KAIROSIS
KAIROSIS
What is “Kairosis”? Is it a game, a piece of music, a kind of opera, a film score? The answer is: a little bit of everything. Based on an idea developed together with Moritz Schneiderwendt (clarinetist, Ensemble Broken Frames Syndicate), this work has accompanied me for the last three years, and it is really mainly thanks to Moritz and his incredibly committed team that the piece became a reality despite many difficulties.
The whole piece is inspired by FMV video games (FMV = Full-Motion video), a genre that flourished especially in the 90s. This genre was in turn influenced by adventure game books, of which the legendary Warlock of the Firetop Mountain was by no means the first (that honor probably goes to Buffalo Castle, an adventure for the role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls). There have also been films that used this idea, most recently “Bandersnatch” from the “Black Mirror” series (Netflix).
This concept has not yet been explored musically, and so the idea arose to write a piece by the musicians of “Broken Frames Syndicate” that can be experienced in this way. Moritz told me about their rehearsal location, the “Seilerbahn” in Frankfurt, a very exciting concert and cultural space that is ideal for filming, and I decided to invent a plot around this location.
Over the Christmas holidays 2021/22 I worked on a script with various decision options that I tested extensively on my family. In the following months, a team was put together and a shooting schedule was drawn up. The piece progressed a little bit in spurts whenever we all had a little time between our “bread work”. Music and film were sometimes created in parallel, which forced me to work purely musically due to the lack of finished film material. I made various “offers” that could then be freely realized in the editing process. In other cases, the through-composed music strictly dictated the dramaturgy of the film.
I don’t want to reveal much about the story, but this much is said: there are many secrets to discover and not everything is as it seems. The main inspiration for me were David Lynch’s films, of course „1984“ and many other dystopian novels, but also the much less well-known surrealist film „La Jetée“ , which for me is an exemplary way of telling a very complex story using incredibly simple means that happens mostly in the imagination of the viewer (incidentally, a direct model for the much better known Terry Gilliam film “12 Monkeys”).
Realizing all of this filmically with a small new music budget and programming without a computer game company was a huge challenge. So you have to have some understanding that we weren’t able to do everything we would have liked to, but I think the result is still impressive and will hopefully inspire further projects in this direction.
After we finished the piece on October 24th. presented live in Frankfurt (of course in the Seilerbahn), “Kairosis” can now finally be played online for an indefinite period of time. Everything is explained on this page and you can get started straight away:
Discovering all 10 “secrets” means unlocking the “best” ending (there are 6 different ones in total). Have lots of fun with it!
Komponist
