Vstal by Manja Ristić & Tomáš Šenkyřík

Vstal is a collection of seven songs created in a dialogue between the experimentalist and composer Manja Ristić and the meticulous observer and field recorder Tomáš Šenkyřík. The album takes listeners on a journey across the European continent, from Ristić’s home on the Adriatic coast to the Czech-Austrian borderlands and the Moravian floodplain forests, which have long inspired Tomáš Šenkyřík’s sonic explorations. This broad scope, sensitively linking the soundscapes of both artists’ homelands, is an expansive vision of the possibilities of field recording and its relationship to place and its memory.
Here, hydrophonic recordings of sea urchins are juxtaposed with the sounds of the everyday, materialised in the electromagnetic hum of Manja Ristić’s kitchen appliances, while surgically precise recordings of the soundscapes of old-growth forests merge with the otherworldly sounds of NASA satellite communications. Together they dialogue with occasional vocals, violin improvisation and sounds from Belegrad’s legendary EMS Synthi 100.
The intimate here informs the hyper-local, and then the cosmic, which travels back to communicate the political as well as the aesthetic through a subtle and poetic language, considering the interconnectedness of all sound worlds. The tender, almost sobbing poetics of the vocals in Pátek Sobota recalls an old folk song that sings of water in the land of Rusava, the content of which, due to climate change, no longer corresponds to the current state of the landscape. Similarly, the composition Čudna šuma, accompanied by the eponymous poem, speaks of a human swallowed by the ground in an unknown, alien forest, as a memorial to all the bodies lost on the Balkan migration route.
The presence of these meanings here is not a rigid axis, however, but only one of many ways to read the relationships between the songs and their sounds. This allows the listener to wander, to get lost and to find their own way back, not only through different geographies, but also through intimate and emotional terrains.
The Vstal aesthetic presents music composition, field recording and experimentation as a critical practice capable of reflecting on complex socio-ecological issues. It is precisely by expanding the notion of ‘field’ that Ristić and Šenkyřík have created a body of work that presents sonic practice as a way of knowing and being in the world. As Ristić says, this album is a record of a shared experience and a relationship between two people who are deeply driven by a love of nature, its sounds and humanity that transcends geographical and cultural distances. In this relationship, they share stories of their land and its past, creating imaginary soundscapes that speak to the listener in familiar tongues.
(Ján Solčáni)


Vstal is a musical journey of Tomáš and I, which began unconsciously from the moment we met in Budapest in November 2018, during the founding conference of the Central European Network for Sonic Ecologies. Tom and I were very excited about each other’s work and areas of research. We continued to communicate and exchange impressions of our results until the decisive exchange in which we agreed to start working on a joint album.
The pandemic was a whirlwind that swept through the lives of all of us. In those months and years, we shared a common understanding of this colossal social upheaval, as well as a concern for the well-being of our families and loved ones. For me, there is a timeless dimension to this album. We met occasionally to share each other’s feelings of grief, shaky reality and the challenges of parenthood, and to express an openness to sharing that can only come from a mutual love of deep nature – that which is deeply spiritualised and comes from the mystical stratum of the world.
It’s clear that the places I’ve captured and explored through the musical essence of this collection may mainly be from my immediate surroundings, but it’s truly the depth and the memories they hold that I’ve delved into. Inherent memories of forests, streams, lakes, the Adriatic coast from north to south, ancient quarries and archaeological sites, holy places, long abandoned Iron Curtain quarries, and nature along the Green Belt. A short but heartfelt story about the harshness of the Balkan route. Abandoned communist heritage and an eclectic addition of carefully selected NASA sounds as a ‘view from above’ are my contributions to this sonic palimpsest.
Vstal is a record of two people deeply driven by a love of nature, sound and humanity, telling each other stories about the environment they live in, but also about the deep past from which we all come – then melting and merging into tales of an imaginary world, both real and phantasmagorical, both tender and harsh, the strange and moody alien planet that happens to be familiar to everyone.
(Manja Ristić)

Listening to the ways of being in the world.

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