The new release coming out on Richard Chartier's label LINE, on April 19th, 2024.
Serbian sound artist, poet, curator, and researcher, Manja Ristić returns for her second release for LINE after 2023's 'Awakenings' (LINE_138). Her new album 'Ma' recalls the incredibly subtle, detailed works of Steve Roden, Francisco López, and Bernhard Günter fused with the adept field recordings of Jana Winderen and the delicate resonances of Toshiya Tsunoda. Two entrancing long-form works incorporating field recordings, acoustic instruments, and unexpected found sounds.
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Ma — depth of the space, of the environment, of relations and mystical interrelatedness. The hidden or obvious void that defines the form and liberates from it at the same time. Ma and the sound? The weight of emptiness and quietness is revealed by unexpected density—the space chants, the chants spread in waves, pulsations, a pellucid spectrum of timbre.
“I hear the water dreaming” echoes in my mind.
Patterns of the forest chorus build pandiatonic clouds, on the brim of sonic hallucinations, we hear the space breathing, vellum of light expanding, beyond our hearing range.
Sounds of Ma deep in the ground, on the surface, underwater, on the surface of the water, in the air, between gravity and the air; Ma between air and objects, tubes and thermal bodies, between the Moon and its reflection; bottom of the silent lake and the stratosphere far beyond our world next to the frozen planet with the hidden ocean.
Ma of the soul caught on the tape.
Nothing is necessary.
Nothing holds everything together.
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List of field recordings and samples:
• Giant anthill in the abandoned forest quarry
• Cricket chorus next to Pohořský rybník lake
• Hydrophone recording of the “silent lake” Stierhüblteich
• Hydrophone recording of the river Schwarze Aist and its various tributaries
• Bowing cymbal under the full moon next to the Schwarze Aist (recorded by Abby Lee Tee)
• Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana—ventilation in the man’s toilet (recorded by Mark Vernon)
• Cassini passing between Saturn and Enceladus Moon (NASA sounds)
• Dad’s boiler
• Breath and broken tape recorder hum extracted from Toru Takemitsu’s tape “Ki Sora Tori” (1956)
• Bowing glass vase
• Two wine glasses gently trembling in front of the fan
• Electro-magnetic field around the broken socket
• Violin
Releases April 19, 2024
Sounds, composition, images, and text by Manja Ristić
Mastering La Plant Studio