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“For “Infra” I collaborated with the Ukrainian video artist Oleksandra Trishyna, and together we directed and shot this piece. It’s an attempt to capture my ideas in terms of duration, continuity and transformation and depict them in an objective way that avoids dependence upon discrete human perception. Through tranquil shots, depicting the path of a person, rising from primordial waters and travelling through the woods to a deserted Tesla coil facility, our work refers to my vision of sound and how it reveals itself as music. Here, electricity isn’t just a marker of industrialisation or urbanisation but a fundamental agent, often used for generation, transmission and amplification of sonic material. The narrative unfolds as an allegorical meditation on the emergent nature of sound and the ways it exists and transcends. Accompanied by the powerful electrified sound, which takes cues from minimalism, drone and electroacoustic music, the result can be seen as a ceremony to call music forth and beyond.

In that sense, “Infra” relates to François J. Bonnet’s notion of music as of something yet to appear — in his manifesto The Music to Come, he charts the territory of music as “the impossible, infra-sensitive, infra-worldly territory” or “the absence of territory” — a place or even a state we tried to visualise in the video’s finale. According to Bonnet, a composer and theoretician, the way we can experience music is similar to the way we experience landscapes — not just as a representation, but as a sum of all sensations they make us feel. He writes: “The experience of the music to come, as a landscape that spreads out before us, is the setting into vibration of sound, that inexpressible, unsayable supplement, irreducible to a code or text, that constitutes the mystery of music, its power.”

We envisioned “Infra” not just like a juxtaposition of visuals and sounds or a study of how they complement each other, but as an attempt to transcend the perceptual boundaries and experience our surroundings, whether sonic or visual, in a direct and non-mediated way.”
Pavel Milyakov