* Edition of 200. * There's something unsettling about encountering an artist who can peer so clearly into the abyss of our potential future while maintaining such exquisite tenderness. Manja Ristić, a classically trained musician whose work extends across the boundaries of experimental radio, field recording, and sound art, has crafted something that feels both utterly foreign and disturbingly familiar – a sonic documentary from a world that may have already begun to bleed into our present. Here, the electroacoustic composer's visionary body of sub-aquatic music serves as both prophecy and lament for our drowning planet.
Across four meticulously constructed ambient compositions, Ristić imagines a dystopian 2221 where humanity's worst impulses have reached their logical conclusions: magnetic field disturbances, global warfare between North and South, destructive ocean mining, and the complete suspension of human rights. Yet within this darkness, she locates sanctuaries – the Scottish Isle of Arran, home to the mysterious “child-God Luka”, and Croatia's island of Mljet, where marine life still clings to existence.
The genius of “Sargassum aeterna” lies not in its apocalyptic vision, but in how Ristić transforms that vision into something achingly beautiful. Her sonic palette is deliberately sparse – field recordings from Portugal's Nazaré, Scotland's Arran, and Croatia's coastal islands, woven together with violin drones, hydrophone captures, and the spectral voices of her EMS Synthi 100. The result feels suspended in time, submerged in an underwater realm where past and future dissolve into a single, haunting present – creating what journalist Lujo Parežanin aptly describes as “listening-as-speculation”.
Working within a lineage that traces back to Annea Lockwood's pioneering explorations of water sounds and Pauline Oliveros' deep listening practices, Ristić pushes these traditions into darker, more prophetic territories. Where Lockwood documented rivers and Oliveros taught us to hear the world anew, Ristić imagines what we might be listening to when both traditions have become memories.
This is ambient music with teeth – never content to simply soothe, but instead employing what Ristić calls “the technique of estranging familiar sounds” to create an unsettling beauty that mirrors our current moment's precarious balance between catastrophe and grace. The hydrophones, crafted by Jez Riley French, capture not just the sound of water, but the weight of uncertainty itself.
What emerges is a work of startling prescience and profound empathy. In a world increasingly defined by ecological collapse and human cruelty, Ristić offers neither false comfort nor nihilistic despair, but something more valuable: the possibility that gentleness might persist even in our darkest futures.
“Sargassum aeterna” stands as one of the most compelling and necessary releases of 2025 – a work that uses the language of speculative sound to illuminate the urgencies of our present moment. Released in an edition of 200 and coming with an insert featuring a text by Ristić herself, with Rekem Records' typically exquisite attention to detail, this limited pressing won't be around for long.
As Parežanin concludes in his liner notes: “Only the child-God can save us – him, and the unconditional gentleness of Manja's music.” Don't let this vision slip into the abyss. Grab it before it's gone for good.
