*50 copies limited edition* Mia Windsor is an experimental musician currently undertaking a practice-led PhD centred on Muta, a material-driven feedback instrument she has developed through ongoing processes of building and improvisation. The instrument operates by resonating physical materials and feeding their signals back into themselves and into each other through spectral processing, producing a system in which sound emerges from the interaction between objects, circuits, and environment. Alongside this work, Windsor composes pipe organ drone music, performs improvised music with Muta, modified reed organs, and voice, and plays in the art pop group Static Caravan.
Muta forms the core of this recording. Its operation depends on feedback, rendering it inherently unstable. Sounds are not predetermined but unfolds through a continuous negotiation with the Muta and material. Each configuration of materials alters the conditions of the system, so that the act of playing becomes a process of listening to shifts in resonance, pressure, and response. The instrument remains open in structure, able to accommodate a wide range of materials whose properties shape the resulting sound. One aspect of this work involves the use of vessels filled with water. Signals are captured through hydrophones placed within the liquid, allowing small disturbances in the water to directly affect the behaviour of the system. Actions such as the introduction of air, the agitation of the surface, or the chemical activity of effervescence produce subtle but consequential changes in the feedback network.
The recordings presented here document a series of experiments using larger vessels, extending the instrument’s range into lower frequency regions. This shift in scale brings a greater sense of weight and spatial extension to the sound. The first track emerges from a more deliberate tuning process, in which water levels were adjusted to locate and stabilise resonant frequencies within the vessels. Through this process, the vase was tuned so that its fundamental frequency sits at a septimal seventh above the singing bowl, producing a complex and unstable harmonic relationship that remains present throughout the recording. The vase itself was sourced from a charity shop and later ruptured during a lecture demonstration. These recordings therefore capture both its initial activation within the instrument and its final sounding. The object is present here as a resonant body with a finite duration, its sonic potential realised within a specific set of conditions that can no longer be repeated.
