Echtzeitmusik / Improvisation / Komponierte Musik

Tina Douglas/ Magda Mayas

OBJECTS OF INTEREST

ROOM40

The translation of the visual into the acoustic is a powerfully esoteric practice. For Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, this nexus of sensory curiosity has provided a perfect point from which they have maintained a decade long conversation around light, vibration and the score as a provocation toward unlocking new approaches and methodologies to seemingly known instruments. On Objects Of Interest, Mayas takes her cues from Douglas’s scores in an exchange of materiality and a dialogue of interpretive acoustics. Together they unlock a dy- namic, but refined interrogation of the piano, clavinet and rhodes expanding these familiar musical objects into points of unfamiliar resonance and unexpected beauty.

Lawrence English, Room40

Tina and I met around 10 years ago in Melbourne through mutual musician friends.

Tina has heard me perform in various context and I have visited her studio and seen her perform on multiple occasions. There was an immediate personal and aesthetic connection and conversations over the years revealed shared ways of working - a collaboration seemed natural and exciting.

We are both drawn to improvisational and intuitive processes and we both use individualized objects or tools to create and develop close relationships with these. For me, it’s a symbiotic process: the objects generate ideas, they afford and limit what I do and structure a piece in a fundamental way. Tina’s scores are very sculptural and tactile - the piano and my objects and preparations in them likewise feel sculptural, tactile, embodied -objects, materials and relationships crossing over.

When I started recording music to respond to Tina’s scores, I had a wish to slowing things down, to expose a certain fragility or imperfection and to let one melody or one chord or one little noise be enough. With the piano you can have such an orchestral approach, and I often do that, but with this collaboration I didn’t feel like I wanted this kind of complexity.

There is a certain fragility that I like about the project and the scores: the fact that they are thin paper scores and I transported them from Australia to Berlin, the cut-outs… it’s all very fragile and beautiful and I kind of felt that I wanted to allow the music to be like that too.

Magda Mayas

Objects of interest is a collaboration between multi media artist Tina Douglas and composer performer Magda Mayas. The project explores materiality and gesture between the visual and the sonic represented through a variety of artistic outputs.

concert, record and book release ( Room 40) and website launch
A collaboration between multi media artist Tina Douglas and composer performer Magda Mayas.
Magda Mayas performs 4 tactile visual scores by Tina Douglas exploring materiality and gesture between the visual and the sonic. The release is accompanied by a book with reflections and dialogues about the work process and excerpts from the scores.
A website with further audiovisual content and interactive scores will launch simultaneously
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1304232/1304233
Funded by Musikfonds

Order CD/Book at Room40 - Matte laminated and embossed CD with insert card plus extensive book featuring an in conversation between Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, plus scores, documentation and photographs. Digital album releases November 5, 2021.

Read Bodies Keep The Score. The Wire, November 2021 (Issue 453) article by Peter Margasak.

Read Fifteen Questions Interview with Tina Douglas - Tactile Scores

TINA DOUGLAS

 https://www.tinadouglas.net/
Is a multi-disciplinary artist with an emphasis on painting. Explorations have included DIY conductive painting, constructed works, 3D printing errors and refuse, improvised sound via interactive conductive paintings and felt works, sound reactive video.

MAGDA MAYAS
https://www.magdamayas.com/
Magda Mayas is a composer performer living in Berlin.  Over the past 20 years she developed a vocabulary utilizing both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, using amplification, preparations and objects that become extensions of the instrument itself. Alongside the piano, Mayas performs on a Clavinet/Pianet, an electric piano from the 60s with strings and metal chimes, where she engages with noise and more visceral sound material, equally extending the instrumental sound palette using extended techniques and devices. 

Tina Douglas, Magda Mayas: »Point«
Tina Douglas, Magda Mayas: »Sediment«
Tina Douglas, Magda Mayas: »No thing«
Tina Douglas, Magda Mayas: »Intersect«

Magda Mayas, piano, keyboards, objects, multichannel playback

Objects Of Interest

Tina Douglas - Visual Scores

Intersect | Sediment | No thing | Point

Intersect score for Magda 2019

Cut paper, each a4 size

intersect 1 x 15 (adapted piano scroll idea)

Played as randomly discover juxtapositions of cut out shapes of each other and layers.

Intuitive response

Length random