Composer Maja Osojnik is another musician to have found a home in Vienna from her native land of Slovenia. Her Doorways (COL LEGNO WWE 1CD 20466 / MAMKA RECORDS MAM08) album arrives with two substantial pieces, both very layered and very blended.
For ‘Doorways #09’, we have a complex graphical score that may have been derived from a particular place in the middle of a forest, and her field recordings from this zone have been collaged together and reprocessed out of all recognition. On top of this miasmic oblong, the Black Page Orchestra – a small chamber ensemble of strings, woodwinds, and piano – add their carefully-tweaked deliberative notes. In terms of the process, this may represent something of a departure from the conventions of tape-composition or musique concrète (as per the press note), and those involved do work hard to maintain those “sound windows” that allow nature’s bounty to spill into the artifice of modernist composition, and vice versa. It’s a delicate balance, at times seemingly spun by hesitant spiders and their young.
The other force at work is Osojnik’s bid to leave behind the cruel city, that modern urban Hell with its thousand and eight distractions, a place where it’s now impossible to tune your mind’s vibraharp to the rhythm of the universe. Yes, like a lot of contemporaries, Maja Osojnik is trying to cultivate her inner Pauline Oliveros. If any listener was therefore expecting a tame pastoral paradise, you can forget that when negotiating the troubling contours of ‘Doorways #09’, which doesn’t want to afford us a moment of peace, unsettling the mind with its rather sombre electronic tones which constantly threaten to win the upper hand in this musical struggle for sanity. I’d hate to hear the other eight ‘Doorways’ in this series; they may lead to circles of Hades.
As to the other piece ‘Blende #01’, the technique here isn’t quite comparable to the above, but it still involves a compositional bed of tape samples on top of which Maiken Beer wails her plaints with her melancholy cello. The samples include recorders played by Osojnik and two others, plus voice fragments; all the musicians involved are women. From what I can gather it’s attempting to write a love song but several steps removed, with added layers of abstraction that distance it from the classical “two arrows of Eros” motif that might reside somewhere at its genesis. This one isn’t directly related to the “flee the city” theme of ‘Doorways #09’, but it’s still quite troubling; Maiken Beer gets pretty agitated in her frantic attempts to express the difficulties of intimacy. Even so there’s more warmth and sincerity here than the haunted-forest piece, and the collective empathy of the women performers carries it through.
All of this music is quite an advance on the Rdeca Raketa releases we heard from this talented player in 2013 and 2016 and 2021. I’ve previously tended to mark her primarily as a vocalist, sometimes capable of spitting out angry noise from her mouth, and always ready to tackle difficult subjects in her work. Doorways reveals another side to her musical personality. Jointly released on her own Mamka Records label. (19/12/2024)