"ghosts, coming out of the hell of the past to sublimate it. A therapeutic work."
Salima Bouaraour, PAN M 360
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One year after the premiere of the work "ghosts," I am delighted to share a remixed version, which served as the context for my performance at Akousma — International Festival of Immersive Digital Music in Montreal, in October 2024.
The work is enriched with recordings that captivated my imagination over the past year and will mutate through different compositional settings in some of my forthcoming releases.
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ghosts (2024) 20’
How do we approach a landscape of severe devastation and dense history of warfare?
In the performance "ghosts," I use obsolete instruments: a modular synthesizer EMS Synthi 100, a discarded wheelchair wheel salvaged from the Adriatic Sea, and a piano fallen into disuse that belonged to the Austrian conceptualist, filmmaker, improviser, photographer, environmentalist, and writer Karl Katzinger, aka John Tylo (October 1953 – April 2021).
Alongside these elements of the past and their rediscovered voices, I incorporate processed hydrophone and field recordings, the treatment of found objects, electromagnetic fields, crystals, limestone pebbles, Atlantic shells, Aleppo pine cones, different chemical compounds, and extended techniques improvisation on a 200-year-old violin. I appropriate these elements through the discourse of critical tourism, environmental issues, and a culture of memory. Specifically, I focus on listening to the inherent memories of places with a dense historical imprint of ecological devastation and warfare—in the South Adriatic, on the Atlantic coast, and in the Czech-Austrian borderlands, formerly part of the Iron Curtain belt.
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Released February 17, 2025
All sounds performed, recorded, composed & edited by Manja Ristić
except for Adriatic dolphins *hydrophone recording by Robertina Šebjanič
The cover image of the micro and macro plastic of the Atlantic Ocean was taken in Nazaré Portugal, in April 2024.
Hydrophone used for an underwater recording made by Jez riley French
Mastering by Goran Simonoski / La Plant Studio