The Pools Beneath the Crater

Program Note

This piece tells a soldier’s fragmented, surreal journey at the frontlines. In this place, fear, memory, and hallucination merge into a single, collapsing reality.

It begins in the thick fog of war: cold, tense, disoriented. The frontline rumbles with explosions, hums of war machines, and nearby gunfire. Sometimes, the momentary warmth of the memories eases the pain, but they disperse quickly as the war returns with force. Orders are shouted. Adrenaline rushes. In the chaos of the attack, the soldier takes a wrong path, and a shell explodes.

Everything is blank for a second...

What follows is not death, but something stranger.

From the wreckage, he descends into what seems like another world: a misty field, a hidden cave, a pool that glows with stillness. Sound begins to shift; textures stretch, voices dissolve, reality softens. This is no battlefield, not anymore. Here, sound becomes a hallucinated cinema. Time unravels.

But bliss is brief. The cave is a crater. The pool is blood. The journey ends where it began: in the snow, in silence.

“The Pools Beneath the Crater” invites the listener to step into the collapsing psyche of a dying mind. Blurring war with dream, noise with memory, and body with landscape.

Composer's Note

This piece is created as a part of Bilkent’s anuual electroacoustic concerts. The concert was after our finals has been finished. Because of that, I was the only student who were willing to create someting for concert, so I had a chance to work on the concert salon with the 16+1 surround system, and it was quite nice.

The story is a blend of liminality and the war series. This is just because the concert was at the very end of our academic semester. I was tired because of all the projects and composition deadlines, and I really wanted to play COH2 / Foxhole (military games) and relax. If I did, I could not have participated in this concert, so I brought what I love to my job, as I usually do.

As usual for electroacoustic pieces, the piece is only made out of sound recordings, and all of those are recorded by me. Also, I heavily processed the sounds. For example, all the gun sounds are wood clicks with gazillion distortions and serial processing.

Unfortunately, translating a surround sound piece into binaural format diminishes its spatial qualities. But we cannot do anything about it, can we? Perhaps you can try to close your eyes and imagine yourself as in the scene?