PAN LES (MISTER FOREST)
The return of pagan poetry.
The trio «Pan Les» is a musicpoetic artistic experiment situated at the crossroads of sound
poetry, ambient, new aesthetics, and spontaneous improvisation. The stage interpretation
of Anatol Sys’s poems is accompanied by a world of sounds with an archaeological
lineage, surprising with the timbre of original instruments and their preparations. The whole
is enriched by dreamlike electronics and creative sampling. A ritual of sound and word. An
exhumation of the Belarusian soul.
- to texts of
- Anatol Sys
The forest is a temple.
The stone is the source. Blood is the wine, and the nation is the grain of a spoiled harvest. The serpent is the king, the oak is the altar, and beneath the ice flickers the braid of a drowned maiden. This is the poet’s true homeland. This is his message to us. From
beyond the grave. From before the kurgans were heaped. From beneath the overgrown
grass: that what is — has always been, we walk behind the plough in circles.
Poems are music.
Improvisations woven around the hard sound and the energy of the Belarusian language combine a primal pulse with an abstractly melodic tonality. The trio’s musicians employ a range of sonoristic techniques, preparations, and realtime sampling, shaped by — and for — the words of Sys’s successive poems. And apart from these poems, nothing ever sounds the same.
Sound is memory.
The compositions were arranged for voice and a unique set of instruments, enriched with field recordings and interventions within the forest space. The program is the result of rehearsals and work carried out in the heart of the Belavezhskaya Pushcha (ancient wild
forest), between the cracks of the halfclosed shutters of an old cottage. That is why one cannot forget the deers, the birds, the rustle of leaves, the rain and the storm. And the
ancestors.
