On September 20, on the eve of the five-year anniversary since Zackie Oh’s murder, LALA will lower its colourful neon lights for a spiritual candlelight evening, where we will listen to Dutch composer Simeon Ten Holt’s minimalist, meditative composition Canto Ostinato performed live by Alexandros Drosos, pianist, composer and researcher of Ten Holt’s work.

Canto Ostinato (1976-1979) is considered to be among the most representative works of European minimalism. Composed for one or more keyboard instruments, it is made up of 106 repeating motifs, 106 small cells, whose repetitions are formed by the expressive and articulatory freedom given to the performers. The structure of this work, along with its references to the harmonic language of European romanticism – a movement that has largely established, over many musical genres, our perception of the relationship between music and emotions – create a familiar, but hard-to-define nostalgic melancholy. As if the music is constantly reminding us of something, which we are not able to identify.

Τhe effect that time has on us is not dissimilar; and the memory of the people who have departed from our lives. Five years have passed since Zak’s murder, the lives of many of us have changed and we wonder: is he still present? Is she still present? If so, in which way? Does he still define our lives? Or has she given her place to an abstract emotional condition, which as time goes by, we find progressively harder to talk about?

The concert is dedicated to this tragic anniversary and the performance of Canto Ostinato aims to express the various shapes of the individual emotional realities that Zackie and her absence have come to mean. Not as a symbol or a flag, but as trauma, as a sweet memory, as a soothing voice that against the course of time, she will always be there.