The Swedish composer and audiovisual artist Maria w Horn is readying her sophomore LP Kontrapoetik for release on October 19th via the Berlin-based art label Portals Editions. Having studied electroacoustic composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and Universität der Kunste in Berlin, Horn uses minimalist/maximalist sonic approaches as a means of examining how audiovisual stimuli affect human consciousness and our perceptions of time and space.
Maria is a member of the Sthlm Drone Society, an association “working to promote slow and gradually evolving timbral music,” and she also co-runs the label XKatedral. In addition, she is part of The Micro Modular Quartet, an ensemble built around a piece of legacy hardware called The Micro Modular synthesizer; and she participates in Hästköttskandalen (HKS), an audiovisual quartet comprised of Swedish and American composers/musicians, as well as Drömfakulteten, a Swedish collective of experimentalists sharing studios in Stockholm. Horn is also a part of Alternating Currents, an intermedial electricity concert choreographed and performed with Stina Nyberg and a frequency-controlled Tesla coil, as well as Dufwa, a project with Mats Erlandsson exploring the extremes of synthesis and digital processing.
For her sophomore LP release Kontrapoetik, Maria w Horn embarks on a personal and historical exploration of her home region Ångermanland in the North of Sweden. Part of Norrland, the northernmost, largest and least populated of the three traditional lands of Sweden, the region is sometimes called “the colonies” because of the uneven distribution of wealth generated by the area–but often diverted from its’ inhabitants. Because of this, since the 1970s, Norrland has suffered the increasing effects of depopulation. However, before that, Ångermanland was also the site of a conflict between the Swedish military and a Worker’s Movement that left 5 dead and nearly set-off a revolution during the 1930s, as well as being the site of that countries’ largest documented execution of women accused of witchcraft in 1674.
Drawing from archival material and field recordings from the region, Kontrapoetik is also a “counter-exorcism” conducted by a feminist satanic sect in which Horn participates. Central to the group is a re-imagining of the Christian Genesis story in which Lucifer is seen as aiding Eve in her struggles against the patriarchy established by God the Father and the male priesthood. Several of the pieces on Kontrapoetik were composed for the sect’s ceremonial practice, and sonically, the album draws from ancient Swedish pastoral music, minor scales, and free contrapuntal progressions.
“FidesMinus” is our first listen in on the upcoming release and it finds the artist tapping into her long-standing interest in drone music. Minimalist in approach but maximalist in execution, the track’s bone-rattling timbres are unsettling, to say the least; but ultimately, their black metal tones and harsh textures are deeply absorbing.
