lin korobkova

»implanted memories«–Composer lin korobkova in conversation with Alexey Munipov

 

How is your »implanted memories« structured, and what role does the 16th-century microtonal organ play in it?

 

»implanted memories« is written for self-playing Archiorgano–a reconstruction of a 16th-century organ invented by Nicola Vicentino–and a singing performer Johanna Vargas. This is a piece I’ve been working on for several years, and it’s definitely one of the milestones in my compositional path.

 

The piece focuses on the phenomenon of memory–and on the juxtaposition between the personal and the mechanical, or the individual and the general. In other words, it brings together two ways of preserving information. One is internal: rewriting, re-remembering, recalling something that has long been gone. The other is technical reproduction.

 

By placing these two modes of preservation side by side, I’m trying to question what it means to be human. What is identity in today’s world? To what extent are we predetermined by cultural paradigms that existed before us?

 

And of course, the work also touches on gender semantics. What does it mean to be born–and to be read by society–as a female person? What consequences does exposure to pop-cultural artifacts and general social pressure have on one’s life? There are multiple layers to how one can read this piece.

 

Still, I can say quite clearly that this is a very personal work for me, because I’m dealing with my own memories. I’m exposing vulnerable parts of myself by bringing in a song I wrote when I was twelve–as a kind of central theme, or a starting point, for the composition.

 

I hesitate when I try to describe what role this song plays, because it occupies different structural positions within the piece. It’s not just an object I work with or manipulate. It’s also a living process–rewriting what I once wrote. At the same time, it’s the reproduction of something already fixed.

 

So there’s this double understanding of what my song can be: something I relive anew each time I revisit it–capturing small intonations, these simple phrases that seem straightforward at first glance–and also something that can be repeated again and again by the organ, in a way that resists the fleeting nature of time. Because the organ is automated, it can repeat things in exactly the same manner–or at least create the illusion of repetition.

 

And of course, the human voice is doomed to fail in terms of accuracy. Maybe this is the core foundation of the work. And yes–I’m very excited to experience it myself.

 

What made you start with this theme–and with your own teenage pop song? What kind of sound-image did you have in mind when you began?

 

I began thinking about this piece when I first saw this organ, and it felt like a very strong paradox to me. It’s an »ancient« organ. Of course, it’s not literally from the 16th century–it’s a reconstruction–but you still have the feeling that it brings you into another perception of time. Maybe even something untimely–it gives you access to that dimension.

 

And at the same time, there is this device–a mechanical mechanism that presses the keys–so the organ becomes capable of playing, without anyone touching it. This is something we usually associate with dystopias, but also with projections of the future–with imagining what human existence might look like in some years, or what is already happening right now. These two very contradictory levels provoked something in me–a very strong response.

 

I started thinking: how can I conceptualize something that would combine this archaic, untimely dimension with ideas of the future–the rise of AI, new technologies, and so on? Finding a second element–putting myself in this duel with the organ–was a crucial step. It helped me understand how to work with the combination of something intimate and something impersonal.

 

You can already see it in the setting: it’s very uncanny. You have a human being sitting independently, far away from the organ–and the organ plays by itself. In a normal concert setting, you would have them merging with each other, almost like a single tool-body. Here they are completely independent.

 

And I realised immediately that I needed to commit something like a surgical operation on my memory–because you can’t really write a piece about memory if you don’t remember it yourself. It just wouldn’t work.

 

That was the moment when I understood: this piece should be about my troubled relationship to my past self. From there, I tried to research how I could work with memory as a composer. How can I structure my process in a way that might trigger certain memories, or guide me through the act of writing? How do you create a structure for the ritual of writing, as I call it?

 

What I’m trying to determine in this piece is not the structure within the music, but the circumstances of writing itself–a scheme for a process, rather than the content. That took time. And I’m still on the way–I’m still completing this work, even now, as we’re speaking.

 

Of course, it also changes while you are writing it–because that’s the core of the piece: it’s fluid, and connected to the very act of writing.

 

You can expect a lot of intensity–but an intensity that isn’t necessarily manufactured through loud sounds or a lot of events. Like a negative intensity–a sense that something is there, but you can’t fully grasp it. You can only anticipate it, and then we’ll see whether it actually surfaces at a certain point in the piece, or not.

 

The organ was originally invented for a completely different purpose. Why did you choose it as your co-partner in this work?

 

Initially, the organ was described as something like a »superior organ«–an organ above all organs–because it was conceived as something »more perfect than nature itself«. The idea was to create an instrument that could combine both »perfect« thirds and »perfect« fifths–which was a major debate at the time. Many composer-theorists were dealing with this problem.

 

You could call it a microtonal organ. But of course it’s far from the 20th-century conception of microtonality–it wasn’t really thought of in that way. It was rather a tool to help singers perform madrigals in a way that would always produce pure intervals. For me, it’s essential that it’s a tool meant to educate singers. I like that both conceptually and practically, because this organ tries to be natural and unnatural at the same time. Again, it’s a paradox: it aims to be more »natural« than the human voice. But then–isn’t it natural to sing out of tune, or to sing imperfect intervals?

 

It’s an analogy of contemporary culture in an unexpected way: an instrument that is imposed on your ways of educating yourself, of behaving, of singing in a certain way. That aspect felt essential. And of course there is also the fact that it plays by itself–this combination of archaic domination and a projection of the future.

 

So in the piece there’s a singer repeating your teenage song, and the self-playing organ doing something similar–two kinds of doubles, or projections, of you. How did you work with that relationship? Do you see the singer as embodying your memories while the organ functions almost like a teacher–guiding, correcting, or disciplining the voice?

