Manja Ristić - Into Your Eyes

A Closer Listen

Over the course of the year, Manja Ristić has been releasing a triptych of intertwined albums, starting with Purpurna vresišta on wabi-sabi tapes, followed by Sargassum aeterna on Rakem Records and ending with Into Your Eyes on LINE.  The first addresses “the trauma imprinted on landscapes,” while the second imagines a dystopian future in which every social and environmental catastrophe has come to pass.  The third is divided into three pieces: the warning, the potential horror, and – although the dream seems unattainable – an alternate, peaceful future in which (depending on one’s interpretation) either humanity has come to its senses or has destroyed itself, leaving infinite space in which the rest of the world might recover and regrow.

Ristić is generous to allow listeners  to”choose their adventure.”  The rub, of course, is that all of humanity is invited to do the same thing, and the majority – at least the majority of those in power – will determine the fate of all flora and fauna.  Echoing Native American and Animist sentiment, Ristić regards each part of the ecosystem as sacred and sentient, a belief that if spread would have a profound effect on environmental policies.  But first comes a warning in the form of “Innocence Overturned.”  The piece rightfully imagines creation unfinished, like a partially-written book.  In the 20th century, a popular t-shirt series sported the line, “On the 8th day, God created (insert your favorite band here).”  Whether or not one believes in a higher power, the principle is intact; we are always in a state of creation, from blood and war to building and art.  Flipping the script, Ristić begins with the ambient wash as a base, then adds the field recordings, an unexpected inversion that imitates policymakers’ approach to the environment.  In so doing, she offers a reminder that every species is simultaneously attempting to write its own script, from beavers building dams to coral reefs attempting to grow.  The sound of water is a memory-check; each of us is born from water, and all creatures once crawled from the sea.

“A Seagull Speaks into the Chimney on the Shore of Lake Geneva” envisions a future with a single character sending a full-throated choir into a pillar of deserted mortar.  Her cry sounds sad, lonely, and confrontational; Ristić imagines her asking all of humanity through the wreckage, “Why have you done this?  Why have you poisoned our oceans and killed our fish?  Why have you burned our lands and flattened our forests?”  But of course there is no answer, for there is no humanity.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  “Prophecy of the World Without Anguish” imagines a different sort of future, in which the waterways of one continent whisper to those of another, in which wind and rain serve as messengers across the sea.  All is at peace.  In this work, the musical ambience meshes completely with the sounds of the natural world: seashell and shrimp, tern and tide.  Is such a vision attainable, as long as humans are in the picture?  The answer is in the piece itself. Ristić’s music lives in harmony with her surroundings; no voice overwhelms another.  By mid-piece, life returns in a flock of flurrying notes.  If we listen to every rock, every bird, every wave, with the same intention, we might reach a new clarity, or at the very least, rediscover the clarity that once taught us that we are not rulers of the earth, but components, like sand and glass, like leaf and loam.  (Richard Allen)