Swiss duo Musique Infinie’s Earth, a live improvisational score set to the imagery of Alexander Dovzhenko’s eponymous 1930 film, is split into two long pieces: “Creation” and “Destruction.” The dichotomy between these two foundational acts is not readily apparent, sonically speaking, anyway. What is apparent, however, is the conspicuous absence of the imagery from Dovzhenko’s Earth, which one will have to look up or imagine as the score marches on. Thematically, Dovzhenko’s work heralds a critical period in Stalin’s efforts at collectivization in the nascent Soviet Union, focusing specifically on Ukraine, where images of industrialized farming are juxtaposed with intimate close-ups of sunflowers and stout babies. The film discloses a further juxtaposition of the competing aesthetic regimes of its moment – the pastoral and the industrial – a contra position was then taken up by Musique Infinie in their two-part score, where muffled voices are processed within the fabric of electronic synthesis
The biblical overtones of the tracks’ titles belie the more pointed political realities of Dovzhenko’s film, which does little to report on the catastrophic famine and purges that followed in the Soviet Union from 1930 on. What’s more, seen against the backdrop of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, the acts of creation and destruction take on entirely new meanings, inviting some pretty heavy-handed readings, which Musique Infinie rarely indulge, to their benefit. Instead, the two sides of eerily smooth synthesis transition between moments without abrupt cuts, allowing the electronics to accumulate organically, building momentum as layers are introduced while others slowly fade away. Whether Earth, the current score, can stand on its own as a work of electro-acoustic improvisation, without the weighty overtones of geopolitical conflict and the history of Soviet cinema, and without the imagery and original score that accompanied Dovzhenko’s work, is really not the core issue here. Ultimately, the contrast between creation and destruction apply equally to the micro and the macro – the sonic grain of processed electronics and those grains lovingly captured as the Soviet Union stood on a precipice, as Ukraine does again today. There is something profoundly epic in Dovzhenko’s film, and somehow Musique Infinie manage to tone down the rhetoric in favor of subtle and gradual accumulation.
Fans of electro-acoustic improvisation will find much to appreciate in Musique Infinie’s
Earth,
regardless of their familiarity with Dovzhenko’s film. While the category of film score is appropriate,
Earth is a kind of anti-score in the end, de-emphasizing rather than overemphasizing the images it accompanies. To find out
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