Lioness

Helena, a paramedic, is losing her fifteen-year-old daughter to drugs and bad company. When Stefi ends up in hospital after an overdose, Helena takes her from the ward and locks her away in the family’s old summer house, certain this is how she will heal her daughter — and the two of them. A psychological duel unfolds between mother and child, in rooms that lie somewhere between reality, helplessness, care and longing.

I wanted the music to hold that fragility and tension — the swing between the ideal and the abyss — and, at the same time, the mother’s sheer will, the almost sacred charge of her feeling. “The music should be more like noise, bedded into the sound design”: that line from my briefing with the director set the course. I approached the score with great restraint, in harmony and density alike. As in almost everything I do, the work begins by gathering and recording sounds — the search for a sonic concentrate, a palette. Here that core became my very old, cracked double bass and a flugelhorn, played by Stephan Meinberg: harmonics and glissandi in abundance, techniques closer to noise than to notes. Beneath them, a brittle foundation of sparse analogue synthesiser tones whose timings and tempi drift against one another, and a heavily processed kannel — an Estonian box zither from my collection.