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MANJA RISTIĆ

Ma

RELEASE DATE: APRIL 19, 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, or 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 which 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, 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, vellums 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 the gravity and the air; Ma between air and objects, tubes and thermal bodies, between the Moon and its reflexion; 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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Catalog:
LINE_151
Format:
digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
April 2024
Tracklist:

1. the ant & the cricket (19:15)
2. full moon trembles on the surface of the creek (20:44)

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

Sounds, composition, images, text by Manja Ristić
Mastering La Plant Studio

Manja Ristić, born in Belgrade in 1979, is a violinist, sound artist, published poet, curator, and researcher. She graduated from the Belgrade Academy of Music (2001), then awarded at the Royal College of Music, London, with PGDip Solo/Ensemble Recitalist (2004). As a classical solo and chamber musician, as well as a composer and an improv musician She has performed all across Europe and in the US, involving collaborations with established conductors, performers, multimedia artists, poets, and theatre/film directors.

Ristić’s sound-related research besides contemporary performance in the field of instrumental electro–acoustics, is focused on interdisciplinary approaches to sound and field recording as well as experimental radio arts.

Ristić has created commissions for Kunstradio – Radiokunst, Radio Cona, Semi-Silent, Radiophrenia, Radio Art Zone, Radia.FM, Framework Radio, and all national broadcasting agencies across SE Europe. She co-curated sonoAdriatic Tales at Ars Electronica 2020 and in the last 20 years curated and developed a distinctive number of cultural events, international projects, cultural conferences, and educational platforms in the fields of inter-media, experimental sound-related arts, scene, and multimedia arts.

The winner of several distinctive awards for solo and chamber classical music, laureate of the Académie Charles Cros Sélection Musiques Expérimentales 2024, holds an honorable mention from the Phonurgia Nova Awards 2022, and a Golden Award for the extended media from the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia. She is a founding member of CENSE – Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies.

In the last decade, Ristić has published sound art independently as well as for labels and publishing bodies: LINE, Kamizdat, DASA tapes, Unfathomless, mappa, Verdure Engraved, Cona Zavod, Naviar Records, Flag Day Recordings, Framework Seasonal, Inexhaustible Editions, Elan Vital Recordings, SIRR-ECORDS, Sonospace, Objects & Sounds, and more.

Works and lives on the island of Korčula, Croatia.

manjaristic.blogspot.com

REVIEWS OF
Ma

  • Ma is a very different sort of recording, with a diverse set of sound sources: some natural (an anthill, a silent lake, a river), some mechanical (ventilation in the men’s toilet of the Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, recorded by Mark Vernon), the electro-magnetic field of a broken socket, “Dad’s boiler”) and some overtly musical (bowing cymbal, violin).  In a way, this release is also collaborative, as Abby Lee Tee makes a contribution and breath and tape recorder hum are extracted from Toru Takemitsu.

    Ma is a Japanese concept that refers to the void between things, which may refer to the distance between objects, the space between notes, or the suspension of time.  On this album, Ristić investigates the relationships between sounds and environments, expanding on the idea of the mystical.  The sense of solace is transferred from the monks back into nature, which ebbs and flows with its own harmonies and densities.  The space between the chirps of a cricket and the tweets of a bird hold a different significance for the creatures themselves; the full moon affects the tides, the human body and the resonance of instruments.  The gap between the known and the unknown ofers comfort to the seeker. one can never know it all, which means one can always learn and grow.  

    Ma may be the most intensely calming of Ristić’s releases, a journey from the home to the river, from the earth to the moon, compressed until all distances seem to disappear.  The artist calls the effect a “Ma of the soul.”  Over the course of these two albums, she has experienced a form of transcendence, and translated it into sound.
    —acloserlisten.com

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    Like Bernhard Günter or the late Steve Roden, Serbian sound artist Manja Ristić makes music for people with keen ears. Even the most perceptive listener will need to turn the volume dial considerably past its usual resting place in order to appreciate the depth of the sound world she conjures. But once you do, what a world it is: an endless field of the gentlest fizz and drone, of crickets and birdsong but also industrial hum, a million frequencies from across the cosmos weaving into a single rippling membrane. (As I listen, a considerable tramuntana wind is whipping against the windows, adding its own whine to the chorus, which feels appropriate; Ristić’s field-recorded collage feels open to the possibility of aleatory collaborations.) The sources of her music, as detailed in the album notes, are staggering: a giant anthill in an abandoned forest quarry; hydrophone recordings of rivers and lakes; a bowed glass vase; a broiler; the electromagnetic field buzzing around a broken socket; the ventilation system in the men’s restroom in Ljubljana’s Museum of Contemporary Art. These, then, are not scientific studies; they’re impressionistic glimpses of the world around the artist, fused into a softly shimmering four-dimensional soundscape—a poetics of pure vibration.
    — Philip Sherburne, futurismrestated.substack.com