Pan-Terrestrial People’s Anthem
Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem is a series of compositions and a book of poetry created entirely from remixing the songs and lyrics of 195 national anthems. The music is constructed from sampling fragments of all anthems to build up an assemblage of sonic layers that transcend established geopolitical boundaries. The poems are created using computer programs that parse, filter, and reassemble the database of lyrics finding thematic and linguistic patterns in the 27,523 words.
Read the full conversation with Andrew Demirjian and fellow artists Rashin Fahandej and Halsey Burgund here: Sound That Surrounds
I’ve been fascinated with national anthems and how words and music are enlisted to strengthen bonds between people and ideas of national identity. I started to wonder if words and music could be employed to loosen bonds between people and their nations. Can text and sound be used to encourage people to see the nation-state as a relatively modern invention, not something that is a fixed given, but historically contingent and constantly in flux? Is there a way to focus on the interconnectedness of our actual existence instead of the separate-ness that many nationalistic movements (‘America First’) are leaning towards? Should we go back to city-states? Is there a new way to think about borders and spaces? In short, I feel the concept of the nation-state has caused so much suffering it should really be reconsidered in our current time.
How can you emphasize interconnectedness and lack of fixity? In creating the 10 songs that make up the album Pan-terrestrial People’s Anthem the music slices small fragments of individual instruments, melodic lines, and chords from 195 national anthems and reassembles parts from different songs together. The idea is to build up an assemblage of sonic layers that transcend established geopolitical boundaries. In thinking about sonic metaphors to embrace a lack of fixity, or shifting borders, in sound I turned to new sonic possibilities afforded by the soundtracks of VR films.
VR movies uploaded to Youtube can feature first-order Ambisonics that allow for the mix to shift and change based on the user’s head — or mobile phone — movement. I wanted to take advantage of this capability in my audio compositions to emphasize a feeling of fluidness and lack of fixity. Four of the ten compositions for this project are released as Youtube VR videos with Ambisonics soundtracks. All of them were created as 8 or 4 channel compositions and mixed to Ambisonics audio.
The music and book are available from Contour Editions. The music can be downloaded or streamed from their website, the book is also available from Amazon.com. More about my work at: andrewdemirjian.com.
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