An invocation or prayer song created by Hypnomancer using generative AI and other music production techniques. Drawing on Pan African musical aesthetics, the song acknowledges the deep love that imbues the essential everyday tasks performed for community survival.

Lyrics by Hypnomancer (David Stout) copyright 2024

On and on we carry our water with our love
We carry our water with our love

On and on, our winding path descends
Where the mirrored river bends 
We carry our water with our love
We carry our water with our love

With my hand in your hand in our hands
our winding path descends
Where the blue wide river bends 
We carry our water with our love

On and on and on
we carry our water with our love
We carry our water with our love

We Carry Our Water With Our Love

This is one of my songs which was recorded on Nick Barbachano's second album 'Familia'.

Plantas Sagradas - Familia

This track is a preview. To listen to the whole piece and buy the record please visit martaforsberg.bandcamp.com.

Swedish composer and sound artist Marta Forsberg debut album "To All Frequencies I Can Not Sense for Quartet" on Havtorn Records.

"To All Frequencies I Can Not Sense for Quartet" is composed for electric guitar (Ellen Arkbro), electric bass (Emil Skogh), drums (Konrad Agnas), trumpet (Niklas Barnö) and electronics. It is a minimalist piece which deals with lingering spatiality - a meditation on the subtle frequencies which exist outside human perception, but nevertheless surround us, ever-present.

Together, the four musicians create a detailed timbral environment encompassing both complexity and simplicity, a contemplative evolution of a dynamic sound-world that is characterised by a shifting emphasis between tones, chords and noise.

Coming from the minimalist tradition of drone music, Marta Forsberg moves between composing for instrumental ensembles (Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, Berlin), creating sound and light installations (Konserthuset, Stockholm) and an ongoing solo practice (3HD festival - Berlin, Unconscious Archives festival - London). As the initiator of the feminist network Konstmusiksystrar, she also actively works for gender equality within the Contemporary Music scene.

Each digital copy of ”To All Frequencies I Can Not Sense for Quartet” includes a limited-edition large pattern print by Swedish artist and illustrator Elvira Varghans.

Release date: November 3rd 2017
Form: Digital release + Limited edition A2 poster by Elvira Varghans
Mix: David Granström.
Master: Saintpid Mastering

To All Frequencies I Can Not Sense for Quartet (Preview)

Angling Alone in Snow is inspired by both Ma Yuan(c.1160-65 -1225) ’s painting Angler on a Wintry Lake and Liu Zongyuan (773-819)’s poem River Snow.  A characteristic feature of many paintings from Ma is the so-called "one-corner" composition, in which the actual subjects of the painting are pushed to a corner or a side, leaving the other part of the painting more or less empty. In Liu’s poem, the poet used only twenty words to paint a quiet and cold picture: on the river with heavy snow, a small boat, an old fisherman, fishing alone in the cold river. Literally, it is a landscape poem. Between the lines, he borrowed the poem from the fishermen who lived in the mountains and rivers to imply his own arrogant emotions, and expressed political depression and loneliness. 

The beginning of Angling Alone is Snow combines water and wood door sounds these real nature sounds and Guzheng with electronics these instrumental and electronic sounds to create a thin and sparse texture, depicting a fishing reel in Ma’s artwork. In the meanwhile, the opening also reflects the loneliness emotion. The vitality and reality combination composition has been run through the entire work. Besides the loneliness, the music also expresses the poet’s other emotions: depression, righteous indignation, nostalgia and peacefulness. 

Guzheng is a Chinese pluck string instrument with a more than 2,500-year history. The instrument used in this work in the modern Guzheng, which has 21 strings. The guzheng is ancestral to several other Asian zithers such as the Japanese koto, the Korean gayageum, Mongolian yatga, and the Vietnamese đàn tranh. 

Duration: 10 minutes

Angling Along In Snow (2018)for Guzheng and Computer

IRCAM Forum @ NYU Selection (2022).
Impulse New Music Festival Call for Scores Winner (2021).
SEAMUS National Conference Selection (2021).
Finalist in the RED NOTE Chamber Music Competition (2020).
Verdant Vibes Call for Scores Winner (2020).
New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival Selection (2020).

To The Lighthouse

another year in mp3s

April 23, 2020. Brooklyn, NY.

Biophilia is a paean to a verdant remnant of a once wild place surrounded by an encroaching spill of housing developments and fracking plants. I created this work as an experience of immersive being - being at the nexus between worlds. Two worlds that have a very different sense of time - an evocation of the state of Time Dilation where one’s experience of the passing of time slows to the point of an infinite now.

Biophilia

WITHERY 2020

Usually, when the cicadas rattle all day long outside my window, I might barely pay notice. But Jean Henri Fabre writes, “The cicada never eats flies or worms or grain. She never eats at all, she only drinks. Then, too, she never lives into the winter.... [F]our years underground; four years in the dark for the sake of five weeks in the sunshine. She sings all the days of the five weeks and makes a deafening shout about her joy at being alive.” Now, I can imagine the cicadas’ tolerance to the darkness, enthusiasm for the light, abstinence from rich food, and powerlessness against frigid death. They ask nothing, expect nothing. Now their sounds inhabit my ears.

I really don’t know if cicada calls carry their emotions, but I am inspired by the sound of cicadas with my own feelings. Four sentiments are structured as my work’s form, starting with insouciance, then joy and fear, and ending with emptiness. 

The work is designed for grand piano and live electronics. The original piano sound via key playing is limited. The majority of piano sounds are played and recorded through extended performance techniques, so the original piano sounds are transformed into new timbre and form. The purpose of using new piano sounds is to adapt to the three characters of work. The characters are cicada, time, and water. The work is trying to find the harmony between the piano and these characters’ sounds. The piano is either prepared with clips, teaspoon, paper, guitar string, blue tack and horse hairs or is performed upon in an extended way to mimic cicada sounds, ticktock sounds, and nature sounds such as rain drops, wind and thunder. The piano is like a glue to connect these characters with logical relationships, increasing contextual support among characters and sentiments. Also, the piano blends all kinds of sounds together to form an organic and cohesive mix.

Qi Shen - Cicadas' Summer (2020) for piano and live electronics

Loom

Selected music & sound-art works by *Hypnomancer, (David Stout) - sonic artist, composer and songwriter. Hypnomancer is a musical shape shifter exploring the world of hybrid sound cultures blending a wide array of genres including ambient, noise, world fusion, alt-country, acid jazz, folktronica, underground hip-hop, IDM, Dub, experimental electronics, minimalism and other contemporary classical musics. His compositions, songs, and film scores are produced with a variety of instrumental approaches including, modular synthesizers, field recordings, folk instruments, generative AI and virtuosic guest instrumentalists.

Early Work:
His earlier works explored the fusion of electronic image synthesis, visual art, music and theatre. During this creative period Stout composed many scores for dance, theatre and film. Some of these works are presented here - see:  Red Sea Mix, Tracks to the Lair, Hermes' Devotion, Trio with Blade and Siege of Heaven.

David's more recent work includes live visual-music performance, generative animation, interactive video installations and music projects combining acoustic instruments with atmospheric electronics, noise and audio-visual transcoding techniques - see: NADA, Particle Chamber Variation, Reentry and Copter.

He is also a founding member of the group, MaDula Hara with healer-singer, Malia Luna. The duo, inspired by global shamanic traditions, is devoted to exploring the healing potential of sound through music, ceremony and ritual performance.

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* Hypnomancy is a powerful method of divination that occurs during sleep. The Hypnomancer can navigate non-ordinary states of consciousness while dreaming to gain knowledge and affect positive outcomes in the linear waking world.

We Carry Our Water With Our Love

Hypnomancer

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