Correnti Telluriche (2022)

Written for the ZfGM Festival 2022.

“Correnti Telluriche” can be translated with “telluric currents” or “currents of the earth”. There is something deliberately enigmatic and almost mysterious about this title, especially in combination with the text, which is seemingly just as mystifying and encrypted. The text comes from a book that I randomly found in a second-hand book shop in Leipzig, its title is “Höhlenwanderungen”.

In this book the French adventurer and cave-explorer Norbert Casteret (1897 - 1987) is telling us about how he discovered numerous caves no other person, if not tens of thousands of years ago, had ever entered.
The initial idea, that lead me to using a randomly found book in the first place was inspired by Umberto Eco’s novel, “Il Pendolo di Foucault”. In this 1988 novel Umberto Eco analyses the thought processes of conspiracy theorists. The protagonists of the story work in a publishing house and start collecting all the wildest theories they come across. At some point they begin playing around with those theories und unexpectedly they get sucked into the ominous and dangerous world of conspiracies.

Inspired by the vicissitude of the novel’s protagonists, I tried to bring the potentially “occult” elements form the book “Höhlenwanderungen” onto the surface. The way this is done is certainly playful and somewhat grotesque, considering there is nothing truly enigmatic in what that book is telling. By decontextualising sentences and their musical recontextualistaiton in the piece, it can sound like Norbert Casteret’s book is hiding secrets only few can decipher and by trying to figure out what is happening, the listener is dragged down into a mysterious underground world.