Plitvice Botany
The symbiotic relationship between visual art and music gives auteurs in both mediums a deep well from which to draw inspiration, which can sometimes lead to direct interpretation. For instance, Stephen Sondheim based his musical Sunday in the Park with George on Georges Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte, while Walt Disney’s animated classicFantasia pays tribute to seven of the great composers of classical music through the magic of Disney’s animated visuals.
Ambient music producer J Mundok found himself on his own musical interpretation journey in late 2015 after purchasing a triptych art installation to hang in his recording studio. The installation,Plitvice Botany 2,4, & 3 by Washington DC-based photographer David Bellard, is a series of three unique photo/silkscreen pieces that use layers of geometric designs combined with photos and super 8 film shot in Croatia at the stunning Plitvice Lakes National Park.
Bellard describes the pieces as “a commentary on spatial aesthetics, the geometry of nature, the mechanical biology of time, and our human need to quantify it through some kind of metrics.”
Inspired by the aesthetics of the series, musician J Mundok composed and recorded Plitvice Botany, a three-song ambient EP based on the three pieces in the installation. “Because the [art] pieces are layered, it allowed me to break down the layers and figure out how I would musically represent each of them through sound,” recalls Mundok. Analog and digital instrumentation, is layered with ritual geometric loops, and the whispering grass of field recordings. Similar to Wolfgang Voigt’sKonigsforst or the microscopic ambient worlds of Taylor Dupree, Plitvice Botany evokes the mysterious nature of the ancient Croatian forest for those that take the journey.
In keeping with the visual art roots, the Plitvice Botany EP is available as a CD/postcard set in handscreened packages. This limited edition piece (15 in a numbered edition) includes the CD, color postcards of the three pieces in the Plitvice Botany 2, 4, & 3 installation, and a handscreened silver metallic ink design on recycled board.
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