This piece was a commission from the Home.Music.Europe Project, which lasted 3 years (2021-2023) and was an artistic Residency, Exhibition and Compositional piece made for four European new music organizations in Hungary, Austria, Serbia and Spain.

My Home in the Mountains was the final piece of this project and was presented at 4 Festivals in Budapest, Vienna, Novi Sad and Barcelona.

The piece is a composition with vocals and field recordings made in China, in a small village deep in the forest in the province of Guizhou. In this small village, which is still very wild and with traditions since the Qin Dynasty. The inhabitants belong to the Dong ethnic group and have their own dialect of KAM (which is difficult to understand even for people who speak Mandarin).

My stay was 10 days in the village, and from the first minute when I was arriving by bus, I was absolutely dazzled by the unique variety of sounds in this village. Right in the middle of the village there are 3 large ponds (rice fields, and the lotus pond) that divide it and where a stream crosses. When evening falls, an absolutely deafening concert begins and it is the sound of the frogs in the ponds, being located in the middle of the town and being so large, the songs of the frogs come from all sides. At the same time, the sound of cicadas and various crickets enter thesoundscape. It's quite unique.

The first night when I heard this soundscape, I went downstairs and sat on the bridge of the pond to make field recordings, and if what I was hearing was already wonderful, because it was nature at its best, suddenly a sound came through the headphones that made me made the hairs stand on end. This time it was not a sound of nature or animals, but rather a group of men sitting in a circle in front of a house singing out loud.

The next night I went out to record a little earlier and then I heard from the other end of the village, almost at the entrance and under the tallest trees, the even more impressive voice of the choir of the women of the village. If the men had impressed me, the female choir took my breath away, as it had an incredible tonal variety. In their song, they also try to imitate the sound of some birds. - Then they would tell me that in the traditional songs of this ethnic group, they often mime animals and sounds of nature. !!!

After several days of living in the village, I began to think about making a composition that would reflect this magic of the night in the village, in which it seems that EVERYTHING SINGS, both the creatures and insects, as well as the villagers.

The intention then was to capture this variety of sounds from the village and generate a composition with it. I always thought it would be a short piece (approx. 3min) and multichannel, because this soundscape was too rich for only a stereo piece. Since there were so many singers in the village, I was very interested in being able to write a song about HOME and that someone could sing it - this was the first idea, but it was really complicated because of the language issue and many other aspects.

I preferred then, not to force anything for an artistic purpose, but to do a collaboration, so I asked them if they had songs referring to their HOME or the idea of home, and luckily for me they responded that almost all of them talk about home. Each family in the village farms the land, so the idea of home is deeply rooted for them in this place. They also told me that the songs they sing are a tribute to their ancestors, so most of them are about HOME.

With this idea in mind, I found and invited two incredible singers from the village, who understood and wanted to participate in the protecto and to do so, they blessed me with two very special ancestral songs that refer to Home in their native language.

The songs were recorded separately (individually). Each one is sung in the original dialect of the song. After having the voices, I made night recordings of the village for a week, focused on the soundscape of the place and the sounds of the animals and creatures of the night, and then made the final composition mixed with the voices of the singers.

The wonderful singers are called LANLAN and CHO. I was very lucky, because they are incredible singers and have really special voices.

In this process I had the immense help of local artist and sculptor LU and my partner Xinyu Xie, who helped me present and explain the project to the singers and translate the songs for me.

The INTRO

The piece has a very special introduction. It is a recording made in the village, in which a voice is heard announcing news through the public address system. It is very curious that in this village so deep in a leafy valley, news continues to be transmitted through a megaphone placed at the top of the hill. The first time I heard it, I was very shocked, because the sound is very loud and you can hear a voice shouting as if coming from the forest and the trees that explains something in a very martial voice.

The villagers told me that this type of public address system dates back to Mao's time.

_

For this reason, the piece begins with an intro in which you can hear a recording of this voice from the public address system that is presented with the help of two actors using the recording amplified with a megaphone in the middle of the audience.