In/Out is a "soundscape theater for double bass and tapes" by Dine Doneff, the Macedonian composer and multi-instrumentalist, and the second release on his label neRED. It is a single live performance of about twenty-one minutes. Doneff plays double bass against pre-recorded music and field recordings gathered across Europe, staged like a short one-act play. It followed Rousilvo, the label's first album.
Doneff performed it on 1 July 2016 at the Domagk Ateliers in Munich. The occasion was the opening of In Search of a Common Ground #2, a group show of eleven contemporary Macedonian artists. The recording and mix are by Pande Noushin. On the tapes Doneff himself plays piano, Fender bass, electric guitar, drums, waterphone, bendir, bells, flutes, spinet, keyboards and mouth harmonica. In Disquiet a vocal quartet joins in, the same four women who sing as the Camea Quartet on Rousilvo.
The piece runs through seven sections whose titles trace an argument about belonging: Common ground, Division within, Contradiction, Homecoming, Unbelonging, Disquiet and Exile. The bass speaks like a monologue, answering a tape collage built from places Doneff passed through on tour. Listeners hear a tram and a melodica played by a blind street musician in Lisbon, and battery-operated toys on a market in Istanbul. Crows in the centre of Timișoara, voices on an escalator at the city's National Theatre and an announcement at Zurich airport follow. The spinet was recorded backstage at a theatre in Krakow.
Doneff has spent much of his career between music and stage. From 2005 to 2011 he led improvised public rehearsals in a small underground theatre in Thessaloniki. Between 2014 and 2016 he worked as composer and actor at the Munich Kammerspiele and the Thalia Theater in Hamburg. In a 2020 feature on Between Sound and Space, Tyran Grillo described the performance as a staged debate. Doneff told him the title means above all balance, with equal weight on both sides.
CD in a gatefold cardboard sleeve, catalogue neRED/2, released by neRED music in cooperation with ECM Records in March 2019.
