Mir collective album

You can get digital copy at https://www.elli.media/releases/mir

Mir collective album has been released the 29th April 2022

Concept by Emanuele Battisti and Julien Bayle
Music supervisor and mastering : Emanuele Battisti
Artwork and graphic design : Julien Bayle

In a world that seems more and more driven by conflict, selfishness and competition, we Elli artists believe in the power of cooperation. This is why we present this collective release, in which 8 different artists offer their personal artistic response to the current war in Ukraine. And to wars in general, because there are way too many conflicts going on for which we barely receive any information at all…

Thus the great Roman historian Tacitus described the reality of war : “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”. A war is never the right path to find peace. War will call for other wars, hatred will nurture hatred. In this dark picture, can there still be hope ?

Interestingly enough, the word mir (мир), that we chose for the album title, comes from a proto-slavic term meaning both “peace” and “world”. As if the only way to live together in this world could be through peace !

The cover presents a coded image of a sphere, and each track represents a section of the global picture, with small traces of the surrounding space. When we open ourselves to difference and we accept the others around us, we become part of a bigger and more meaningful unity.

We need to be united.

Mir !

My statement for the track I composed :

zero is a soundscape extending few seconds selected from a field recorded I did in Kiev City circa 2016. I was alone in a green park, next to a church, and I heard spectral voices coming out from it. I recorded one hour of this, with Kiev urban sounds. This is the only sample used for composing this track and everything is based upon it as I didn’t want to use external sound or instruments for this piece, to make it more introspective and folded on itself. It extends the concept of cut-up to different times scales. By working at these different scales of time, from micro and granulation to Sound object and tones researches, from meso and deep reverberation trying to express void space to macro and composition itself, I wanted to express the collapse of time and space into a dimensionless space, to the void: point zero, which links to the title of this piece.

Cover Design

Generative design drove me, here, to explore so many things. Feeling this creative process as the Eco’s Opera Aperta, it drove me to design systems more often than directly touching the sensitive matter itself.

I designed these covers some very simple algorithms, using Processing Java wrapper, for creating these covers for a collective album in which I got a piece.

I chose some rules in order to illustrated the collective piece idea, order vs chaos concepts, the feeling of destruction contaminating structured places, amongst many. Each track’s cover got exactly the same number of elements. The overlay of all covers results in the album’s cover.