Strange Blooms

There is movement everywhere. Energy everywhere. Order everywhere too, hidden in the roots and elevated to extraordinary heights by our most beautiful machines. A poetic exercise in pattern recognition, Strange Blooms splices the baroque with the organic, twisting together the patterns found in both plant growth and the celestial sounds of the 17th-century harpsichord.

Originally composed as the score for a contemporary dance work in collaboration with choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, Prokofiev’s Strange Blooms takes up Louis Couperin’s Chaconne La Complaignante, performed beautifully by harpsichordist Jane Chapman on a period harpsichord, and moves from great distortion to the light. Over the course of five tracks, this work by Couperin, uncle of the more famous François, jolts from barely recognisable earthy sowing (“Resilience of Roots”) to the spacious and eerie, yet noble (“Pods Swell and Open”) through to atomic breakthrough (“Cell Splitting”). By Track IV, “Cadence” the original Couperin has nearly broken through, held back only by a persistent sense of dread, the future coming towards the past. Then the final track, the original Jane Chapman harpsichord recording, a subtle edit of three manual harpsichord settings, restores the original recording to its untampered-with purity, and the passage from earth to the sky is complete.

Couperin’s La Complaignante is itself an exercise in restraint, barely modulating from the tonic key, staying within a four-octave range. Due to Jeyasingh’s interest in the remix as a mode of approaching work, and the idea of cross-pollination, Prokofiev paid attention in particular to the micro-tunings of Baroque music, creating new “inter-attractions and magnetism” as he puts it, using electroacoustic and remix techniques to mimic the wavering passage of seedlings reaching for the sun, and the way the organic and the mechanical form an uncanny fusion. We are confronted with the intertwining of classical and modern, distortion and clarity, shadow and brightness. We see this idea of positive remixing today in the arts, in the celebration of multiple modes of cultural fusion – mingling, respectful emulation and social dynamism: various roots intertwine and organisms splice to create new varieties and “strange blooms”.

Through the vertical layering of harmonies, and the stretching of the stochastic harpsichord tones into lengthier cinematic movements, the expression of plant growth, in fits and starts is captured, and the whole begins to bloom, blurring the acoustic with the electronic. The instrument so much associated with an upright worldview and the imposition of order becomes earthy, and bodies – plant and human – sway together in a brave new synthetic world, where patterns are buried deep within the soil.