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2LP
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KR 118LP
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For her new and most radical album Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming -- almost ambient and always demanding your full attention. Aiming to analyze and understand their interaction beyond the composer's control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. While the halldorophone -- famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her Joker score -- roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on "minimal interventions -- some string strumming and plucking" that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O'Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. Indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay. Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener "Omen in G" is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, "Nominal in D," plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. "Fades in C" -- the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes -- unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and "Organon in D" closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni's unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.
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LP
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KR 097LP
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Cello player and electronic artist Martina Bertoni returns with her second album for KarlRecords. Hypnagogia delivers six new, masterfully crafted tracks between experimental ambient, drone, and modern composition. Cellist and composer Martina Bertoni started playing the cello at a very young age. Classically trained, her career further developed around experimental and film music, for which her cello has been featured in numerous records, works, and soundtracks for films and series. After two EPs and her debut full-length All The Ghosts Are Gone (2020), Bertoni joined the Karl roster where she released Music For Empty Flats in January 2021 (KR 083LP) to critical acclaim (listed as one of the "Top Ten drone albums of 2021" by A Closer Listen). On her new album Hypnagogia she continues to explore the sonic possibilities of her cello which she uses as primary source for composition and sound processing through reverbs, feedbacks and sub-bass frequencies, thus crafting sonic sculptures, rich of atmospheres and frictions, fed by ambient as much as drone and modern composition. In the words of Martina Bertoni: "The six tracks that constitute Hypnagogia have been written during 2021 and partially inspired by the reading of Stanislaw Lem's book Solaris. The title refers to a transitional state of consciousness from wakefulness to sleep, during which one might experience sensorial hallucinations and lucid dreaming, and can tap into the pristine structures of the subconscious. Hypnagogia portrays an imaginary cosmic journey of the Self that crash ends into a blinding sun." 180 gram vinyl; includes download postcard.
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LP
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KR 083LP
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Cello player and electronic artist Martina Bertoni's new album Music For Empty Flats delivers masterfully crafted experimental ambient/drone. Martina Bertoni is a Berlin-based cellist and composer. she started playing the cello at a very young age. classically trained, Bertoni's career soon developed around experimental and film music where her cello has been featured in numerous records, soundtracks for awarded movies and TV series and collaborations, among others with Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo with whom she recorded several albums and performed at many prestigious festivals all around the globe. The core of her solo work is based on deconstructing the relationship with her own instrument by combining acoustic sound, repetition, analog and digital synthesis. after the EPs In A Paradise You Would Be Happy (2018) and The Green EP (2019) she released her critically acclaimed full length album All The Ghosts Are Gone with the Reykjavík based label Falk in January 2020. On her new album she continues to explore the sonic possibilities of her instrument which she uses as sound source -- sounds which are then processed, adding reverb, feedback and sub-bass frequencies and thus crafting sonic sculptures, rich of atmospheres and frictions. "The inspiration for the title Music For Empty Flats comes from a fraction of time during last winter, while I was visiting Iceland. I had the strange opportunity to spend lots of time listening to music, alone in a brand new but unoccupied -- therefore completely naked -- empty flat in the suburbs of Reykjavík. it was Christmas, it was constantly dark, outside there was snow, inside there was this strange dystopian empty space in which I could listen to my favorite pieces of music in complete solitude. this is when I started sketching the new record." says bertoni. The resulting seven new tracks deliver masterfully crafted experimental ambient/drone, dense and intense but fragile and sensitive at the same time. Recommended for fans of: Hildur Guðnadóttir, Giulio Aldinucci, Lawrence English.
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