Berlin-based, Bulgarian violinist Biliana Voutchkova is a dynamic and thoroughly engaged composer-performer, interdisciplinary artist and curator with a personal, unconventional artistic language. But when the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown began in March 2020, and all her concerts and activities were cancelled, Voutchkova lost her motivation to work or produce anything and lured herself «into the pleasure of sudden free time, connecting daily to the beauty of spring … I slowed down, observed, and I listened – to the world within and outside, to my thoughts, my heart, my mood, my close and distant surroundings, to the sounds heard each day and night at my home, in the presence of no one besides my children … my listening became deeper, undisturbed, conscious, lovable».
This intimate process led to the creation of «Seeds of Songs», a kind of aural chronological retrospective of the year of Corona, that began to take shape in September 2020 and concluded at the beginning of 2021. Voutchkova collected and edited snippets of the most familiar, alongside the sudden and unrepeatable, field recordings, her voice, playing various objects and small instruments. This is the first solo project of Voutchkova where she imagines and collages together various unrelated sounds. «Seeds of Songs» is released by London’s Cafe Oto’s sub-label Takuroku, dedicated to music recorded during the Covid-19 lockdowns.
The 31-minute «Seeds of Songs» is a series of short and abstract ideas, brief melodic themes and non-narrative, song-like vocalizations and enigmatic chants. Voutchkova plays the violin as a resourceful sound generator rather than a conventional strings instrument, but, surprisingly, the brief snippets connect organically and all accumulate into a hypnotic and haunting dreamscape. This intimate composition offers, obviously, an insight into the «condensed essence of what lies deep inside» Voutchkova. But it also explores her rich and imaginative sonic vision, where spontaneous and intuitive sounds and their resonant qualities in time and space are means to reach deeper wisdom and sensitivity, of ourselves – bodies and souls – as well as of the world around us.
Beautiful and inspiring.
Eyal Hareuveni
Biliana Voutchkova (vio, v, field recordings, obj)
