Each of the two editions of Late Night focuses on a special artist: The music of Magda Drozd takes its time, spreading out in delicate soundscapes. On her research trips, the violinist, singer and sound artist regularly immerses herself in the local music scenes. At SONIC MATTER, she celebrates the release of her new album «Divided by Dusk», featuring collaborators including Japanese bamboo flutist and electronic musician Rai Tateishi. The two artists will bring together their practices in an unique concert which presents materials from their current albums as well as new material as a duo they composed for their shows in Switzerland. Together with artist-in-residence Nguyễn Thanh Thủy on the Vietnamese zither Đàn Tranh as special guest, Drozd and Tateishi will perform the first Late Night.
Find the ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES at this link.
LINER NOTES – MAGDA DROZD «DIVIDED BY DUSK»
Night is about to fall, the day slowly fades, and twilight is the time that Magda Drozd’s latest album inhabits. «Divided by Dusk», the Polish musician’s third solo album, carries the promise of a crepuscular otherworldliness.
Comprising eight tracks, the album is partly inspired by Drozd’s time in Japan, a country with a rich tradition in ambient and experimental music. During several visits, Drozd has collaborated with Japanese flutist Rai Tateishi and electronic producer Koshiro Hino; both members of Osaka rock minimalists goat, who each make instrumental and recording cameos here.
This experience, lineage and sense of musical connection coalesces with Drozd’s renewed interest in her Polish roots, as manifested in her home country’s folklore and ancient history. Together, these elements form a work that becomes an act of sonic excavation. Layers of dark ambient tones intertwine with field recordings, textured violin sounds, ancient chants, and luminous folk motifs, invoking ancient unspecified rituals.
The album opens with «Eclipse», a dual space of light and dark, where a near-spiritual atmosphere invites us to consider the cyclical nature of existence. The lyrics and melodies on the title track evoke the search for a lost place, long buried, that continues to haunt the memory. «Contrasts» leads us through shifting harmonic soundscapes, with references to Japanese ritualistic sonorities and ambient music. «Rounds» is a collaboration with Rai Tateishi, who plays the shinobue, a small transverse bamboo flute used in traditional Japanese music, and the khaen, a Southeast Asian mouth organ. Together, Drozd and Tateishi bring to mind hallucinatory landscapes and ancient pagan traditions conversing across spacetime.
At the heart of the album appears «Piosenka Ludowa» («folk song» in Polish), a freeform interpretation of a folkloric motif. It rises like an urge to dance, to celebrate the passing of seasons. Shortly after, «Hungry Nightmares» draws us back into the dusk. A struggle of forces unfolds as «Vertigo» pulls us into a vibrating abyss. At the journey’s end, «From the Depths» welcomes us into a space without fear or illusion. Inspired by a Polish folk song, this composition deconstructs its traditional melody and lyrics, unleashing the ghosts of past cultures, the ones we inherit through the music passed down to us.
Drozd’s album has a magnificent, wandering, melancholic air. Like an anchor sinking below the water’s surface, it takes on an incantatory dimension, welcoming us into a liminal world, one filled with buried treasures.
«Divided by Dusk» is released at Präsens Edition.
LINER NOTES – RAI TATEISHI «PRESENCE»
A vital piece in the mosaic of goat (JP) and a master of the shinobue - the traditional Japanese bamboo flute - Rai Tateishi summons the ancestral spirits embedded in this instrument through fearless improvisations that refine a vast array of techniques, from the most lyrical breaths to abstractions of more conventional forms. Amid percussive passages, near-alien sonorities, lysergic ceremonial moments, and an enveloping aura in pursuit of the unfathomable, «Presence», his solo debut on NAKID, sees Tateishi weaving, alongside the shinobue, other timeworn wind instruments like the shakuhachi and the Irish flute, crafting a music that, by this point, feels entirely his own. TICKETS 25 / 30 / 20 – Legi 10 CHF DAYPASS 70 / 85 / 55 -Legi 30 CHF
INFORMATION & ACCESSIBILITY
Wheelchair accessible
SUPPORT
The creation of Magda Drozd’s album «Divided by Dusk» was supported by Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur and Stadt Zürich Kultur. | 