At the bottom of this pursuit lies a confluence of lived turmoil: the disturbances of warfare, the ache of displacement, the unyielding gravity of injustice, and the haunting absence of genuine concord in an epoch fraught with impending doom. These inward scars, carved along the contours of isolation and resistance, now serve as the scaffold upon which I imagine an [auditory] utopia—a precarious structure of egalitarian equilibrium—not as a fixed ideal, but as an unending approach, an emergent stratification of becoming [in sound].
I always return to a sense of arcane astonishment—an ancient, nameless apprehension that everything we perceive, desire, and endure is bound to the singular span of life allotted to us. Within that recognition, a cosmic pull arises, beckoning me toward realms that lie just beyond perception’s reach. I find myself enticed by the speculative and intangible: environments unanchored by physical consensus, drifting as conceptual phantoms and awaiting their incarnation in sound. Through my compositional gestures, I strive to transmute these elusive sensations into waves of resonance, translating uncertainty, temporal density, and precarious potential into vibrational contours that escape the confines of language.
In these efforts, music hovers at a threshold between the quantifiable and the unbounded. It echoes the essential paradox of existence: forward motion unraveling into stasis, structured forms dissolving into silence, aspirations collapsing just as they approach fulfillment. Within this dissolution, a delicate beauty emerges—a flicker where knowledge disintegrates, and definitions lose their grip. It is precisely in this gap, this hollow space of uncertainty, that meaning germinates: poised between what can be dimly intuited and what continually escapes our grasp, between the realm of the audible and the vast expanse of absence.
The architectures I assemble are organic, if intangible—sonic organisms whose structures serve to excavate resonances lodged beneath the perceptual surface. They seep into existential strata: obscure echoes of something universal and enduring. It may be that my compulsion to probe the crevices of sound is rooted in these displacements and upheavals that have inscribed themselves upon my interior terrain.
Ultimately, I percieve my work as a meditation on the impermanence and contingency inherent in existence. To shape sound and then let it dissolve into silence acknowledges the ephemeral current carrying us through an immeasurable cosmos. Each attempt to define the meaning of life eventually slips into its own dissolution. Yet, within this very transience, an unadorned beauty emerges: a stark, yet profoundly moving loveliness found in simply inhabiting our world.
I craft sound not to impose significance, but to coax it forth, unhurried and oblique, like a distant glow emerging in darkness. I want music to extend beyond its structural confines and assume the form of a philosophical tableau. Rather than seeking refuge from life’s dissonances, I choose to face them head-on, absorbing their contradictions and uncertainties into the fabric of the sonic landscape.
What does it mean to exist within time’s viscous currents? What does it mean to yearn for understandings that never fully surrender to words? Perhaps it is enough to remain in search, to listen rather than assert, and to marvel without expectation of resolution. In this open-ended wonder, in the precarious balance between what can be momentarily sensed and what forever slips away, a form of existence is disclosed—fragile, boundless, and eternally resonant.
Belma Bešlić-Gál
In Razno XXI. May 2024.