“The air is darkening – Through the night with lullabies”

a sound-composition/lecture performance by Merzouga

Somewhere on earth night is falling at all times. At each and every moment someone is singing a lullaby somewhere. These lullabies are as varied as the cultures that they come from are different. And by no means do they always correspond to our ideas of what a lullaby sounds like. While in some regions of the world children are sung to sleep with gentle melodies, there are lullabies in other regions that can compete with the rainforest’s noise at nightfall, and merge perfectly with the hyper-complex jungle-soundscape. The impressive musical diversity of lullabies and their variety of nuances and timbres are represented in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archive’s collections.

The sound art-duo Merzouga (Eva Pöpplein şi Janko Hanushevsky) was invited to create a composition for the 250-channel immersive audio-space at Humboldt Forum Berlin that premiered in 2025. In their lecture performance opening the 14^th edition of Grand Prix Nova International Radio Drama Festival they present this work, talk about their experiences in using artistic and dramaturgical aspects of their use of the immersive space, and play a live-performance of their electro-acoustic night-composition they created to envelope the ethnological field-recordings of the lullabies.

Lullabies connect us with generations before us. In the ephemeral transition between day and night, in experiencing the warmth and security of an embrace, the most solid foundations of our lives are built: the bond with those closest to us, the cultural identity that roots in the melodies we sing and in the stories we tell our children; in the myths and legends and in the promise of being protected. Because when the night ends, a new day will come. And when that day is dawning, night will be falling again somewhere else in the world.

Many thanks to the Ethnologisches Museum / Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in collaboration with the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss for granting us access to its impressive archive.

https://merzougamusic.com

Image: NASA, Earth at Night. https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/NightLights & Merzouga photo by Andreas Vandenhoff