PRIMORDIAL
A time-travelling marriage of science and sound
“Koukias’ sharp and at times fragile music miraculously reflected this vast landscape on the edge of the Australian desert”
Music: Constantine Koukias
Piano: Gabriella Smart
Original Sound Design Tape: Mischa Duncan Te Pas
Flinders Ranges Recording (South Australia, 2021): Daniel Pitman
Live Sound Design: Greg Gurr
Live Sound Recording: Donald Bate
Lighting Design: Jason James
Commissioned by The Hon. Christopher Schacht & Soundstream
PRIMORDIAL merges science and sound to create a journey through time, to the first signs of animal life on earth: the Ediacara fossils. A visceral listening experience, it re-enacts the shifting of tectonic plates which formed the inland sea in Flinders Ranges, South Australia, where these organisms first evolved almost 600 million years ago.
Composer Constantine Koukias translates this seismic movement into manipulated piano preparations and electronics. Reinventing the sound of the traditional piano, he conjures a haunting and fragile sonic landscape that reflects an archaic continent.
The origins of the piece trace back to 2019, when Koukias and pianist Gabriella Smart visited the Ediacara Fossil Site in Australia’s Southern Desert. They were captivated there by the layers of sediment which have built up over millions of years, both smothering and preserving these monumental fossils. The phenomenon inspired the composition’s form: a live piano performance fused with layered recordings of performances by Smart, on location in Australia and, in the future, at similar locations worldwide. This concert features the combination of the Flinders Ranges recording (May 2021) and Mischa Duncan Te Pas’s original sound design tape, which premiered in Amsterdam (October 2022). PRIMORDIAL is therefore an evolving work, the foundation of which incorporates the sounds and spirit of each fossil site’s environment.
Between 2024 and 2027, Koukias and Smart will visit 10 additional fossil sites and record the work in situ. Each recording will create another stratum. The culmination of the project will occur in late 2027, with the final performance featuring all 11 layers.
In a piece on MONA FOMA 2023, Beat Magazine describes PRIMORDIAL as follows:
“But time is larger than our fragile lives, end to end. We are reminded in Primordial, a piece by IHOS Amsterdam composer Constantine Koukias and pianist Gabriella Smart. It grows with the overlay of each new performance at Ediacara fossil sites and will take years, with the final culmination in 2027. In the expression of deep time and tectonic movement on a piano, it is the early iteration of an artwork of strata and complexity, each layer covering the bones of the first. Some of these fossils are located in the Dneister River in Ukraine. How deep are the old bones, that they might sleep and know nothing of the war and my family above, that not even a disaster at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant will crack and wake them? This geology will outlast ecological collapse and war.”