They don’t come much more challenging than Lorca; extraordinary poetic verse, brutally violent yet starkly beautiful imagery and potent undercurrents of elemental passion and mystery. Yerma depicts the tragic trajectory of a woman whose longing for a child drives her to commit an unspeakable act of violence; Anthony Weigh’s new version stripped the story to the bone, removing the usual cast of village gossips and neighbours and focusing instead on the four characters’ intense inner dramas. Natalie Abrahami’s production for the Gate and Hull Truck was played out with a similarly uncompromising starkness on a bare sand floor against a ramshackle backdrop of abandoned scrap.
I wanted the music to sound similarly de-contextualised – as if it came from everywhere and nowhere – and rethought my whole approach from the ground up. I’ve always loved the DIY musical aesthetic of Harry Partch and John Cage, and spent a long time constructing all sorts of peculiar home-made instruments out of old planks, metal and wire. I also involved multi-instrumentalist and improviser James Hesford (one of my regular collaborators), whose cello and violin playing weaves in and out of the elemental percussion and the textures and soundscapes derived from electronic transformations of babies, lambs and insects.
