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.

A Vibrant Touch

Aleksandra Słyż – Healing

It is transience's aim to create a temporary suspension of reality where listeners can recenter and reflect with a supportive sonic environment. During the current g3noc1de in G a z a and the surrounding areas, many of us are feeling massive amounts of grief, anger, and all manner of other emotions that it's hard to know what to do with. In Germany, and in particular in Berlin, we're witnessing new levels of state repression on freedom of movement and expression. It's really important during such times to take care to regulate ourselves and help care for one another, so that we can organise and continue the ongoing work of fighting for freedom. 

For this episode of transience we are glad to welcome  to have sound artist + designer, DJ and radio host, MINQ @soundslikeminq as this month's guest. transience host, Lou Drago met MINQ at the ambient floor at Whole Festival 2022, and soon bonded through their shared interests in sound-based mindfulness practices such as Deep Listening. MINQ has been facilitating workshops with the aim to discover what lies at the intersection of mindfulness, movement and sound in QTBIPoc-centered spaces with their research project and workshop series Sonic Utopias | Research Lab. They also have a monthly show on Refugee Worldwide called Sonic Utopias.

To hear more from MINQ you can visit https://soundcloud.com/soundslikeminq

Photography from Micki Rosi Richter <3

Thank you to all of you who are continuing to raise your voices for a ceasefire and to free Palestine

transience #54 with Lou Drago

Jack Quartet - String Quartet #2

Liza Lim, "Shallow Grave" solo for neolithic horn and F trumpet
premier performance by Marco Blaauw at Eclat festival, Stuttgart, February 2024
There’s an image that sticks in my mind: March 2022, 12 days into the war in Ukraine, a military brass band plays, standing around a crater made by a Russian bomb. The image echoes on in our times of extreme and often incomprehensible violence and I’ve been thinking a lot about music’s power to address and reach into a hole in the ground and pull back up some life energy from what has been destroyed. The power of music to speak to the dead, to reach back in time and unwind something; to make passages for the living; music as a living knot in time between the ancestral and the unborn—these are some basic themes of recent work.
Shallow Grave is in two parts. In the first part, Marco Blaauw plays a ‘Neolithic’ horn, a replica of a 3,000-year-old ceramic horn excavated from a rock shelter in Vallabrix, Southern France and recreated by André Schlauch as part of the European Music Archaeology project. It’s shaped like an animal horn but I think of it as a lump of earth with a mouth. The second part of the piece is for solo trumpet; music of bitter and ironic humour, an imaginary ‘Punch and Judy’ show of stupid sock puppets bashing each other with sticks and rocks until the puppets bleed.

Liza Lim, Shallow Grave, performed by Marco Blaauw

@lou_drago & @marumwelt at cochilo
@infinity-rug

fofo: alias.illias

Lou Drago & marum at Cochilo - Waking Life '24

Chino Yoshio - 193193 (For Gentle Sine Bells) 
naran ratan - fanfare for naran ratan 
Burial - Kindred 
Juriaan Andriessen - Move Mode 
Blu Mar Ten - The Fountain 
4hero - Parallel Universe 
Ben Watt - Some Things Don't Matter
Ichiko Aoba - Amuletum 
William Orbit - Ravel's Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte 
Gui Boratto - Mala Strana

Orson Abram @ YESFEST WINTER

Dream Gloaming (2025) for fixed media
*Originally for 4 channels, here is the stereo remixed version.

Music Composition: Chen-Hui Jen

Poem in Chinese is AI-generated by Chen-Hui Jen's language model. 
English Translation / Editor: Chen-Hui Jen

《暮之沉降》

在未醒與未眠之間
聲音尚未找到名字
只是一縷呼吸
隨暮色，散落為霧

有光未至
卻在眼皮下漾動
像河的暗潮
將一切牽向無岸

Dream Gloaming

In the liminal space between waking and sleeping,
A sound yet unnamed
But a breath
fades into haze with the twilight.

Light hasn’t arrived,
yet it flickers beneath the eyelids—
like a hidden river current,
drawing everything toward a shoreless drift.

Dream Gloaming (2025) for fixed media - Stereo Remix

TEST

01.08.2016, Darmstadt, Ferienkurse,"centralstation" 
Solist: Christian Dierstein
Komponist: Mark Andre
Edition Peters/Leipzig

S2 für Schlagzeug

Text by Daniel Schmiedt

Played by Mocrep Ensemble in Orangerie 13.08.2016
Concert of 48th International Music Conference Darmstadt
Workshop corporation by Steven Takasugi

Qin: Alexander Ellsworth
Vocal: Bethany Younge, Nick Meryhew
Electronics: Amanda Bailey, Hang Su

Second Appearance of Incessancy (2016) - Ensemble Version

Christian Smith, Percussion 
Alejandro Oliván, Saxophones (Baritone, and then soprao) 
Stefanie Mirwald, Accordion 

Live performance from April 21st, 2017 @ Experimental Sound Studios as part of the Outer Ear Series. 
Ralph Lewis, recording engineer 

Bethany Younge is an American composer currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. She has received a Masters degree in Composition from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in The Netherlands and a Bachelors degree from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Composition (along with a minor in TIMARA-Technology in Music And Related Arts). She has studied composition closely with Richard Barrett, Martijn Padding, Yannis Kyriakides, Peter Adriaansz, Lewis Nielson, and Seung-Ah Oh and attended master classes conducted by esteemed composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, David Lang, Rebecca Saunders, Richard Ayers, Helena Tulve, Gordon Mumma, Rand Steiger, Trevor Wishart, Kiaja Saariaho, and Chaya Czernowin.

Awards: International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, Stipend Prize
Editor for Cacophony Magazine
Performer for Mocrep

http://www.bethanyyounge.com/

TEST

wojtek blecharz

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