GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
 
 

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On Kinship and Listening     In my work, I have long felt a quiet yet powerful kinship with certain forms of Australian Indigenous art - above all the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre, Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Dorothy Napangardi, Kathleen Ngale... Through their dotted fields and drifting constellations, these artists seem to evoke not only the visible landscape, but a vast, unseen one: ancestral, rhythmic, cosmic and grounded in Country. As someone who did not grow up here in Australia, I am deeply conscious of the distances involved - not just geographical, but far more importantly, cultural. I make no claim whatsoever to represent or speak for these traditions. I simply love their art and the ethos it embodies, and I feel continually, directly inspired to translate its spirit into musical structures. And I do listen - something in these paintings speaks to me with unusual clarity. Their visual language - meticulous, luminous, filled with space and time - echoes how I've come to think about music: not as narrative, but more as a kind of presence, in silence and luminous vibration. Shimmering note patterns in my music might be akin to dots across a canvas or a desert floor. Particles of witness, of being. They might be stars, footsteps, marks of time and space. I see in these visual patterns something that finds a very natural parallel in music, and which I am surprised not more people have used in their music - not as a copy, but as an attempt to tune into something older, something that resists spectacle, remembers and translates, something that finds echoes and correspondences. This is in no way meant as appropriation, and I do hope it is not received as such. It is meant as an act of deep reverence - a form of listening across vast differences: cultural, temporal, ontological. And perhaps, in this act of listening, a kind of kinship becomes possible. Fragile yet, in my view, deeply necessary.       G. L.