Sunday, November 30, 2014

Something about Martyna Poznańska

  Let's start out by listening to something... for example... click the link below

https://soundcloud.com/martinska/a-single-resounding-thump-announced-their-coincident-landing

     I don't know what's truly "important" in field recording, acousmatic composition or sound-art. I am aware of many opinions and many names, albums and tracks that are at my fingertips. I listen at times as if my life depended upon it and more often than not I find I'm a tough nut to crack: I find no reason not to like them all, criticism seems misguided, biased, lacking valid criteria, arbitrary, or not in my realm of faith. But a few works come alive almost within their own efforts and stride with an elastic & animal veracity across my ear drums slip into my mind and swim there. They are of themselves, as we are -- and seem friendly, like cities of sunken, phosphorescent stones. Environments reborn that recall the actual shaping orchestrations of experience's poetry in the making. The poet Louis Armand wrote "of the too persistent intersection of the outside and under the skin". And Stephen Ellis helps me get at the other side of it with: there is no meaning other than 'adjacency'. And yet one doesn't really get any closer. The work of Martyna Poznańska is both numinous and riddled with ambiguity. Heraclitus said "The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself." Maybe there is something too familiar in the work of Martyna Poznańska to be considered elusive. A sound artist she verily is. From the Far East of  Poland she "defects" towards Berlin and the UK while her work resonates resolutely with the places she visits. Among them apparently Vietnam. Since I know Berlin and Poland through direct experience, I can imagine an isolate, rain-slant figure walking through ice-covered pavements recording the automobile reverberations, factory dins and chattering market swells. Ms. Poznańska seems to always be between worlds. Here we are: in and under-passage with foot-steps on the margins of Lethe or some Alexanderplatz and yet there's something like a synthetic siren song, unnerving and soothing, all at once. There is no real "nature' without "industry" and nature seems to be an outright factory with a tree running through the bowels. Sounds appear through drain-pipes or a grain-silo, like landscapes blurred behind frosted and foggy glass, with the clatter of spoons, broken things almost coming together again, flirt with statement, then disappear with a cat-step on a ghost shroud, all sent back to us as through amniotic fluid. Poland gives us this Tarkovskyan post-apocalyptic smile-scowl of wabi-sabi. This one here is a kind of spider-cipher skein-lyre whipped by enharmonic scirocco.

    state of origin hajnowkapoland by martyna poznańska on soundcloud

      Silence existing only by displacement of sounds cannot be heard knocking on immaterial doors like they do. She doesn't want to be interrupted while she runs about town between appointments. There is nothing and everything to hear in her works. I can listen or not listen with equal concern and yet I press the replay button with great ease. I'm impressed by what's not there. There's something about Martyna Poznańska. Maybe it's the glasses. They give the impression of huge, dilating eyes that permit her to visualize things others do not see. Maybe she doesn't. But I like to think she does. Certainly her sounds are listening. And more than worthy of contacting.

https://soundcloud.com/martinska/we-are-ourselves-gestures-of-making

   http://martinska.bandcamp.com/album/listening-east

 http://dropr.com/martynapoznanska/3534/exhaustikon

        http://martynapoznanska.com/


                              

 

No comments: