We Visit The Hadal Zone with Composer Zibuokle Martinaityte

Last month, visitors of the 46th annual Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival were transported into the hadal zone with composer Zibuokle Martinaitye, and we were lucky enough to be on the journey with them.


By Georgia wells

The UK premiere of the Hadal Zone by Žibuokle Martinaitytė, at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

It was during the pandemic when Lithuanian-born, New York-based composer Žibuokle Martinaitytė, composed an hour-long piece entitled The Hadal Zone. Her inspiration for the work was taken from Rebecca Solnit’s essay ‘The Blue of Distance’ which evokes feelings of faraway places and hard-to-understand emotions. Žibuokle found similar themes in the hadal zone with these distant ecosystems providing a source of intrigue and probing an exploration of stranger, deeper emotions that we may not yet fully understand.

This was, however, not the first time we had heard of Žibuokle’s work. Earlier this year, we stumbled upon the composition and featured it as our Soundtrack of the Month in Episode 30 of The Deep-Sea Podcast. As a fan of the piece, I was delighted when asked to join Žibuokle and writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson for a Q&A session based on the work, before attending the UK premiere of the Hadal Zone alongside hundreds of others. 

During the Q&A, myself and Žibuokle talked about the hadal environment and how her piece follows the five depth zones of the sea. I was surprised to learn that Žibuokle had not consulted a scientist during the composition of the piece, as key elements of the deep’s ecosystems were translated clearly through the music, like the dynamic diel vertical migration found in our mesopelagic zones.

Notably, the piece surprisingly starts in a very low pitch. As mentioned by Tim during the Q&A session, when you begin already in such a low place, you are left wondering just how deep we can possibly continue to go—another brilliant example of how Žibuokle captured the almost impossible expanse of the deep sea itself. Žibuokle speaks of not just the physical journey to the deep, but the mental states in which you might experience as you journey down through the deepest cracks in our seabed. She spoke of the hallucinatory possibilities whilst witnessing something as incomprehensible as the abyss. 

As you move deeper towards the hadal trenches, the individual instruments become almost indistinguishable, except for some unexpected throat singing. Žibuokle muses that it could represent the marine life down there, their voices ringing through the gloom. Or, it could also represent the souls of the humans lost at sea, those who call the abyssal plains their final home.

What’s clear, is that Žibuokle has brought the inaccessible depths right onto our laps and into the consciousness of many people who will hopefully consider the deep sea as a place of wonder and inspiration. She offers this emotional connection to these distant places which will ultimately lead more people to care about its fate.

You can now listen to the Hadal Zone yourself via all the major streaming platforms.