Clara de Asis, Mara Winter

Five works for flute, percussion & electronics, recorded during Covid-19 lockdown in a church in Basel, Switzerland, March 2020. Commissioned by Another Timbre and performed by Mara Winter - flute and Clara de Asís - bowed objects, percussion & electronics.

"There were some pieces that I composed and others that were formed by Mara and I, where the roles of composer / performer dissolved into each other. ‘A passage through’ was composed specifically for Mara’s bass flute, also relating very much to the context which we found ourselves in. This opened the possibility, first to go to that tunnel in the middle of the night and work on the music there, then to use the church – both spaces offering acoustic qualities that are essential to the piece. I would say that this composition is very specific in some aspects, and very open in other aspects and so, even if I composed it, Mara’s approach in its realisation was determinant. ‘Still water’ and ‘Wind that walks’, are standard compositions. For the latter, we had this idea about streams of air and a noise element that doesn’t have a distinct pitch, but which can be perceived as changing ‘colour’ sometimes. We worked on that material and once we developed it, we decided on a structure based on slight ‘colour’ variations over time. Also, we were interested in ambiguity and memory. I feel these factors are apparent throughout all the pieces in the album. In ‘Wind that walks’, there’s a flute breath sound which is constantly on the edge of being a discernible melody, but that could also be ‘air’. In ‘Repetition of the same dream’ there are elements that reappear in ‘Present omission’ under a different light, if I may say. In general we worked in a very intuitive way. We didn’t want to restrict ourselves to fixed ideas about what roles each of us should have, and we didn’t attempt to stick to one formula. Some pieces happened to be developed one way, others in another way." - Clara de Asís

“Music of extremely reduced means, but of astonishing power”- Marcus O’Reilly