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Image Credit: Superpang

Album Of The Month: Aleksandra Słyż - Tonarium Live

Drones from an unique instrument

Written by Stromkult on .

Aleksandra Słyż is a Polish composer and sound engineer that works in the intersection between classical and electronic music. Her new album Tonarium is out this month on the Superpang label and the first record in our new "album of the month" series!

Słyż composed the album at the Tauron Lab in Katowice, exclusively using the Tonarium instrument-setup that also serves as the album's namesake. The "Tonarium" consists of two interconnected modular systems by Serge (Random Source) and Bugbrand, as well as an impressive looking custom-built analog mixer — those who visited SuperBooth24 might have already come across it at the Tauron Lab booth from last year!

Tonarium 1 96605566

(image credit: Tauron Lab)

Listening to Tonarium Live, one gets a good sense of the instruments' sound over the roughly thirty-five minute long drone piece that stylistically sits somewhere between Eleh and Kali Malone, combining simple sustained drones with a certain analogue rawness and sparkle that lends the sound an "electrical" quality that almost springs out of the very reduced, almost elemental-sounding tones.

As with all drone music, with a record like this, finding the right balance between stasis and change is key — luckily, Słyż has a keen sense for always bringing in new changes at the exact right moment, allowing the sounds to tell a story through their progression, while also providing them with enough space to breathe and develop on their own terms.

Throughout its duration, Tonarium Live always develops with great care for those all-important timbral and tonal subtleties, with metallic overtones, crisp layers of noise and sustained resonances weaving themselves around the fundamental tones through the means of analog additive synthesis methods like wavefolding and frequency modulation.

Contrasting the piece's slow and continuous changes in timbre are occasional — at times almost almost abrupt sounding — chord changes that result in an almost immediate change in the music's overall mood and emotional atmosphere, ranging from darker, guttural moments to more light and melodic, almost sacral-sounding, scenes when the chord-shapes reach for those higher notes.

If there is a central musical idea to Tonarium Live, it then might lie in how the piece plays with this relationship between the abrupt chord changes and the more gradual timbral modulations, showing how a given timbre can suddenly sound very different when presented through different notes and how questions of composition and sound-design are always intrinsically interlinked when it comes to making electronic music.

If you want to find out more about the album, you can also hear Słyż talk about the Tonarium and process behind the album (with subtitles) here:

Tonarium Live is out now on Bandcamp. You can find Aleksandra Słyż' other work on her website and Instagram.