yann-leblanc
Une musique du clair-obscur et des lointains intérieurs, par laquelle nous sommes à la fois emportés et ancrés. Une musique qui se meut, se mue, se meurt et renaît à nos oreilles avec insistance, faisant à chaque fois vibrer l’être et le monde tout entiers de sa tonalité intime, grave et profonde. Interview d'Aleksandra Słyż en français : www.larevuedesressources.org/Un-contact-vibrant.html
PadraigC
Such a gorgeous release, one can't help but be hypnotized by the soothing, minimal drones.
The artists statement/release notes is so informative...
Very hard to pick a favourite track!
The vinyl looks great. I nearly searched flights to Poland for one of the tour dates - would be amazing to experience live!
Favorite track: Healing.
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Polish composer Aleksandra Słyż joins Warm Winters Ltd. with A Vibrant Touch, her second full-length album. While her debut Human Glory released by Pointless Geometry explored two distinct approaches and techniques, here she finds her unique path forward: finding connections between acoustic and synthetic sounds, creating rich drone structures, slowly but intensely pulsing and resonating within the surrounding space and within each listener.
“I am very much fascinated by the processes related to the body sensations experienced through sound and its movement. I have always perceived sound as a physical phenomenon, travelling as waves of energy, as vibrations which we can literally feel and physically experience,” she shares. “Therefore, from the very beginning I wanted to use recordings of specific acoustic instruments, which in my opinion beautifully represent the motion itself.” Joining Słyż and her modular synthesizer on A Vibrant Touch is a quartet of musicians playing violin (Kosma Műller), viola (Kamil Babka), cello (Anna Szmatoła) and alto saxophone (Marcus Wärnheim).
The three pieces on the album explore the physicality of sound of these instruments – like the way a finger or bow presses down on the string of a cello, or the air pressure in the saxophone when someone blows inside it – as they intertwine with expert navigation of modular synthesizers by Słyż. Drawing on the work of 20th century spectral composers like Grisey or Scelsi, just intonation, drone music and microtonality for inspiration, the Polish composer uses dissonance, tension and pulse with incredible grace and power.
She opens the proceedings with the patient, gliding and stirring piece “Healing”. “The Ruthless Act” is slightly more ominous and grainy, as the cello and modular synthesizer mimic each other's movements to disorienting effect. The final piece “Softness, Flashes, Floating Rage” is a monumental composition lasting almost 26 minutes, a crowning jewel of the album. Słyż and the instrumentalists are exceedingly patient as the piece slowly unravels into a brutal, heart- and ear-shattering climax. It's a testament to her compositional prowess, that a piece of this length is imbued with so much weight and elegance.
Aleksandra Słyż is a Polish composer, sound designer and sound engineer currently moving between Stockholm, Sweden and Poznań, Poland. She has soundtracked and created sound design for multiple films, worked on various installations, and composed music for different ensembles. She has performed at many experimental music festivals, including Unsound Festival (Krakow), Ephemera Festival (Warsaw), Avant Art Festival (Wroclaw), Between Festival (Stockholm), Idealistic Festival (Copenhagen), Kiev Music Fest (Kiev), Open Source Art Festival (Sopot), Sanaatorium of Sound (Sokolowsko), UNG Nordisk Musik Festival (Pitea) and others.
credits
released September 23, 2022
Released by Warm Winters Ltd. as WW022
Recorded between January 2020 and October 2021 in Poznań & Stockholm
Composed and recorded by Aleksandra Słyż
Mastered by Mikael Lindblad Ehnborg
Lacquer master-cut by Andreas [LUPO] Lubich at Loop-O
Artwork and design by Maks Posio
Poetry by Konrad Wróblewski
Marcus Wärnheim – alto saxophone
Kosma Műller – violin
Kamil Babka – viola
Anna Szmatoła – cello
Aleksandra Słyż – modular synthesizers
Exploring connections between acoustic instruments and modular synthesizers, creating rich and diverse drone structures which highlight the power of microtonality’s resonances and tensions.
The debut from Vermont duo UNIONBLOCK features homemade electromagnetic banjos creating haunting drones in religious space. Bandcamp New & Notable May 24, 2022
New England collective approach devotional music from a drone-heavy, electro-acoustic perspective, bringing heavenly sounds down to earth. Bandcamp New & Notable Nov 24, 2021
supported by 60 fans who also own “A Vibrant Touch”
This music Marta created, holds stillness and space just as much as it holds notes and chords, and it is in those spaces between notes that captured my attention so much. This music requires some patience and is for everyone, but I find it gorgeous. Especially when everything finally comes together on the last track, "music" with a choirs wordless vocals taking the chord changes and melody all the way to the climactic ending. Joe Borreson