music & videos
upcoming projects
PIERROT
Pierrot is DELUNE's debut baroque-pop concept album. Inspired by the Commedia Dell’Arte clown Pierrot le fou, the fool in love, the music follows the journey of falling in love: from blissful heights, to rock bottom, to self-realization. We are collaborating with London-based animator Alexandra Hohner, creating a nostalgic visual world for the album. Our first collaboration, Lavender Too, was premiered by ELLE. We'll be releasing one single a month, starting in late January 2020.
ALEXANDRA HOHNER
KAZAKHSTAN EP
DELUNE's next body of work is KAZAKHSTAN EP, written in Almaty, Kazakhstan in 2019. We co-composed music in four languages, creating an original musical theater piece for the National Nemetski Theater, called “The Rainmaidens of East World,” based on a collaboration with an international team of artists: Tilman Hecker (Berlin-based avant garde opera director); David Brynjar Franzson (Icelandic composer); Jos McKain (Berlin-based choreographer); Belle Santos (Berlin-based costume designer); Scott Bolman (Brooklyn-based lighting designer); and more. The production, following a young woman’s journey to save her city from a drought, rallies the audience around climate change awareness and community empowerment.
The upcoming KAZAKHSTAN EP remixes and brings this music to an international audience. From hacker-inspired heavy beats, to cowboy and video-game instrumental duels; and ultimately into sacred natural beauty, the EP eventually wraps up with an AI/human blend choir topped off with euphoric trap music.
We're collaborating with Berlin-based film director Kieran Behan to create a 10-minute short, from both digital and analog film, shot in the vast crater-like expanses of Mallorca, Spain. This piece will explore the tension between humankind and nature; it is a current retelling of a supernatural struggle to save mother earth.
BEHIND BRICKS & BARS: AMERICA'S BEST-DISGUISED PRISONS
"'The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,' writes Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel on Siberian prison camps, The House of the Dead. Nelson Mandela continued this thought in 1995 when saying, 'a nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.'
The United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with 2.12 million people currently held in penal institutions. As a result of this, the United States has more employed through the penal system than any other country: Over one million security guards, correctional officers, and jailers are employed annually; totaling to an amount that almost matches that of secondary school teachers. The annual expenditure per prisoner is approximately $34k, dwarfing the approximate $13k per pupil in both elementary and secondary schooling.
Where and how a government spends its money can quickly be linked to what and who the government is prioritizing...
The two government-funded institutions serving the largest populations also happen to be the two institutions containing those with the least amount of clout and voice: public prisons and public schools. Although both institutions have different reasons for being, and certainly different objectives, they still contain and manage dependent populations. The management and execution of both institutions are becoming more and more alike.
The American principles of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and ‘freedom of opportunity’ become intertwined in a modern philosophical limbo: we are depriving the most dependent populations by immediately assuming guilt, implementing restrictions, and presuming deviance, whether proven or not. Youths, pushed into the compulsory educational system, are unknowingly caught in the crossfire of a governmental institution that is at loose ends. Due to the overpopulation of many public high schools, and the lack of staff to maintain the pupils, school students are being treated with the same methods of crowd control and scrutiny from the most effective model the United States has to offer: the prison system. This makes the similarities in the architecture and social infrastructure of these institutions all the more arresting. These institutions are not formless, abstract ideological concepts that invisibly encompass such a large set of the population, but rather, they are manifested in physical, tangible structures which house and contain people every day..."