The black and hooded head is speaking (2024)

Written for Concrète [Lab] Ensemble. Officially released as part of the album “Monolite”, through NovAntiqua Records.

This piece can be heard as a journey across the ocean, from the abyss to a sunlit shore. 

The title is a reference to Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, specifically the chapter “The Sphinx”, where Captain Ahab speaks to severed whale’s head, absurdly demanding answers about the secrets of the ocean depths and ordering it to speak.

“It was a black and hooded head, and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphinx’s in the desert. ‘Speak, thou vast and venerable head” […] ‘speak mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. The head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid the world’s foundations.’”

This piece depicts an imagined surreal situation in which the whale’s head begins to answer Ahab’s rhetorical questions. Its speech is grotesque and almost unintelligible, describing its journey through a distant underwater world to which it will never return.