In her artistic practice, @magda-drozd is deeply concerned with listening. The artist and musician not only investigates the ways her audience listens but also continually hones her own auditory sensibility. For her second album, 18 Floors, Drozd trained the latter on the Lochergut, an iconic residential estate in Zurich’s Kreis 4, which she called home for several years. Over the past two years, she compiled a corpus of field recordings in and of the apartment building, which became the basis for an examination of how sound produces knowledge. The result challenges current assumptions about buildings, urban living, and the ecologies of cohabitation. In the context of her project, Drozd conceives of the building as a living organism rather than a collection of static material. The field recordings served as raw material for the compositions, which were woven into eleven speculative tracks consisting of analogue and digital sounds, including violins, guitars, synthesizers, drum machines, and Drozd’s voice. The music moves between sound art, ambient, and experimental electronics, occasionally showing flashes of pop, indie rock, and R&B.

Drozd’s album, released one and a half years after the COVID-19 outbreak, could not be timelier—even though the conception of 18 Floors predates the global pandemic. The album’s actuality derives from Drozd’s sense of the importance of the home, which has become glaringly obvious in the age of Corona. She concentrated on what was close by when attention was habitually lavished on far-away places. In this process, she examined the constitution and potential of her home, and her preference for documenting what might be over what actually is defines her avant-garde attitude. The result is an album that creates a space for what is transient, uncertain, and unstable. And it creates a space for opportunities, which we need now more than ever.

—

18 Floors is Drozd’s second album. Her debut, Songs for Plants, was released on vinyl and digitally by Präsens Editionen in 2019. Her follow-up enters the label catalogue among releases by @samuelreinhard , @beliawinnewisser , @martina-lussi , and Leo Hoffmann. 

—

Written, recorded, and produced by Magda Drozd, 2021
Published by Präsens Editionen
All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, hiring, lending, and broadcasting of this record is prohibited.

Mix by Samuel Savenberg
Lyrics and Melody on A3 and B3 by Nicola Genovese and Magda Drozd
Mastered by Stefan Betke
Liner notes by Salomé Voegelin
Cover by Magda Drozd
Graphic design by Kaj Lehmann
Executive production by Remo Bitzi

Supported by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, Stadt Luzern FUKA-Fonds, and Zürcher Hochschule der Künste

Magda Drozd - Pink Chimney

Cleave Excerpt Berlin

vision | living light (2015/21)
for amplified viola + effects pedals and samples

Viola - Nefeli Galani
Recording - Tobias Hagedorn
Electronics & Mastering - Raphaël Languillat

Special thanks to Kommune 2010 (www.kommune2010.com)

vision | living light

Recorded live at [Endlich], Tempelhofer Feld, 2021.

Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist, composer and educator based in Berlin, Germany since 2008. Felicity plays with the timbres and biorhythmic patterns of her field recording archive to create quasi-bioacoustic music. Felicity has played in collaborative projects Native Instrument (Shelter Press, Entr’acte) presenting electro-acoustic bug beats with vocalist Stine Janvin. Felicity has released solo publications on Longform Editions titled Stereo’frog’ic, a play on the word stereophonic –  presenting a sound piece, crafted from found recordings of frogs, insects and other ‘vocal’ animals wavering about in a stereo field. More recently a tape release titled Creepy Crawly on Slovakian label Mappa Editions and  Bell Metal Reeds (One Instrument). Felicity has presented projects in many different settings from galleries, gardens, clubs, festivals and online platforms throughout Europe, including National Gallery Denmark, Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW, Sonic Acts Academy, RIVERSSSOUNDS.org and recently sound design for 100 Climate Conversations , Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia.

SC: https://soundcloud.com/felicity-mangan
WEB: https://felicitymangan.org/

Mastered by Mattia Onori.
Artwork by Pablo Diserens.

Melantónia live set 018 - Felicity Mangan

Recorded live at RHIZOM Festival 2022, June 4-6, at Rote Fabrik, Zurich.
More infos: https://www.rhizomfestival.ch
Magda Drozd on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/magda-drozd
Magda Drozd Website: https://www.magdadrozd.com/

Magda Drozd - Live At RHIZOM Festival 2022

Raw cut, free impro, no mixing.
Just my soul passing through the empty streets of my home city

The Passing

Keep The Salt

#Acapella #vocals #Harmony #Nongoma #Johannesburg #Zurich #Southafrica #Switzerland #MountSelph-Esteem

WHERE I WANNA GO

Listen to the full album here: https://soundcloud.com/zweikommasieben/sets/magda-drozd-songs-for-plants-pe
@zweikommasieben

Painkiller (Songs for Plants, LP)/ Präsens Editionen

un progetto di poesia performativa e paesaggio del suono di Gaia Ginevra Giorgi

testo, voce e effettistica vocale: Gaia Ginevra Giorgi
drammaturgia sonora: Riccardo Santalucia

Manovre Segrete / L'animale nella fossa

Knuckles and fingertips dragging along walls, measuring its surface by the friability of flesh, to record in blood and on traces of skin that place the map can’t grasp: the tight and ungiving space between building and body, between material and skin, where simultaneity has physical consequences; where architecture does not house but constructs movements and stillness; and where the skin bears the brunt of the desire to hear what stops the body move and what makes the building hollow. Here knuckles and fingertips perform a forensics of the invisible as an aural delineation and search for an access point at the site of interaction.

A Cartography Of Knuckles And Fingertips

Sound artist and musician based in Zürich

Painkiller (Songs for Plants, LP)/ Präsens Editionen

Magda Drozd

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