‘For many years I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.’
When Žibuokle Martinaitytė read these words by the American author Rebecca Solnit, from her essay ‘The Blue of Distance’, they had a profound effect on her. In 2006 and deeply affected by the death of her father, she moved to New York from her native Lithuania, and her music underwent a fundamental shift to become more raw and emotionally direct. Nodding to Solnit’s meditation on the colour of the sky and of distance, Martinaitytė calls this her ‘blue period’. Her work since has been been preoccupied with the sensations of loss, distance, nostalgia, tranquillity and emptiness, from the elegy she wrote for her father, Completely Embraced by the Beauty of Emptiness (2006), to the orchestral Saudade (2019), based on the peculiarly Portuguese state of deep emotional longing for something that may not and probably cannot exist: a kind of meta-nostalgia that the poet Florbela Estanca (1894–1930) called longing ‘for the longings I don’t have’.
When Covid restrictions in 2020 forced Martinaitytė to stay for an unplanned six months in Lithuania (she was meant to be there for just ten days, supervising an orchestral recording), those resonances took on new, still darker meanings. The extraordinary Hadal Zone, one of several pieces written in that pandemic year, unfolds with the slowness of particles descending to the seafloor. Lying six and eleven kilometres below the sea’s surface, or more than two kilometres past where the faintest light from the sun can penetrate, the hadal or hadopelagic zones are found in the few dozen deep sea trenches dotted around the globe. Some of the most remote and most extreme environments on earth, these zones are nevertheless vast in volume and populated by highly specialised forms of life, capable of surviving without sunlight, in low temperatures, and at extremely high water pressures.
They are also not untouched by man’s influence; the Anthropocene reaches even here. In 1970 four kilograms of plutonium was jettisoned from the Apollo 13 mission and is now thought to lie at the bottom of the Tonga Trench, where it will emit radiation for the next few thousand years. In the same decade 387,000 tons of pharmaceutical waste was dumped into the Puerto Rico Trench in the 1970s. And a proportion of all plastic waste in the ocean eventually sinks into the hadal zone, where it will remain for hundreds of years.
Tracing the slow descent into this remarkable and troubling place, Martinaitytė reveals correspondingly stranger and deeper soundworlds. As we move successively down through the ocean layers – epipelagic (‘sunlight zone’), mesopelagic (‘twilight zone’), bathypelagic (‘midnight zone’), abyssopelagic (‘abyssal zone’) and hadalpelagic – the music gradually descends to a point where individual frequencies are no longer distinguishable and have become just physical sensations. At this extreme of distance, the emotions and desires of Solnit’s blue have been left far behind, replaced only by a dread darkness.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 46th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2023, takes place Friday 17 – Sunday 26 November 2023. Tickets for Hadal Zone are on sale now.