Liza Lim, "Shallow Grave" solo for neolithic horn and F trumpet
premier performance by Marco Blaauw at Eclat festival, Stuttgart, February 2024
There’s an image that sticks in my mind: March 2022, 12 days into the war in Ukraine, a military brass band plays, standing around a crater made by a Russian bomb. The image echoes on in our times of extreme and often incomprehensible violence and I’ve been thinking a lot about music’s power to address and reach into a hole in the ground and pull back up some life energy from what has been destroyed. The power of music to speak to the dead, to reach back in time and unwind something; to make passages for the living; music as a living knot in time between the ancestral and the unborn—these are some basic themes of recent work.
Shallow Grave is in two parts. In the first part, Marco Blaauw plays a ‘Neolithic’ horn, a replica of a 3,000-year-old ceramic horn excavated from a rock shelter in Vallabrix, Southern France and recreated by André Schlauch as part of the European Music Archaeology project. It’s shaped like an animal horn but I think of it as a lump of earth with a mouth. The second part of the piece is for solo trumpet; music of bitter and ironic humour, an imaginary ‘Punch and Judy’ show of stupid sock puppets bashing each other with sticks and rocks until the puppets bleed.

Liza Lim, Shallow Grave, performed by Marco Blaauw

A 56 minute radio show broadcast in Bristol UK on Thursday 28th January 2016 featuring 6 long songs by Franco Luambo Makiadi (recorded in Zaire in the early 1970's) and an Omo washing powder advert recorded by Tabu Ley Rochereau (recorded in Zaire in 1966). Throughout the radio show are the sounds of tropical birds recorded by Jean Roché.

Liza Lim, Shallow Grave, performed by Marco Blaauw

Marco Blaauw

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