*200 copies limited edition* Music composed in resonance with Orlando di Lasso’s ‘Prophetiae Sibyllarum’ (ca 1555-60). The Sibylline Prophecies are a 16th century collection of vocal motets that could be considered prophetic, because they open up the music of its time to chromaticism beyond diatonality, posing new challenges to tuning. On the other hand, the sung text is an unambiguous appropriation of ancient Greek Sibylline oracles, claiming these predicted the coming of Christ —a fictional revision of history that misses the revolutionary moment of prophecy, where an existing situation is broken open, made unstable, is destroyed even, and for a moment a desert looms in which every world, past or future, vanishes like a mirage. But, at the same time, here anything seems possible; it’s a challenge to start walking paths, instead of fixating on settlement and taking root. As a kind of recuperation of this revolutionary moment I decided to read Lasso’s music the way an oracle might, adopting methods for divining earth, sky, fire, water, and using them for transforming the music in all different directions.

«When speech becomes prophetic it is not the future that is given, it is the present that is taken away, and with it any possibility of a firm, stable, lasting presence... It is once again like the desert, and speech is desert-like, this voice that needs the desert, to cry out and to reawaken the terror, understanding and memory of the desert... » (Maurice Blanchot) —Reinier Van Houdt