MANJA RISTIĆ

Into Your Eyes

OUT NOVEMBER 7, 2025 ON ALL DIGITAL LISTENING PLATFORMS

Serbian sound artist, poet, curator, and researcher, Manja Ristić returns for her third album for LINE. Ristić’s new album Into Your Eyes is a triptych of her unique micro focus works recalling the subtle, detailed worlds of Steve Roden or France Jobin fused with the adept field recordings of Jana Winderen, Francisco López, and the delicate resonances of Toshiya Tsunoda.

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Every wave, every grain of sand, every rock, every millimeter of current, every hum, every drop of rain, every gust of wind, every grain of salt, every molecule of air, every electric pulse, every Pascal of pressure, every creature in lake, sea, or river, every insect, bird, mammal, arthropod, crustacean, every leaf, branch, root, every inch of soil, every fungal culture, every crystal, every forest, moss, cloud, or heavenly object, every atom of every square millimeter—is sentient.

This triptych of works listens into that sentience. It moves through a world saturated with voices—an intricate weave of physics, chemistry, biology—where nothing is silenced, nothing excluded. Every ripple vibrates with sound, dissolving boundaries and erasing hierarchies. Here, music is not an art form imposed upon the world, but the condition of its being.

Innocence Overturned is a meditation on unfinished creation—a pact made in the gaze of death to let the pen rest, to leave the book unwritten. It carries the weight of youthful visions realized and relinquished, of characters conjured and then set free.

A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva is a lament and a witness. In a poisoned ocean, the bird’s cry into the hollow throat of a chimney becomes an act of faith: “Perhaps someone listens.” It is a work of elemental conversations— tide to rock, river to cloud, cloud to sun—and of the human ear straining to hear them.

Prophecy of the World Without Anguish imagines a future where such conversations are uninterrupted, where the tide’s love song in Scotland, the whisper of the Adriatic seabed in rain, the hollow resonance of a barrel at the Tagus estuary, and the singularity of each lightning strike are all part of a continuous, unbroken chorus.

Threaded through these works are moments of encounter: a Guardian Angel sculpted by Adrian Arleo on the banks of Rattlesnake Creek; the deep sediments of seashells underfoot; the knowledge that love can grieve into eternity; the recognition that every single body is a battlefield.

Collectively, they form a cartography of listening—a poetics of attention that treats the world not as backdrop, but as a living score.

READ Manja Ristić’s article ‘Mnemosonic Topographies – Sensory Epistemology Between Sound, Space, and Memory’ via The Attic Magazine, Oct 4, 2025

READ ‘Manja Ristić about Animal Sounds and Interspecies Communication’ interview on Fifteen Questions, Nov 2025

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previous Manja Ristić works available / published on LINE:
Ma   (LINE_151) 2024
Awakenings (LINE_138) 2023

Bandcamp Apple Music TIDAL Reviews

Catalog:: LINE_169

Format:: digital

Edition:: open edition

Release:: November 2025

Tracklist:

1. Innocence Overturned (14:10)
2. A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva (18:01)
3. Prophecy of the World Without Anguish (22:11)

All sounds recorded, edited, and composed by Manja Ristić
Except for the field recordings of Lake Geneva by Mark Vernon

Hydrophones built by Jez riley French

Mastering by Goran Simonoski, Studio La Plant

Cover image by David Fulford, Black Hill Creative
Text by Manja Ristić

Manja Ristić, born in Belgrade in 1979, is a violinist, sound artist, published poet, curator, and researcher whose work bridges classical training with radical sonic exploration. A graduate of the Belgrade Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music in London, she has performed widely across Europe and North America, collaborating with conductors, multimedia artists, poets, and theatre and film directors. Over the past decade, her focus has shifted toward interdisciplinary sound research, field recording, and experimental radio arts, with commissions from ORF musikprotokoll, INA GRM, Radiophrenia, Radio Art Zone, Kunstradio—Radiokunst, Radio Belgrade, Radio Cona, Semi-Silent, and others. Her work is published internationally on labels including LINE, Rekem, Erstwhile, Unfathomless, tsss tapes, WabiSabi Tapes, DASA tapes, Inexhaustible Editions, Skupina, Flag Day, and Naviar Records. She is also a founding member of CENSE—Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies.

Ristić’s practice unfolds at the intersection of artistic research, ecological awareness, and embodied listening. She approaches sound not as an isolated aesthetic object, but as a living field of relations—a dynamic interplay between biophony, geophony, and anthropophony, where each sonic event is inseparable from the microenvironment that shapes it.

Ristić has received numerous awards, including recognition for solo and chamber classical music, a shortlist for the Académie Charles Cros Sélection Musiques Expérimentales 2024, a Golden Award for extended media from the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia 2023, and an honourable mention from the Phonurgia Nova Awards 2022.

