Lift to Dubai

CD Ouroboros. - Kairos, Paladino Media, 0015045KAI, 2020

The priemiere of Lift to Dubai took place in 2009 at the Berlin Konzerthaus, performed by Ensemble Modern, conductor Franck Ollu.

“into…” was developed by Ensemble Modern and the Siemens Arts Program, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut. It was an ambitious project, that tried to cast the essence of four different cities in music. Does each city have a different sound? Can sound alone grasp the feeling of a city? Sixteen composers spent a month discovering these four cities: Istanbul (Turkey), Dubai (United Arab Emirates), Johannesburg (Republic of South Africa) and Pearl River Delta (China).

I picked up a microphone and started recording the real city: people talking in underground tunnels, construction cranes, shopping malls, boats, local publicity and even my hotel TV set. Dubai felt to me as a recycled city: ideas, objects, people recollected from different places of the world, who built this place anew. I tried to do the same thing in my piece, transforming and rearranging the recorded material to create something new.

The title of the piece refers to the lift of the Burj Al Arab Hotel. During our stay we visited this magnificent sail-shaped hotel, the third tallest in the world. It stands on an artificial island and offers great view of the city and the sea. As we were riding the open glas lift all the way to the top, people came and went, interrupting and at the same time adding to the event. I was recording the whole thing and later used the sound files as a metaphor for my way of discovering this city. I tried to build a bigger picture, using sound fragments like mosaic tiles, like the various stops and corresponding perspectives offered to us in this fast ascending lift.

Truthful to the place where it originated, I made sure the piece was interrupted with a publicity break... Anyone who has ever visited Dubai would understand this choice.

Vykintas Baltakas