A Study of Losses

In spring 2023 Viktoria Dalborg, director at the Swedish circus Kompani Giraff, reached out to me, asking if I would be interested to provide the music for their next project, a show based on an adaptation of a novel by German author Judith Schalansky. Admittedly, I had neither heard of the circus or the author before but was very intrigued as soon as I read an abstract of the book and saw a few videos of Kompani Giraff’s previous work. I was immediately taken by the costume, lighting and stage design around the acrobatics.

The main themes in Schalansky´s book and in the adaptation for the circus show deals with the concept of loss and the impermanence of everything known to us: from extinct animal species, lost architectural and literary treasures to more abstract concepts of loss through the process of aging.

I wrote a few first songs that I was pretty happy with, the wide variation of sounds and ideas felt in debt to one of my all-time favorites: The Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs. After having taken a break from writing because of other projects, I met up with Viktoria at a cafe in Stockholm to discuss our collaboration. She invited me to Malmö to see a special performance of their current production “Moln” in which Jonathan Johansson and David Lindvall, who wrote the music for that show performed live.

The show left me amazed and was unlike anything I had ever seen before. Not only were the acrobats deeply creative and expressive for their performances but also the whole atmosphere created by the lights, stage design and music made for a special kind of experience that went beyond a normal concert or theater piece to me. Having seen the full potential of such a show, I returned to Berlin doubly inspired to create something as meaningful and moving for their next project.

After finishing 11 songs and themes, Viktoria asked me if I could extend some of the songs with instrumental themes to match the total length of the planned performance. At that point I was deep in a sonic world taking inspiration from a lot of choir, renaissance and other early music I had been obsessed with and the instrumental pieces were quick to follow, almost all new pieces of their own.

I asked Clarice Jensen, an extremely talented cello player and arranger I had worked with for “No No No” and some live performances to arrange and play over some of these instrumental pieces with a string quartet. I titled them with the lunar seas inspired by the chilling tale of a man obsessed with archiving all of humanity’s lost thoughts and creations where they collect on the moon, who realizes all too late the life he has lost in the process.

A Study Of Losses has turned into a rather unexpected piece of music for me. At 18 songs and nearly an hour long, it is by far the largest album I’ve ever done.

- Zach Condon
Berlin, April 2024