Splendid Isolation?

Just briefly: Due to the use of electroacoustic sounds, it is recommended to wear headphones while listening.

“Splendid Isolation?” has a personal and a statistical layer. As a first step, four members of the ensemble aisthesis used a mobile device to describe their personal experiences during the lockdown of April 2020 – which as we learned later was only the first one. These statements were analysed according to their speech melodies and rhythms, which eventually delivered the basis for four vocal solo pieces. Members of the SCHOLA HEIDELBERG rehearsed and recorded the pieces at home, again using a mobile device.

The second layer is built around statistical data about the Corona pandemic (derived from ourworldindata.org) and the ups and downs of economic core figures. Implementing four voices on an analog modular system, the sonified data embeds the spoken word in its historical context.

Artists:

Jörg Deutschewitz

Matthias Horn

Barbara Ostertag

Kirstin Maria Pientka

J. Marc Reichow

Svea Schildknecht

Nikolaus Schlierf

Peter Sigl

Concept, composition, sound editing:

Ekkehard Windrich

Lyrics (English):

Peter Sigl: Home office sucks. While cooking, I’m thinking about how to finish my due work and while working, I’m thinking about the recipe for dinner.

J. Marc Reichow: Again hiking in the forest, East Bavaria or Böhmerwald, soft paths underneath the pines. I want to, or I must put patches of the forest into an order, as though they were huge patches of moss. It’s only that I don’t know for whom. I am searching for the ever-empty taverna, the beer was a good bargain.

Nikolaus Schlierf: Outside spring is screaming, nature is exploding. The world has come to a standstill, a shutdown, decelerated.



Kirstin Maria Pientka: It was not that difficult to not eat. It was fulfilling to have days that were about nothing, where I didn’t have to think about anything, I didn’t really have to do anything and I was allowed to be with myself.