Lapilli is a 23-minute soundtrack to 65-minute Slovakian essay film by Paula Ďurinová.
The experimental documentary uses images of rocks, caves, mountains and oceans as the backdrop to personal reflections of the grief arising from the sudden loss of the filmmaker’s grandparents. The film has been succinctly described as "a soft film about hard matter."
Although I have yet to see the film, the soundtrack has an intriguingly fragmented quality that conjures up a sonic world of echoing caves and barren landscapes. The music certainly doesn’t have any reassuring qualities and would serve equally well as a score to a horror movie.
The Berlin-based sound artist delicately applies plucked minimalism, sine waves, eerie drones and detuned strings. The instrumentation is listed as “Broken autoharp, organ drones and dripping stalactites.”
From Soft Void to Hard Matter, The technique suggests natural surroundings that have a beauty in spite of their harsh and unforgiving aspect. The whole is described in terms of Strings of a dying autoharp rolling like clouds of our memory over the abyss of things no longer present.
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The harsh, yet curiously comforting, mood seems perfectly in tune with the profound questions posed by the film’s director: How does hard matter die? A rock, a pebble, a mountain, a stone? How does it invite change, transformation, and us? How does it mirror our grief?
Needless to say Hermanova’s compositions provide no answers but gently guide the listener into an ambient space which invites reflections on time and memory.
Petra Hermanova at Bandcamp
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