Petra Hermanova - Lapilli

A Closer Listen

Grief is a universal experience that no one can truly be prepared for, and one that each of us inhabits differently, in ways we are unable to control or predict. Written for Paula Ďurinová’s film Lapilli, Petra Hermanova‘s soundtrack follows an exploration of death through stones, caves and volcanic landscapes, asking how the physical world absorbs and preserves traces of loss. The title refers to the fragments of rock ejected during a volcanic eruption—small stones suspended between destruction and renewal—and Hermanová’s music inhabits that same uncertain territory, poised between fragility and endurance.

The opening suite, “Five Stages”, moves at a measured pace, every gesture carrying its full weight without ever tipping into emotional excess. Rather than illustrating the five stages of grief to which the title presumably alludes, the music creates a contemplative space in which listeners are left to negotiate that process for themselves, offering emotional cues without ever prescribing a response. Pieces such as “Outcome (Massives)” and “Soft Void” shift the focus towards resonance, silence and the physical behaviour of sound itself. Broken autoharps, their cracked strings given one final voice, merge with the film’s environmental soundscape until it becomes difficult to distinguish music from water droplets, stone or air. Each sound seems pared back to its essence, as though carved from rock rather than composed. By degrees the textures thicken and subtle trajectories begin to emerge, most clearly in “The Cave”, before “Dusk, Breath” brings the work to a close, the organ lending the final moments a quiet, almost liturgical sense of resolution.

If In Death’s Eyes confronted bereavement as an intimate human wound, Lapilli broadens that perspective, suggesting that grief belongs as much to landscapes and geological time as it does to ourselves. Rather than offering consolation, Hermanová creates a place where mourning is simply allowed to continue, carried by stone, air and the slow passage of time.

In the following interview conducted via email Petra Hermanova elaborates on her production process.

Both In Death’s Eyes, your previous album and Lapilli are deeply concerned with death, grief, and transformation, but they seem to approach those themes from different angles. In In Death’s Eyes, death often appears as an intimate, almost bodily presence, whereas Lapilli explores loss through rocks, caves, minerals, and geological time. Did working on Paula Ďurinová’s film change the way you think about death? Did it shift your focus from personal grief toward a broader relationship between mortality, landscape, and material transformation?

The way I think about death was most significantly changed by experiencing the death of a loved one. Anything that came afterwards was more damage control. Paula and I went through a grieving process around the same time, and we also worked on our debuts in parallel. When I was in the Merseburg Cathedral recording organ for my album, Paula was descending deep inside of cave systems to film for her documentary, and we kept texting each other photographs of these incredible spaces. They were profound experiences and I remember quite clearly that life made sense again in those moments, the pain was transmuted.

I tried to think about working on my album as a way of contributing to the canon of music dealing with human mortality, but it still ended up being a very personal work. I came to a different understanding with Lapilli. Having been invited to write music for someone else’s reckoning with death, I got to observe a separate grieving process. Suddenly there were different associations, metaphors and coping mechanisms in place, and this was a much stronger departure from the personal to the universal.

The autoharp plays a central role in both works, yet its function feels different. On In Death’s Eyes, it often acts as the voice of the individual sufferer, standing in tension with the transcendence of the pipe organ. On Lapilli, the autoharp seems to become part of the landscape itself, with its detuned and deteriorating strings echoing caves, stone, and erosion. How did your relationship with the instrument evolve between these two projects, and what drew you to its increasingly fragile and material qualities?

Autoharp is a matter close to my heart, maybe more of an obsession. I always feel a bit sad that I can only ever bring two with me while I’m performing because they are all so different. Writing music for film is more free in this aspect, and so my first thought was to use the broken autoharps in my collection, the ones that I don’t dare to restring and tune properly, because they’re too fragile, too cracked. There is an analogy somewhere in there about the possibilities of someone who feels fragile and broken but still would like to be useful.

I thought a lot about instruments that are no longer played and just lay somewhere, completely mute. Even one of my main instruments hung on a wall somewhere in Spandau for decades, before I got it. So it was about seeing what kind of sounds can be still coaxed out of these “dead” autoharps, and this couldn’t be further away from how I usually write music. There is a peculiar sports event called the Autoharp Toss in which participants of a musical gathering compete in tossing an autoharp beyond repair as far as they can. Instead of that, I took these autoharps and recorded their swan songs.

Lapilli is the soundtrack to “a soft film about hard matter” and the liner notes ask how rocks, pebbles, and mountains die. The music often feels suspended between human memory and geological time, as if grief is being measured against processes far older than ourselves. When composing the music, were you trying to sonify the landscape itself, or were the sounds primarily a way of reflecting the emotional journey of the film’s narrator through loss?

Lapilli is now a music release, but in the film it exists alongside the sound design Paula worked on with the composer and musician Agnese Menguzzato. In places they are so intertwined, that it can be difficult to distinguish what is music and what is sound design—in the caves, the pluck of an autoharp string may as well be the sound of a water drop. We talked at great lengths about all these scenes and what they represent.

I am a very visual person, so while it sometimes felt a little bit like looking for the sound of the landscape, or of all these various geological processes the landscapes undergo, most often we were working in more abstract terms, superimposing sonic parallels onto fragments of text or mental states that informed these scenes. As the film moves through its stages, the instrumentation develops a narrative also, and the broken autoharps are at first accompanied, and then slowly replaced with the steady breath of an organ.

In In Death’s Eyes, lyrics played a crucial role in articulating grief, uncertainty, and the tension between spiritual and earthly forms of consolation. Lapilli, by contrast, communicates almost entirely through instrumental sound, texture, and space. Did working on a film allow you to express things that language couldn’t? How different was it to construct meaning through timbre, resonance, and silence rather than through words and song?

By the time I started composing for Lapilli, I had been working with the theme of death for almost two years. I saw it as an opportunity to extend and inhabit the same space with similar means, but with a very different set of constraints and reasons for them. In my practice, the usual starting point is silence. I then fill the silence with as little as I can, or as much as I want to.

This time, the starting point was an already emotionally saturated image with an equally charged narration, so I had to construct different poetic principles for this work. How much can I add without overloading this moment? How sparse can I go—and will it still be music then? Previously I hadn’t considered making purely instrumental music, so this was pivotal, it opened a new channel for me. (Gianmarco Del Re)