She has curated events for institutions such as Ars Electronica (Linz), Cona Zavod (Ljubljana), BSFF (Amsterdam), BELEF (Belgrade), the Municipality of Belgrade Old Town, CIFRA World (Dubai), and others. From 2004 to 2024, as a founding member of the Association of Multimedia Artists “Auropolis” (Belgrade), Ristić developed a distinctive body of cultural events, international projects, conferences, and educational platforms in the fields of experimental sound, multimedia arts, and scene-based practices.

She currently works and lives on the island of Korčula, Croatia.

manjaristic.blogspot.com

REVIEWS OF
Into Your Eyes

Listening to “Into Your Eyes” feels less like pressing play and more like consenting to slow down – an agreement signed in breath rather than ink. Manja Risti doesn’t offer tracks so much as thresholds. You don’t cross them quickly; you hover, uncertain at first, then quietly altered.
Risti has long operated in that rare zone where sound art, ecology, and poetry aren’t separate disciplines but different dialects of the same sentence. A classically trained violinist who gradually abandoned the safety net of notation, she now works as a careful listener to systems most of us ignore until they fail: water pressure, microcurrents, weather moods, the private lives of materials. Her third release for LINE refines this practice into a triptych that feels simultaneously microscopic and planetary – three long-form pieces that ask not “what am I hearing?” but “who is speaking, and why did I stop listening?”.

What’s striking about “Into Your Eyes” is its refusal of drama. There are no climaxes, no obvious narrative arcs, no gestures begging for interpretation. Instead, Risti builds density through attention. Sounds accumulate like sediment: hydrophone murmurs, fragile resonances, barely-there vibrations that feel closer to tactile sensation than to music in the traditional sense. If you’re waiting for a melody, it won’t arrive. If you’re willing to accept presence instead, you’ll be rewarded.

“Innocence Overturned” opens the album in a state of suspended becoming. It feels like a work about restraint – about stopping before the gesture hardens into statement. There’s a quiet tension here, a sense of ideas deliberately left unfinished, as if completion itself might be a kind of betrayal. It’s contemplative without being precious, and austere without slipping into coldness. Think of it as a room with the lights off, where you gradually realize the darkness is doing something important.

The wonderfully titled “A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva” introduces a more explicitly narrative layer, though story might be too linear a word. The piece moves like an act of witness: environmental, political, and faintly tragic without ever raising its voice. Field recordings breathe alongside processed textures, and the listening position feels deliberately fragile – as if the work could collapse if approached too aggressively. There’s a quiet, almost dry irony here too: the idea of calling out into a structure built to channel smoke, hoping someone might still hear.

The closing “Prophecy of the World Without Anguish” is the longest and most immersive of the three, and perhaps the most radical in its gentleness. Rather than forecasting catastrophe, it imagines continuity – an uninterrupted mesh of sound-events where nothing is hierarchically louder, more important, or more musical than anything else. Lightning, water, air, resonance: everything coexists without competing for the foreground. It’s not utopian in a naïve sense, but it does suggest that anguish might be a byproduct of how we listen, not of the world itself.

Technically, the album is immaculate without advertising its craft. The use of hydrophones, the careful mastering, the integration of externally recorded material – all of it serves the central idea rather than the other way around. This is sound art that doesn’t fetishize process, even though the process is clearly rigorous. Risti’s strength lies in knowing when to intervene and when to step aside, allowing the environment to co-author the work.

If there’s humor here, it’s subtle and human: the quiet absurdity of realizing that every surface, every pressure change, every supposedly inert object has been speaking all along – patiently, indifferently – while we were busy being expressive. “Into Your Eyes” doesn’t demand your attention; it patiently waits for it. And once you give it, you may find that the world sounds slightly louder, stranger, and more alive than before.
—chaindlk.com
Manja Ristić is a Serbian sound artist, violinist, poet, curator, and researcher who currently works and lives on the island of Korčula, Croatia. Ristić’s practice unfolds at the intersection of artistic research, ecological awareness, and embodied listening. She invites audiences into a slowed, heightened state of perception and re-sensitizes listening as a practice rooted in the politics of care, re‑establishes bonds with the beyond‑human world, and positions sound research as both an artistic and ethical act. Her sound art, the music, is not an art form imposed upon the world, but the condition of its being, its natural, essential vibration.

Ristić’s approaches sound art not as an isolated aesthetic object, but as a living field of relations—a dynamic interplay between biophony, geophony, and anthropophony, where each sonic event is inseparable from the microenvironment that shapes it. Into Your Eyes is a triptych of works that deepens Ristić’s thought-provoking sonic vision, listens into the sentience, and focuses on the vulnerability of aquatic ecosystems. She captures the infrasonic pulse of marine life and traces the resonant contours of its architectural spaces. Her works move through a world saturated with voices—an intricate weave of physics, chemistry, biology—where nothing is silenced, and nothing is excluded. Every ripple vibrates with sound, dissolving boundaries and erasing hierarchies.

