Terri Hron: Forensic Music
The poetry heard in Forensic Music comes from the last collection of my maternal grandfather, Jan Vladislav. It is hard for me to describe in what way the three poems are connected, or to dissociate their meaning from my relationship to my grandfather, both personally and through my mother. The impossible attempt to make such connections and to figure out “what it all means” is the spirit of Forensic Music, in which a series of seemingly disparate elements are juxtaposed and intertwined, sometimes rising to the surface for a moment before once again being swept up.
Forensic Music is also a kind of archaeology of previous works, Pták Ohnivák, BitterSweet, and Phoenix, that are connected by the notion of transformation and rebirth. Various elements and sounds are sifted and turned over, pieced together. It is as if these works had been shattered and I am trying to reconstruct what happened, how they used to function, what it was they were communicating, but without a clear conclusion or result.
The field recordings I used in Forensic Music are related to the imagery in the poems and the archaeological allusions: bird calls, ocean waves sifting pebbles, invasive mechanical noise, and fire.