SANCTUARY
A new multimedia project for digital instruments, percussions and video images
in 2004, I conceived, written and produced one of my most successful multimedia solo concert: Mandala based on the sacred images of Buddhism and inspired by the strong influence of Far East music on my compositional work since the 70s.
The show was the first chapter of a journey that now, thanks to the new technologies can flourish in a second episode with new music and new breathtaking images shot in HD and edited with the latest film concepts.
Mandalas are geometric maps of Vajrayana Buddhist visionary worlds. Appearing in both painting and sculpture, mandalas typically consist of nested squares and circles. These geometric forms define the center of the cosmos and the four cardinal directions. Minutely detailed and saturated with philosophical meaning, mandalas are a feast for the eyes and the mind. For Buddhist meditators, however, mandalas are not just images to view, but also worlds to enter. To work with a mandala, practitioners first re-create it in their mind’s eye, and then imaginatively enter its world.
Mandala, the holy symbol of the Buddhist Universe, named my first multimedia project, extending and enriching a constant research on sounds and images which dates back to forty years ago.
It was and is still an investigation devoted to integrate the contemporary Western musical language to the one coming from South-East Asian tradition.
Computer use is one of the most distinctive features of this project, since nowadays it has become the heart of contemporary musical praxis. Here it gives me the possibility to recall immediately chants, musical sequences, instrumental sounds, voices and noises recorded during my pilgrimages around the world.
Nothing is still on the tape, then, indeed everything is a live even-flow from the stage in real time.
Starting 10 years ago, using last generation computers, at last I realized the dream of musical interaction with machines, endowing the solo performer with an orchestral character, since then impossible for a solo performer.
So this is no longer a show for images and solo percussion, yet it becomes a performance in which percussions are means to activate a sounding scenery with almost endless possibilities of expression.
Moreover, languages integration (images and sounds) raises the perception range to a total level of fruition, soaking the audience in an artistic tour in which iconographic and sounding effects are given the same importance.
My enthusiasm as traveler and film-maker has been carrying me for years on the streets of the world with the only company of my faithful cameras. The result is an archive of images, which I edited to let them become the natural counterpoint for the music composed during the rests of my roaming.
The image-sound interaction has thus become an indispensable element of distinction in my artistic creation.
The deep interest in the musical and cultural tradition of the Far East dates back to the beginning of my career with the discover of Balinese music and the magic sound of gongs and metallophones.
It met a gradual consolidation as time went by, until the creation and release of Sacred Shadows in the year 2002. It is a wide project for Balinese gamelan, ensemble, choir and video installations, tested in Bali and premiere-performed in Italy.
The inspiration for the Mandala project was born in the isle of Java, while contemplating the astonishing temple of Borobodur.
It should have been a two-day visit, yet the magic of the place made me prisoner of its charm for a week, during which I ascended to the heights of the temple in the way the Buddhist tradition prescribes, shooting in the same time twenty hours of images.
The concert is divided into four parts:
Lost Mandala
Is the film-composition which gives the whole performance its name; it is based on the images of the Buddha and the symbols of Mandala. Its shape perfectly sends back to ground plan of the Borobodur temple, the biggest Buddhist temple in the world and the most ancient in the Far-Eastern Asia.
It was built during the realm of the Cailendra dynasty, which dominated the isle of Java in the eighth century A.C.
With more than one million square stones, 2,500 low-relief panels with a linear length of 3,500 meters and its 504 statues of the Buddha in actual display obtained from a single stone, the temple symbolizes the ten levels of the Mahayana, the cosmologic system of Buddhism. The five graduated terraces of the base are collectively named as Rupadhatu, while the top level is made of a circular and concentric three-terrace structure called Arupadhatu, symbolizing the spiritual status in which the believer approaches a better life, free from the constraints of earthly life.
Next to Borobodur images, I inserted the ones of the Kyoto, Fukushima and Bali temples, in a musical and visual interaction to which the sounds of both tradition and contemporaneousness convey an expressive amalgam, homage to holiness.
Deep Forest
In this composition the waters and forests of Madagascar are blended with Balinese and Japanese visions; music itself explores the sonorities of the water and forest, mixing them to synthetic sounds and instrumental samples. An archaic melody opens this part of the show, passing seamlessly from one atmosphere to the other.
Water and forest are regarded here both as a representation of the Earth and the lung of its surviving: images were shot in Japan, California, China and Vietnam.
Ancient Rain
The hypnotic Balinese atmospheres permeate this video-composition, starting with images of the Buddha, perfect connection to the previous composition.
The sound of rain, which, together with other water sounds, accompanies all of my compositions, opens this composition conveying a sense of serenity. Yet this soon turns into a sort of hypnotic trance during the Balinese dances. These have been appropriately realized for this show and emphasized by a musical composition in which oriental instruments oppose themselves to Western contemporary expressive forms.
Sampled Kechak, an extraordinary Balinese vocal expression, creates a contrast with the powerful sonorities of the drums in the final part of the execution.
All samples and images were created for this composition only.
Echoes form a Japanese Garden
Using a sampled sound of Sakuachi and gongs, this composition explored the peace and pure beauty of a Japanese garden interacting with the sound of the nature and the images of Buddha.
Sacred Native Spirit
The show is brought to its end by apiece dedicated to Native Americans, a people who found in sacredness the perfect balance between nature and everyday life.
The images, for the most part taken from ancient photos by Edward Curtis, appear on those of South American deserts, shot by me and interact with the Native songs samples, interludes for a long percussion performance.