Winner
Winner
On the morning of February 24, 2022, air-raid sirens wailed in the streets of Kyiv, heralding a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. When the composer Adrian Mocanu heard the noise, he had a curious reaction. “I thought the sirens sounded like giant wolves howling,” he told me, in an e-mail. The aural illusion haunted him, and last year he created a piece called “Time of the Wolves,” which blends recordings of sirens and of wolves into a smoldering, eerily expectant electronic soundscape. The title alludes to Michael Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup,” in which a family wanders a contaminated landscape, and also to the Old Norse epic “Völuspá,” which contains the line “Wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls.”