Lamento (2006)
Eight channel sound installation for a forest.

Lamento deals with the concept of transformation from nature to culture. The piece is an eight channel sound installation, to be performed in a forest. The main theme is the piano and its pre-history of once being a tree growing in a forest. The aim has been to visualize the history of the material of the instrument; how it, by being transformed from nature to culture, has become a piece of wood in a piano.

Tones and sounds from eight pianos have been recorded. Then eight loudspeakers have been mounted on trunks in a forest. Each loudspeaker represents one of the instrument. 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 intstrument to serve man.

Fundamental for the piece are the 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 interfere.