Loris S Sarid is a Roman artist who has been based in Glasgow since 2015. His work throughout the years has included songwriting, soundtracks and installation, blending elements of classic composition with improvisation and coding. There’s a sense of playfulness that ties Loris’s music together, a lightness that is not without meaning or intention, but rather displays a will to never take itself too seriously. Through solo releases with Constellation Tatsu, Moonglyph Records, and 12th Isle with collaborator Innis Chonnel, Loris creates musical environments with both programmed and performed instruments, often mocking one another in what he would affectionately term ‘laptop surrealism’.
This piece was originally made as something to be experienced through headphones for Glasgow’s Burrell Collection, the once-private art collection of William Burrell, donated to the city of Glasgow after his death and since 1983 housed in Pollok Country Park. I live walking distance away from the museum, and while making this music I went there a number of times. I really inhabited the place with my imagination and tried to take in as much of its atmosphere as I could. After my initial overly-optimistic request of letting me sample their Mesopotamian bells and other artefacts (which was unsurprisingly rejected) I had the idea of taking note of which material what I wanted to sample was made of, and look for modern industrial versions of the same objects made of the same material. Following a sort of thrift store treasure hunt I managed to find all the objects I wanted. In the following three weeks I sampled those objects extensively. I wanted the music to feel like the materials that stand out to me in the building. I like the idea that they are like old cousins related by function to those ancient pieces in the museum. The track is in large part made with these sounds, to which I added more conventional synthesisers and other instruments like clarinet, flute, digital piano, my voice, kalimba and guitar. I kept visiting the museum while making the music to make sure it worked well in headphones and that it felt good in the space it was aimed for.
From a certain perspective, our whole life is a single uninterrupted listening session. From birth until death, we never really switch off our ears. Music is one of the elements that appears in this session. How music is different from the sound of the wind or waves is something that for me comes down to intention. When intention is brought into sound we create spells and we make music. We do it in many ways: conversation, traffic, applauses, arguments, the cheering of football supporters in a stadium and so on. This for me is all bad music, but music nonetheless. Good music is a consistently curated output of sound. That means the way someone is honking in the car and the way someone responds further in the line of traffic, are curated together and intentionally put in relation with one another. What I like about good music as opposed to most conversation is that I don’t need to pay attention to it. Music is a much more effective form of communication. I can play an album and clean the house and not think about it, and still it would communicate with my mind and my body effectively. I can also approach listening as a unique activity and focus entirely on the music and have a different experience. Similarly to the difference between visiting a place for the weekend and moving there for some time, longer tracks give you more information and time to become a citizen of the world they are building. The longer a piece of music is, the more it reminds me of the natural world and the way I don’t need to pay attention to every single sound for them to impact my reality.