Distopía en Azul/Dystopia in Blue combines acoustic sources and instruments - including percussion, voice, bird whistles and flutes - with live electronics. Through an improvised performance, the duo weaves sonic threads between the coastal landscapes of western Norway and the islandscapes of Cuba, both real and imaginary.
Daiyen Jone anchors her performance in personal memory, a nostalgic tone that at times turns into lament. Together with Knut Jonas Sellevold’s live electronic manipulation the composition evolves through a collaborative, creative intimacy, creating a dense emotional soundscape. Amid flutes that weep, soft nostalgic voices, and percussive loops and distortions that surge like the tide, the listener moves forward without a map. Here, sound does not exist as adornment – it is the thing that in turn obscures, resists, and reveals that which language cannot name.
The result is a mediation from afar, an ode to the well-worn memory of present-day Cuba: sweating streets, orphaned façades, stories of exile, grandmothers, an island turned showcase for the foreign gaze. A fossilized carnival, a reef in decay, where hope turns dystopian and is replaced by political taxidermy. With a touch of rawness, of sweetness, of beauty, and of mysticism, the enigma that is at the beating heart of the Antillean island spills over, permeating and colouring every place: a place where the collective experience and the ferocious veil that obscures and binds it cannot be contested.