ECARTELE is an imaginary soundtrack for a feature film dating from the 1970s about the meeting between two of the major thinkers of the 20th century – the Nobel Prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychoanalyst and creator of the theory of archetypes, Carl Gustav Jung. The album relates in musical terms the story of the unusual friendship between the two scientists and explores the mysterious grey area between physics and the psychology of the unconscious. The title of the album (from the French ‘écarteler’) refers both to the medieval tradition of quartering execution victims and to the Jungian concept of ‘quaternio’ – the intersection of two pairs of concepts that are polar opposites. Thus, in the exchange between Jung and Pauli, two other people play an important role: one is the young English doctor Erna Rosenbaum, who belonged to C.G. Jung’s circle in the late 1920s, and the other is the mathematician, astronomer and theologian Johannes Kepler, whose work was a powerful source of inspiration for Pauli. The album tracks are short, episodic, minimalistic and narrative – a musical screenplay and soundtrack for a film that was never made... In order to achieve a tonal range that is both modern and cinematographic, the composer Damian Marhulets uses electronic sounds as well as working with the four string players of the famous Szymanowski Quartet and Marina Baranova on prepared piano