The opening work, “Innocence Overturned” is a meditation on an unfinished creation, described as carrying “the weight of youthful visions realized and relinquished, of characters conjured and then set free”. It contrasts an almost transparent but resonant drone with the ripples of flowing water until all dissolve into an enigmatic, dream-like drone. The unsettling “A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva” (with field recordings of Lake Geneva by fellow sound artist Mark Vernon) is a lament and a witness work for a poisoned sea. The seagull’s cry into the hollow throat of a chimney becomes an act of faith: “Perhaps someone listens.” It is structured from a series of elemental conversations – tide to rock, river to cloud, cloud to sun, and of the human ear straining to hear them. The last work, “Prophecy of the World Without Anguish”, imagines an utopian future where such stimulating and life-affirming conversations are uninterrupted by the actions of humans, and where – literally – “the tide’s love song in Scotland, the whisper of the Adriatic seabed in rain, the hollow resonance of a barrel at the Tagus estuary (in Portugal), and the singularity of each lightning strike are all part of a continuous, unbroken chorus”.

These works relate to Ristić’s past encounters: a Guardian Angel sculpted by American sculptor Adrian Arleo on the banks of Rattlesnake Creek in Texas; the deep sediments of seashells underfoot; the knowledge that love can grieve into eternity; the recognition that every single body is a battlefield. Ristić suggests a highly immersive and enigmatic listening experience with this triptych of works, an arresting form of cartography of listening that calls for a poetics of attention that treats the world not as backdrop, but as a living score.
— percorsimusicali.eu
Over the course of the year, Manja Ristić has been releasing a triptych of intertwined albums, starting with Purpurna vresišta on wabi-sabi tapes, followed by Sargassum aeterna on Rakem Records and ending with Into Your Eyes on LINE. The first addresses “the trauma imprinted on landscapes,” while the second imagines a dystopian future in which every social and environmental catastrophe has come to pass. The third is divided into three pieces: the warning, the potential horror, and—although the dream seems unattainable—an alternate, peaceful future in which (depending on one’s interpretation) either humanity has come to its senses or has destroyed itself, leaving infinite space in which the rest of the world might recover and regrow.

Ristić is generous to allow listeners to”choose their adventure.” The rub, of course, is that all of humanity is invited to do the same thing, and the majority—at least the majority of those in power—will determine the fate of all flora and fauna. Echoing Native American and Animist sentiment, Ristić regards each part of the ecosystem as sacred and sentient, a belief that if spread would have a profound effect on environmental policies. But first comes a warning in the form of “Innocence Overturned.” The piece rightfully imagines creation unfinished, like a partially-written book. In the 20th century, a popular t-shirt series sported the line, “On the 8th day, God created (insert your favorite band here).” Whether or not one believes in a higher power, the principle is intact; we are always in a state of creation, from blood and war to building and art. Flipping the script, Ristić begins with the ambient wash as a base, then adds the field recordings, an unexpected inversion that imitates policymakers’ approach to the environment. In so doing, she offers a reminder that every species is simultaneously attempting to write its own script, from beavers building dams to coral reefs attempting to grow. The sound of water is a memory-check; each of us is born from water, and all creatures once crawled from the sea.

“A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva” envisions a future with a single character sending a full-throated choir into a pillar of deserted mortar. Her cry sounds sad, lonely, and confrontational; Ristić imagines her asking all of humanity through the wreckage, “Why have you done this? Why have you poisoned our oceans and killed our fish? Why have you burned our lands and flattened our forests?” But of course there is no answer, for there is no humanity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. “Prophecy of the World Without Anguish” imagines a different sort of future, in which the waterways of one continent whisper to those of another, in which wind and rain serve as messengers across the sea. All is at peace. In this work, the musical ambience meshes completely with the sounds of the natural world: seashell and shrimp, tern and tide. Is such a vision attainable, as long as humans are in the picture? The answer is in the piece itself. Ristić’s music lives in harmony with her surroundings; no voice overwhelms another. By mid-piece, life returns in a flock of flurrying notes. If we listen to every rock, every bird, every wave, with the same intention, we might reach a new clarity, or at the very least, rediscover the clarity that once taught us that we are not rulers of the earth, but components, like sand and glass, like leaf and loam.
—acloserlisten.com

MANJA RISTIĆ

Tracklist:

REVIEWS OF Into Your Eyes

REVIEWS OF
Into Your Eyes