Get a glimpse of lockdown with Gabriel Prokofiev as our Artistic Director shares what he's been watching, reading and listening to.
What are you listening to this week?
I hate that question because being a composer, I’m often so focused on finishing what I’m writing that I don’t listen to much else! Right now I’m desperately trying to finish a viola concerto so I’m listening ad nauseum to my unfinished sketches for that. For my new radio programme (The Electronic Century, BBC R3), I’ve been listening to a lot of interesting electronic music, right across the board – searching through all of the artists I like from right back in the 50s and 60s. Re-listening to pioneers like Raymond Scott, Daphne Oram, Messiaen, Suzanne Ciani – and discovering newly re-issued synth tracks from electroacoustic composers Francois Bayle and Bernard Parmegiani, and the remarkable 50s Danish grandmother of electronic music: Else Marie Pade (who I sadly only discovered after we’d finished recording the radio program!) – there’s so many unsung musical heroes out there.
Then there was something I heard the other day, Moses Boyd’s album Dark Matter. I’m just finishing mixing a whole bunch of tracks for electronics and strings, and he’s obviously using electronic beats with jazz and acoustic instruments, so I thought I’ve got to really listen to this because there are quite a few parallels. We’re different but you know – it’s like two sides of a coin in some ways.
Keeping busy in Lockdown
I’ve had a lot of work which has been really fortunate, so I’m feeling really blessed to be able to keep working. When I’m not working, I’ve been trying to persuade my kids to play board games every week, to try and get them away from their screens and to have some sort of family focus – and they do like the games but it’s always a bit of a battle! I’ve got this game Pandemic – weirdly we got it by chance a few months before the first lockdown – and I think it’s a really good game, but my kids totally hate it. So every time I say board games, it’s “as long as it’s not Pandemic!” Now we’ve started this new game called Azul – it’s quite random, you’re a tile designer and you have to try to fill your wall with as many tiles as possible. It’s easy but really satisfying, so that’s something.
And then of course we’re trying to do cycle rides as well – and living in Hackney it’s excellent because you can go to all the marshes – Walthamstow Marshes and Hackney Marshes, and then there’s Epping Forest you can get to on a bike quite easily too.
Books
The Unconsoled Kazuo Ishiguro
The book that I read around the beginning of lockdown, it just blew my mind – The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. It’s now one of my favourite books of all time. I heard an excerpt in Hong Kong in November a year ago on the radio – someone was reading excerpts of it on this classical music radio station, and it was just totally intriguing. I read the book and I couldn’t put it down, I could really relate to the main travelling pianist character on tour in a new city, there were a lot of things in the experience of a touring musician that I really related to. Ishiguro is really famous for Remains of the Day which seems like quite a calm book, but this is like a David Lynch movie as a book! My jaw dropped so many times, I was laughing out loud, it was great.
TV
My son who’s 13 is obsessed with Japanese Anime – he literally forced the family to watch Attack on Titan which is one of the most successful Anime series of all time. And he keeps showing me on IMDB how it’s got the highest rating for any series – it’s even higher than Breaking Bad! It is actually pretty good – at first I thought it seemed just another clichéd thing, cadets training to fight giant zombies scenario, but after about five episodes you get into the politics and it starts to get pretty engaging. I mean, I’m not a massive Anime fan but that was a discovery and it’s an incredible world to discover.
Like many people I watched The Queen's Gambit and I enjoyed that. I play chess – I used to play it when I was younger, and of course I thought “Oh God, I want to start playing chess now!” I even started watching YouTube videos of famous chess matches and really enjoying them. I don’t know why, but because chess is deemed as such an intellectual pursuit when you’re playing you feel clever and cultured, which is a nice bonus! I’ll see if that lasts though.
The Queens Gambit – Netflix
Attack on Titan
Out now
Six Hesit Heist
The new single from Gabriel Prokofiev