Vstal is a collection of seven songs created in a dialogue between the experimentalist and composer Manja Ristić and the meticulous observer and field recorder Tomáš Šenkyřík. The album takes listeners on a journey across the European continent, from Ristić’s home on the Adriatic coast to the Czech-Austrian borderlands and the Moravian floodplain forests, which have long inspired Tomáš Šenkyřík’s sonic explorations. This broad scope, sensitively linking the soundscapes of both artists’ homelands, is an expansive vision of the possibilities of field recording and its relationship to place and its memory.
Here, hydrophonic recordings of sea urchins are juxtaposed with the sounds of the everyday, materialised in the electromagnetic hum of Manja Ristić’s kitchen appliances, while surgically precise recordings of the soundscapes of old-growth forests merge with the otherworldly sounds of NASA satellite communications. Together they dialogue with occasional vocals, violin improvisation, and sounds from Belegrad’s legendary EMS Synthi 100.
The intimate here informs the hyper-local, and then the cosmic, which travels back to communicate the political as well as the aesthetic through a subtle and poetic language, considering the interconnectedness of all sound worlds. The tender, almost sobbing poetics of the vocals in Pátek Sobota recalls an old folk song that sings of water in the land of Rusava, the content of which, due to climate change, no longer corresponds to the current state of the landscape. Similarly, the composition Čudna šuma, accompanied by the eponymous poem, speaks of a human swallowed by the ground in an unknown, alien forest, as a memorial to all the bodies lost on the Balkan migration route.
The presence of these meanings here is not a rigid axis, however, but only one of many ways to read the relationships between the songs and their sounds. This allows the listener to wander, to get lost, and to find their own way back, not only through different geographies but also through intimate and emotional terrains.
The Vstal aesthetic presents music composition, field recording, and experimentation as a critical practice capable of reflecting on complex socio-ecological issues. It is precisely by expanding the notion of ‘field’ that Ristić and Šenkyřík have created a body of work that presents sonic practice as a way of knowing and being in the world. As Ristić says, this album is a record of a shared experience and a relationship between two people who are deeply driven by a love of nature, its sounds, and humanity that transcends geographical and cultural distances. In this relationship, they share stories of their land and its past, creating imaginary soundscapes that speak to the listener in familiar tongues.
(Ján Solčáni)
Limited Edition Cassette + Digital Album
Releases October 24, 2024
Recorded and mixed by Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík
Design by Ján Solčáni
Words by Manja Ristić and Ján Solčáni
Mastered by Filip Johánek
Released by Skupina as SKPN010 in 2024
Recorded and mixed by Manja Ristić and Tomáš Šenkyřík
Design by Ján Solčáni
Words by Manja Ristić and Ján Solčáni
Mastered by Filip Johánek
Released by Skupina as SKPN010 in 2024