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Symposium Musicum

Symposium Musicum (LP)

Label: Mappa

Format: LP

Genre: Experimental

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The ever-wonderful mappa continues its liquid/sonic cartographic explorations with a fascinating new album by Symposium Musicum.

The eponymous album "is developed from field recordings, interviews, and observations collected in the villages of Podolínec, Lomnička, Levočské Vrchy, and Kolačkov - all areas of the eastern and north-eastern Slovakia with significant Romani enclaves. The pieces resulting from these interactions encourage the listener to tune in for a delicate negotiation of language, (audible) gesture, and storytelling."

John-Robin Bold, Anna Khvyl and Elia Moretti are the artists involved in field work, field recording, composition and mixing. A truly captivating project capturing lighthearted musical collaborations with local participants – the result is in many ways revelatory and poetically impactful. 

The album Symposium Musicum is developed from field recordings, interviews, and observations collected in the villages of Podolínec, Lomnička, Levočské Vrchy, and Kolačkov - all areas of the eastern and north-eastern Slovakia with significant Romani enclaves. The pieces resulting from these interactions encourage the listener to tune in for a delicate negotiation of language, (audible) gesture, and storytelling.

The collaboration with the local participants appears lighthearted and whimsical on the records, but this seeming easiness is clearly a result of devoted fieldwork planning and committed post-production. The curated compositions represent and emphasize not only performative aspects of the acoustic activities but also point attention to seemingly non-productive aspects of creation, such as silence, hesitation, observation, perception, or waiting.

Sound experiment and preservation is not the only goal of the project. Some of the records capturing acoustic activities in peculiar places but also carry an element of social novelty that accompanied their making - according to the locals in Lomnička, the recording visitors were the first non-Romani persons who spent the night in the village.

Details
Cat. number: MAP030
Year: 2023
Notes:

Recorded in Wiesbaden, Germany in 2019 and 2020 by Johannes Schebler
Artwork and layout by Johannes Schebler
Mastered by Pentti Dassum
Words by José Badía Berner