In creating as in a mirror, darkly the things that moved me included aspects of “impurities” such as those that occur in (old) films due to dust particles and scratches, or that are revealed when one looks through scratched glass. For me, two points were important: firstly the coincidental way in which these impurities come to be (since they are not “integral” to the material but rather “happen” to it), and secondly the possibility of using such chance occurrences as a theme in their own rite by projecting them into a more-or-less empty space.

At the centre of this composition, therefore, is just such a randomly occurring phenomenon – realised as isolated events distributed in a seemingly aimless way, floating within the space without being related to one another or anything else, with the musical action virtually frozen.

The piece has been revised for Warsaw Autumn 2013 followed by a commission of Deutschlandfunk, Köln.

Joanna Woźny