Falkensee, Germany. In his new album Imaginary Ecosystems, Omer Eilam presents a contemporary interpretation of sacred music. An interview.
What motivated you to make this album?
The idea, which eventually led to the album, originated 10 years ago during my studies at The Institute of Sonology in The Hague. Like many other electronic musicians, I was excited about the possibility of using computer algorithms to govern the “behaviour” that a certain sound exhibits. Based on predefined rules, different parameters of a sound—its timbre, pitch, loudness, etc.—can change over time in a process that resembles the dynamic behaviors of organisms in nature. When applying this idea to several such “sound organisms” at once and letting them influence the behaviour of each other, one can think of this scenario as an ecosystem of imagined sounds; hence the name Imaginary Ecosystem. I ultimately created a framework for electronic music improvisation based on this idea and used it in several live concerts. The results were recorded and later developed into the first two compositions on the album: ”Anthroposophia” and ”Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones.”
How are music and spirit connected in your own life?
If we examine the course of music history, we find that it has always had two functions: sacred music connected us with the divine, while secular music connected us with one another. In recent times, there has been much emphasis on the second, while the first has been largely forgotten or relinquished to the past. When we want to connect with the spirit through music, we often go back to Bach or to simple song forms. In other words, there is no new sacred music. Yet if we acknowledge that the spiritual world and our consciousness are ever evolving, then we must find new forms—ones appropriate for our times—to connect with spirit. Electronic music provides such new forms inasmuch as it enables us to imagine and create sound worlds that never existed before. More and more, I see it as my task in life to create this musical bridge, to awaken spiritual impulses in electronic music, and bring new forms to spiritual music.
More Omer Eilam
Image Omer Eilam in the studio. Photo from Katrin Plümer
