Delusional Records returns with the debut musical brainchild from Brooklyn-based filmmaker and experimental music producer Michelle Roginsky. Under her alias mother, her EP A Simple Procedure soundtracks an unreleased body horror film, cinematically centered on erratic unease.
Roginsky grafts bloodpumping club forward pulsations with tranquilizing synthesis over the course of A Simple Procedure, acknowledging the often melancholic feminine experience of clinical treatment.
Peace Portal is pleased to premiere “There Are Two Rooms”, an amnesiac meditation closing the EP like waking anaesthetic with an awareness of alteration. Roginsky has offered to brief us herself on the results of the release and its inception.
Can you share more about the concept for the film and this soundtrack? I’m curious if there are any personal experiences you drew from, specifically or generally?
For me, film is a narrative form of storytelling whereas music is a subconscious one that allows me to excavate ideas in a more abstract but also more elemental way. I say for now that this film is unmade, but perhaps in some ways I’m trying to welcome it into the world.
My family immigrated from the former Soviet Union in the 90’s and I have always imagined that I have a doppelganger, whose family never left, back in eastern europe living in parallel to me. That sense of existing between two worlds was deepened by a mysterious illness I got in elementary school [hair falling out, pulled out of school, the whole damn thing] which set me further apart from my surroundings at a formative time. I was already an outsider in my language and culture, and suddenly even my body was strange and alienating.
In the broader story of this EP, "There Are Two Rooms" is a somewhat ominous but, I hope, sublime resolution. If I ever get to make the film, I hope it will live up to my own hype.
How did you build the concept of the imagined film into structured pieces of music?
In my classical music upbringing, my piano teacher [Vera Burkhadarian, my angel!] used to say that playing piano is a conversation between your two hands.
In this particular track that idea lends itself quite nicely to this notion of containing a conversation between my doppelganger and I while under the spell of a deep anaesthesia.
There Are Two Rooms started as a 40 minute improvisation on my keyboard that I cut up into pieces and ascribed various instruments to on midi. So this concept of two strangers who are linked intrinsically and searching for each other felt embedded in it. Structurally this track happens in three acts: a melodic question, then the tension of chords glitches and drones, then something like a resolution in the answer of vocal harmonies and then ultimately a melodic phrase that echoes the opening.
If you were to imagine the setting that “There Are Two Rooms” soundtracks, what would we see? Where would we be?
When my mom was in college she did expeditions to the Arctic circle - multiple weeks spent navigating and trekking through this harsh and beautiful environment - the pictures from those trips have always captivated me deeply.
In my micro-video for this track I pulled together some pictures I have from visiting northern Iceland in winter as a stand-in for this arctic open landscape which intuitively feels like the setting for this meeting. Two twins searching for each other in the vastness.
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