Playgrounds - A Song for Laser Harp

8. October 2020 | by Veit Ziegelmaier

The Munich music duo "Elwood & Reßle" has recorded a song especially for the laser harp of our exhibition "Lasers | Light | Life". Inspired by this extraordinary instrument and its "strings" of coherent light, they created "Playgrounds", a sensitive song that deals with fateful turns and the longing for playing and free space. Therefore it fits very well to the present situation.

It was a while ago, when we reported on www.laserlichtleben.de that we could win the professional musicians Nathalie Ellwood and Josef Reßle to compose a song especially for our laser harp. Fascinated by our exhibition´s highlight exhibit, both familiarized themselves with the idiosyncratic way of playing this pentatonic tuned light instrument, which only a few musicians in the world, such as Jean-Michel Jarre, use for their performances. Accompanied by keyboard sounds, the song "Playgrounds" was created during evening rehearsals, which they then began to record on location in our exhibition. We filmed the rehearsals and recording session with a camera in order to capture the sound recordings in a video showing them in action. But then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Our exhibition had to be closed for six months due to security measures and also the musical postproduction in the studio came to a standstill because of the lockdown and its aftermath, so that the completion of the project had to be put on hold for the time being. Good things take time, so we are happy to finally publish the finished result exclusively on www.laserlichtleben.de and www.photonworld.de. We would like to take this opportunity to express our special thanks to the two creative musicians for their extraordinary commitment! From today's point of view, the lyrics to "Playgrounds", which were already written around the turn of the year before the outbreak of the pandemic, seem like a foreboding, as they deal with the longing for playgrounds and spaces of freedom, which characterize our current time.