Maja S.K. Ratkje – River Mouth Echoes

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje

CD – Tzadik
In a nutshell: acoustics with tenuous electronica, edited traditional music instruments, sensitive sonorities, highly calibrated but destabilizing. The performance is heartfelt and there’s an extreme diversity within the passages, improvisation, and in the creative continuum of its elements. It is suspended between electro-acoustics, chamber music and vocal research. An attitude that expressed through stylized forms, not aseptic ones. Nevertheless it still relates to the authorial – typical of cultivated music – although pervaded by tangent digital tensions. In the end it’s enthralling because of the textures and of the timbre range. This is a collection of extreme registers that can be defined as experimental. It is a fantasy for violas inspired by the poem “Et Os” by the Norwegian writer Karin Sveen, whose title translated in English means “estuary” (hence the Album title “River Mouth”), a zone of land and water where different runnels converge.