top in the shape of a dice bearing four Hebrew letters corresponding to N., G., H., Sh., which, depending on the time and place have different meanings. The title of the piece refers to Primo Levi's book: The Periodic Tables (Il Sistema Periodico; 1975). Magna Morphina (“Aunt Morphine”) was the nickname the author gave to one his relative as a child, a person he feared and for who he created a imaginary world and a series of imaginary tortures. “Sandà” is one of the terms used for “baptised” and also means “destroyed”.

lyrics

Chasing roaming dogs in Bucharest, a market in Krakow, looking for traces, my traces....

“There are the so-called inert gases in the air we breathe. They bear curious Greek names of erudite derivation which means “the New” [Neon], “the Hidden” [Krypton], “the Inactive” [Argon], and “the Alien” [Xenon]. They are indeed so inert, so satisfied with their condition, that they do not combine with any other element, and for precisely this reason have gone undetected for centuries. (…) The little that I know about my ancestors presents many similarities to these gases.” (Primo Levi, The Periodic Table: 1975; 3)

credits

from Lands and Genotypes, released January 7, 2010
Recorded on Location
Mixed in EMS, London, UK

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about

Emmanuel L. Spinelli London, UK

Emmanuel Lorien Spinelli is a composer, sound-designer, and music lecturer. He works within many genres such as soundscape composition, experimental music, musique concrète, sampling, free improvisation, avant-rock, electronica, and sound-poetry.

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