MAJA OSOJNIK – DOORWAYS

MAJA OSOJNIK – DOORWAYS (MAM08/2024)

Doorways was born from a longing to escape the city and everyday life – and the problematically fast pace thereof, a pace of production that accelerates the erosion of attention. In seeking to arrive in a quiet place, to linger there with an observational unprejudiced eros, to become completely aware of being alive. In line with Pauline Oliveros’ practice of deep listening, Maja Osojnik’s album explores the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. It raises the question: How attentively do we perceive, recognise and internalise the ever-changing (aural) environment?

Both compositions, with their subtle changes in sound, can be seen as a collage, a pas de deux between nature and cyborg. Through shading, microscopic deviations, transitions, layering and alienation of original field recordings, the pieces draw attention to the essence of what is present, what exists, on site and invite the listener to engage in a kind of auditory gymnastics. It’s about active listening – what the artist Maja Osojnik calls cinema for the ears – an interactive game with one’s own self. The compositions invite the listener to hear them deeply; they function like a rotary dial, bringing extremely sensitive changes into focus. By constantly readjusting the focal point, they create new relationships between the electronically generated sounds, instruments and field recordings.

The first piece, Doorways #09, is a musical interpretation of a sound map of a specific location in the middle of a forest. The composition overwrites, stretches, alienates and acoustically camouflages the natural environment on site. The field sound recordings are manipulated, reduced, filtered and tonally altered. In a reversal of traditional musique concrète, the blocks of natural sounds are reimagined through the language of music and replaced by acoustic and synthetic musical instruments. The result is an electronic soundscape, a nourishing foundation of sound upon which the new layer, an instrumental work with Black Page Orchestra, unfolds.

Doorways #09 is the latest in a series of graphic scores that Maja Osojnik has created for various groups and ensembles over the years. The graphic composition gives clear and unambiguous instructions regarding the sound material but leaves room for temporality: the tempo at which one moves through the score, how long one lingers, is left open and up to the ensemble. In this way, the score inherently raises the question of how communication – both with oneself and with others – can unfold. It brings responsibility and the relationship between the individual and the collective into focus, not in division but in unity. Likewise, it raises the question of creative freedom, the relationship between interpretation and improvisation within the rigid framework that a graphic score necessarily entails.

Blende #01 explores change, transformation and the game of mimicry. While it doesn’t directly depict the myth of Daphne, it draws on similar motifs, particularly focusing on the curse symbolised by Eros’ two arrows: one representing eternal love, the other an inability to receive love. This polarity and the resulting paradox form the core of the piece, along with the pain that arises from it (The pain is not a scandal). Central to the composition is the moment of transformation, shapeshifting, metamorphosis – where the old must be released, yet the new remains elusive. In its abstraction and personal expression, the piece confronts the process of death, evoking the emotions that come with it: fear, pain, curiosity, desire and ecstasy.

“I slap death in the face, me an artist, in a final and wonderful gesture, I conquer the fear of death by listening to the process of dying.” (Byung-Chul Han)

The piece thus looks into a surreal, hallucinatory dream world, zooming in to a microscopic entity and out to a dense, overgrown forest. At sunrise, oblique light shines in hundreds of directions, through the trees and the rising mist, and then refracts like a kaleidoscope in the dewdrops on the leaves. Everything breathes, grows, builds, embraces, envelops, flows and moves slowly between life and death in a state of constant circulation and metamorphosis, invisible to the eye. Always there, unconcealed but never exposed. Exposed I am. Standing there. Right in the midst of it. Come closer. Look inside. I open my mouth. Red. Doorway… (maja osojnik)

   

photos by Christopher Sturmer

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Wading through lucid dreams.
Realms of possibility and counter-worlds in Maja Osojnik’s DOORWAYS
by Sebastian Höglinger

It sucks and breathes, creeps and flies in Maja Osojnik’s multidimensional sound multiverse. Everything here communicates in a ghostly way, permeating marrow, body and stone – organically animated and sometimes extraterrestrially echoing. There, on the border of life and death, the undead purr lustful verses; there, where fog forces the grove into hazy twilight and – as in Haunted Horror – glances over shoulders seek to protect from the unknown.

The sound proliferations of Osojnik’s Black Page Orchestra sprout like mushroom colonies on lush green moss. Symbiotically, they nourish each other, supporting and propelling themselves into collective musical spaces – loud and quiet, fast and slow. DOORWAYS 9 depicts this breathing organism, this formation of bonds, this collectively undertaken, grandiosely open-ended cartography of a utopian musical counter-world in which everything is conditioned and interpenetrated: Natural space and fabricated nature, this world and the hereafter, involuntary hearing and conscious listening. In the tradition of Pauline Olivero’s “Deep Listening”, the artistic shapeshifter Osojnik mediates between the presumed poles, positioning her graphic notations like statues at the edge of the path, thus pointing to spaces of possibility, without specifying or ultimately demanding a final destination. With a spirited punk attitude, her orchestra embraces the state of productive limbo, in which field recordings enter into dialogue with the instruments, translate themselves into musical language and increasingly merge into the candor of collectively experienced radicality. The energies of the nine-piece ensemble are released as they improvise, redefining temporalities, modes and tempos and opening portals – doorways – into musically reflective universes, similar to electrified bodies colliding in a seemingly chaotic, rather prudent showdown in a mosh pit.

One such parallel universe is the second side of the record – a kind of dark side of the moon, or rather: an enticingly bright light at the end of the tunnel – entitled BLENDE. Violoncellist Maiken Beer wades through lucid dreams in the wake of Osojnik’s experimental arrangement – out into dark waters in which currents that can hardly be tamed, yearn for life. With surefootedness, she rejects any fatalism in the escalation of suspense. The composition articulates itself instead as a game, full of exquisitely exposed harmony. Along the dramatic chasms that encompass the soundscape, ripples of sound expand into torrents while the cello’s melodies cascade into the depths. Everything is in free fall. Everything is constantly changing; until your breath catches, and cones of sound push through the dense treetops like autumn light. Somewhere between beauty and horror, life and death.

DOORWAYS 9 and BLENDE give heaviness and big-feelings their nonchalance back. They are musical pleas for active listening and perceiving with the utmost intensity: ‘cinema for the ears’. If Osojnik’s sometimes dark, quasi-cinematographic dream scenes were populated with the walking dead, they would be bursting with desire, like those in the hit series “True Blood” – more sophisticated perhaps, but undoubtedly handsome and worldly. Osojnik’s reincarnates are not driven by egos, but act as an egalitarian collective – independent of time, geography and style. Multiplication is the name of the game. Form gangs!

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reviews:
Christopher Nosnibor for Aural Aggravation:
“This is not an easy, or immediate, album. We all need time, and to take and make time. Along way, Osojnik leaves us haunted an incurring . Ot’s a spacious, and low—key but cheering.”