 

For me it was important that the listener is always hesitating: is this memory something that belongs to the person singing, or is the singer detached, like the organ? I think the piece plays a lot with detachment and warmth–with merging into the song, or holding it at a distance.

 

There are places where one might think: this is definitely this person’s song. And there are others where one might think: the singer is just another machine, so to speak–someone who reproduces it. That ambivalence is part of the piece.

 

I also thought about it a lot through theories of the uncanny. When Freud conceptualizes the uncanny, he describes this strong sensation of feeling at home and not at home at the same time–when we encounter something that resembles us closely, but also has disruptions, or points where we recognize it as something completely alien.

 

It has to be familiar enough for us to project ourselves into it, and at the same time it has to contain small discrepancies. Both with the organ and with Johanna, the singer, we get something like that. I don’t want to call them objects–but they are uncanny actors, uncanny doubles: doubles of themselves, doubles of me, and possibly uncanny doubles of the audience as well, who will witness and participate in this experience.

 

You describe it as a ritual–could you elaborate on what you mean by that? Do you think of it in religious terms, or more as something theatrical, psychological? Is it a kind of therapy, too?

 

Definitely not a religious one. It’s more about the working process. At a certain point I read a lot of literature on ritual focusing on their formal aspects rather than on sacred meanings.

So basically it’s about reducing ritual to the profane, because it focuses on the formulas behind repetition. In my piece, for instance, I had to come up with certain rules for writing that always remain the same, while the writing itself changes each time it is actualised.

 

And that is actually quite close to the core of many religious rituals, because there are prescriptions–strict rules of action. You touch certain objects, you move to the center, you perform a sequence. And yet every repetition contains small shifts. Obviously the space, the time, the participants–they all change the dynamics of the procedure.

 

The reason I started calling it »ritual« was precisely this. I was trying to get away from the idea of composing as a process of manufacturing structures–because structures define the written score from the inside. You could say that structure is what you hear. But I wanted to make space for the freedom of the writing process–even while the prescriptions remain very strict.

 

And it fit very well with the concept of memory, because ritual is a way of preserving something in time. When something is repeated, we keep trying to reach an archaic original that is never fully reachable. If we think about Christian rituals, for example, they create a relation to events that took place a long time ago. The ritual is supposed to bring you closer to events that are not really reachable–or only reachable on a symbolic level–through actions that are meant to remind you of them.

 

In my piece it’s different, because we’re dealing with a personal pre-event. This personal pre-event becomes something I cannot grasp–something that stays on the other side of my writing process. The ritual is what guides me, or gives me stimuli, for a symbolic repetition–a symbolic reincarnation–of that event.

 

Has working on the piece affected your own memories? Have they become more stable–or more fluid?

 

When I initially thought of the piece, I was very connected to the original memory–the recollection of that first song. But now I think I’ve created an artificial loop: I recall the first weeks of working on the project as the pre-event, because it was already so long ago, and the piece itself has become a story for me. It became its own memory.

 

This is also something I’m trying to achieve in the work: that what seems to lie outside the piece becomes reachable within it–that the beginning can, in a sense, be reached from the end.

 

You’ve said this is a very personal project for you. It touches on detachment and gaslighting, and on how society polices–or disciplines–women. Is there any personal background you’d want listeners to know that would help them grasp the piece more intensely?

 

That’s a tricky question, because my whole existence is, to a certain extent, ungraspable even for me. But also, I think every work of art is personal and impersonal at the same time–it keeps this paradoxical ambivalence.

 

As a listener you don’t really need to know anything about me as a human being to grasp the intimacy and the detachment. What I’m trying to articulate should be in the piece itself–and in that sense, it’s not important that you know it’s my song. I hope it would be perceivable from the ritual itself.

 

But of course, as a person, I am very concerned about the world in general. For me it has both levels: personal and political, definitely. In my spare time–and also in a large part of my working time–I do research and activist work related to gendered violence. It’s essential for me to contribute to a shift in power dynamics.

 

At the same time, I think the question of identity goes far beyond being female or male or non-binary. And I’m critical of it, because I see how easily it becomes a tool for manipulation–a way of dividing real human beings, with all their complexity and ambivalence, into strict groups.

 

This is something I struggle with personally as well: who defines these categories, how are they imposed, what political relevance do they have? Which categories are not yet formed–and why? These questions are always with me. But I also think they remain, in a way, the background of the piece: something the work might trigger, questions I hope it can open up.

 

I’m looking forward to the performance myself–to the presence it will bring, to the experience of gathering together and listening, of coexisting in the same space. I’m curious what that will change in the piece itself, because for me the event of actually being there, and witnessing, is crucial.

 

What feels most essential to you about this piece–the reason it needs to exist now?

 

It might offer a more precise understanding of how we recall things. And by witnessing it, it can also become a kind of reflection–because we all live in our memories and in the present at the same time. Part of being human is that we embody our memories over and over again, inevitably with changes and discrepancies.

 

That’s how identity functions–and, in a way, how society functions. To witness this in a different context might bring a new understanding of yourself.

 

I also think it will be a very strange piece of music. Even for me, as the person writing it, I’m still surprised by where it takes me.

 

Personally, I think the things we don’t fully know yet, but that feel strangely familiar–those are the places we should look at most closely. They point to parts of society that matter: things we need to grasp, examine, and engage with. I hope this piece is one of those places.

 

But I do think it will stay with you–as something you carry in your memory.