Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practice began in the vast resonance of the Fort Worden cistern, whose forty-five-second reverberation revealed to her that space itself can become an extension of the instrument — a co-performer capable of refracting, absorbing, and reclaiming sound under its own conditions. That site-specific encounter made audible how acoustically unusual spaces open portals into deeper perceptual strata. It raised a fundamental question: what is it in sound that can shift our sense of depth within a given space?
Architectural measurements can describe acoustic properties, mapping resonant patterns that shape how sound moves and propagates. Yet mathematics alone cannot account for the perceptual distortions — how a small chamber can sound cathedral-like, or how reverberation can dilate our sense of scale. Nor can it explain the elusive somatic effects these spaces provoke: spontaneous sensorial recall, subtle shifts in bodily orientation, sensations of elevation or expanded awareness. The missing link, one Oliveros intuited, lies in the energetic dimension of listening to “spaces”, and in the relational field between sound, space, and memory in permanent energetic entanglement with body–mind.
Sound behaves as a distributor of energy through space. It carries the imprint of intention but also funnels attention — reorganising the energetic conditions it encounters, affecting bodies, objects, atmospheres. Each body, with its own energetic dynamics, disrupts and reshapes the space it inhabits. Within the media of air, liquid, gas, and solid matter, this constant turbulence unfolds under the laws of non-negotiable physics: gravitational pull, pressure gradients, and electromagnetic exchange. In this interplay, sound captures and organises space into patterns, allowing us — beings whose perception depends on pattern recognition — to detect even the subtlest shifts in our surroundings. What we perceive sonically, as with vision, is an interpretation constructed by the brain from basic sensory responses. When interpretation shifts into somatic and deeper sensorial pathways, we regain the ability to sense delicate energetic modulations, expanding our reality towards the various conditions embedded in the spaces we inhabit — through heightened awareness, deeper cognitive processing, and stronger emotional and physiological reactions to stimuli.
I spent several days in Lisbon in April 2024. The recordings I made emerged from free roaming and intuitive movement through the city, the botanical garden, the banks of the Rio Tejo, both in the urban core and near its Atlantic estuary. I visited an independent gallery and several museums. I attended a political performance and a Free Palestine demonstration. I was in permanent motion, and these recordings are the outcome of that encounter between movement and place.
Lisbon’s mnemopolitics is inseparable from its layered history — a city shaped by maritime expansion, colonial complexity, dictatorship, revolution, and the long, unfinished labour of collective remembering. Its soundscape carries these strata not as static archives but as vibrating residues: from the echo of the Carnation Revolution to the quiet resilience of neighbourhoods resisting erasure under the pressures of tourism and gentrification. In Lisbon, memory is not a monument but an acoustic phenomenon — dispersed, refracted, and continually renegotiated. The city listens to itself through its own reverberations, and in doing so, it insists that history remains audible, contested, and alive.
The album Lisboa traces this mnemosonic terrain through a sequence of sonic waypoints, moving from micro ecologies to collective action. It listens to the fragile habitats threaded through the city’s interstices, then shifts into the pulse of human presence and the everyday choreography of bodies shaping and being shaped by place. The trajectory involves sounds of cultural spaces where memory is curated and sedimented, before extending outward into the delicate and harsh soundscapes of infrastructures: of transit and labour, thresholds of movement, exchange, and historical entanglement. The distant humming of the bridge becomes an architectural hinge between all these worlds, a structure of passage and tension. The album’s closing gathers all of it into a political zenith, where bodies, histories, and environments converge in collective action, insisting on freedom and justice for the oppressed.
Lisbon’s soundscape, unlike many European capitals whose identities have been eroded by gentrification, still resonates with the depth of mnemopolitics. From quietness to full urban tumult, in which human-made noise is in constant dialogue with hidden micro ecologies — ocean, river, forest, birds conversing with machines, transport systems, bridges, barges, electrical grids. Human voices, noise pollution, nature, and objects sounding as if some mysterious synchronisations were unfolding beneath the surface. A soundscape of unusual depth.
I was compelled to notice that the subtle sonic morphologies of Lisbon’s cityscape extend not only through space but through time, releasing forgotten memories from its holofractal belly, ensuring that every grain of painfully earned freedom remains accounted for. It is a soundscape that must be preserved at all costs.
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For Mark
Releases January 27, 2026
All sounds recorded, edited, and composed by Manja Ristić
Cover image, text, and video by Manja Ristić
Mastering Goran Simonoski — Studio La Plant, Belgrade
Track 6 contains an excerpt from the public performance by António Caramelo —
AIR PROTEST (2024)
Demonstration/performance to the sound of megaphones.
Route: From the door of the Zaratan Gallery to the steps of the Assembly of the Republic. AIR PROTEST is an imaginary protest that is formalized as a response to the pro-life demonstration scheduled for April 6th (2024), taking place between Zaratan Gallery and the Assembly of the Republic. It is a non-action that occurs in the cultural and political domain, aiming to exacerbate the notion of a culturally neutral people who have never been involved in a strong or convincing struggle related to anything. AIR PROTEST does not defend an ideology; it has no slogans or props, just the sound of past demonstrations and protests, in which nothing remains undone. AIR PROTEST is a project by António Caramelo, and is part of the «Lápis Azul» exhibition, with joint support from República Portuguesa – Cultura / Direção-Geral das Artes and Comissão Comemorativa 50 anos 25 de Abril.
Special thanks to Joao Castro
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED