is a deliberate continuation of my earlier work, recasting its central idea for a different performance context. The string quartet,  lighting design, video, fixed media, live electronics and use of  space found in the original are distilled in this second version into  a solo viola whose sound is processed electronically. The material is thus revisited from a different vantage point, while one  vital link with the first version remains: Konrad Janus. Originally  the violist in the quartet that performed Silence Unleashed, he  now becomes a solitary voice emerging from its former collective  structure. The viola carries within it the memory of the original  work’s sounds and gestures, yet now stands alone.

The new work retains the original’s underlying dramatic trajectory: a journey from attentive listening to individual sonic  events towards an experience of sound driven by pulse, motion  and physically palpable energy. Where Silence Unleashed offered  an all-encompassing experience shaped by the interaction of  sound, image, light and space, Silence Unleashed II focuses on  a single element of that world. Dispensing with the visual component and elaborate choreography of light follows naturally from  the shift from the quartet’s collective body to the solitary voice of  the viola. Attention can therefore settle on the process of sonic  transformation itself and on the relationship between the performer and the surrounding acoustic environment.

Filip Popielarz