The Closer I Get To Myself

Elo-Mall Toomet is a poet/artist from Tartu, Estonia. She writes in both Estonian and English. We only met on the internet, but there we had stimulating exchanges of ideas. A while ago we worked together on a small project, with Elo-Mall providing one of her poems as a sound file, with me adding some of my pictures and the music. On her own blog Elo-Mall describes our contacts like this: 
"Wolfgang Roosch is a good internet friend. He happened to stumble upon this exhibition in a café in Tartu where he was visiting - an exhibition of  visuals that used quotes from my first English poetry book. Being deeply into poetry and visuals himself, Wolfgang liked it and contacted us. And has been a source of good advice and conversation and ideas ever since. This is the first little collaboration between us, hopefully not the last. Also, hopefully Arvo Pärt does not mind the use of his music here too much. 

I like how it all comes together and I like the gentle visuals of the quite harsh winter - I guess it is the same kind of work I try to do with words. To speak gently of the deep and dark."

Check out Elo-Mall 's blog , it's full of good reflections, poems and artistic work. And she digs up superb music clips from YouTube as well!

Actually, there's been one little project before "Sometimes...". It had Elo-Mall's poem "Yes" as its base. For a good reason I could not complete it. A first tentative soundtrack is as far as I got...

I worked with the sound first, based on Elo-Mall's sound recording, and a track by " Röyksopp ", a Norwegian electronic group. As imagery I had mostly press photographs in mind which I wanted to drift in and out in in bits and pieces, something like a constantly shifting collage.

I realized from the beginning that the telephone sound effects were a bit retro since they aren't heard so often anymore. But I liked the idea anyway. Around the same time a friend of Ello-Mall's - Chris Carlone, a New York filmmaker - had very similar sound ideas for a short film he and MargeNelk produced. It featured one of Elo Mall's poems as well, this time with her in the leading role! The music by Frieder Zimmermann of Dresden, Germany, also helps to make the film "To Beauty" a real marvel! It came out before I was done. After that I figured that a second production leaning heavily on the "telephone" idea wouldn't be so cool. But for myself the work with this soundtrack was an experience in itself.