PERFECT OFFERING & VANISHING POINT

Perfect Offering

Cassandra Miller wrote ‘Perfect Offering’ at a time when she was feeling rather useless. Apart from pushing some notes around on a blank sheet of paper, all she could think about was a lyric by Leonard Cohen that ran through her head like a mantra: ‘ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering’. It then influenced the composition process, and the more the piece took shape, the more it seemed to be about bells, how they ring and how they mark the passage of time.

Miller went in search of relevant recordings and became particularly drawn to the sound of ringing bells from a French monastery. She found magic in slowing down the recording and notated the hidden melodies that emerged when the bell resonances hooked together as if it were a Renaissance polyphony. The composition was commissioned by theatre De Link and first performed live in 2020. A revised version was released in March 2021.

Vanishing Point

Composer/musician Sam Vloemans wrote Vanishing Point as the soundtrack to the animated film with the same name by visual artist Hans Op de Beeck. The title refers to a point in the picture plane of a perspective view where parallel lines seem to converge. At the height of a vanishing point in the distance, we can no longer perceive three-dimensional depth. Op de Beeck uses the term metaphorically, as a tipping point from which we pass from measurability and legibility to the unknown, indecipherable and incomprehensible, or from the concrete to the abstract, mental or spiritual.

The film begins with the image of a little boy lying peacefully on his back with his eyes closed. We are then transported to fictional landscapes, still lifes and figures. Together with the music, the watercolours brought to life create a vast, stilled atmosphere that invites us to momentarily disappear into a moment of letting go.