Warm Winters Ltd. / Slovakia / 2022 / CS
The latest release by Australian, Berlin-based artist Felicity Mangan collects a series of works created during 2020 and 2021 and reveals the artist’s fascination with all things water and other related phenomena. Featuring a wide scope of works – a recording of a performance utilising biorhythms and timbres collected from river banks sits next to a monophonic installation piece inspired by both amphibians and amphitheaters or recordings of a human-frog conversation – ‘Wet On Wet’ is fascinating both in concept and sonics, continuing to expand on Mangan’s previous interest in biophonic patterns, quasi-bioacoustics and aural illusions.
“Digging The Pedospheric Vibes” – a major part of the album presented in three parts – is a new electronic music composition by Mangan focusing on farmscape ecology and the important role soil plays in climate change. Assembling sounds created by the flora and fauna of a soil’s ecosystem and utilising a variety of bio-acoustic techniques and microphones to capture seismic vibration from substrate as well as hydro- and airborne sounds, provided the composer with a range of frequencies, timbres and biorhythms to be used as instrumentation for composing electronic music. It’s a disorienting, rhythmically complex piece which seems to point to new frontiers in the relationship between ecological practice and sound art. Felicity Mangan’s artist notes indicate a deep interest in sustainable farming and regenerative agriculture and suggest that this will continue to be a topic of her sound practice going forward.
In other places on the album, the artist toys with our perceptions and expectations. “Dolphin Tricks” is just that – playful, bouncing – but it retains a seriousness through its seeming use of dolphin sounds to create complex, almost urgent polyrhythms. “When Do Frogs Go Out” is the closest to a raw field recording, but the conversation audio is warped, sped up, so how can we trust that the sounds are real? “River Toce” – documented here by FACT Mag www.factmag.com/2021/09/14/fact-live-felicity-mangan/ – is a piece responding to a waterside location, but Mangan’s sound manipulation causes the sounds to stutter, flow in unnatural patterns and appear in strange order to disorienting effect.
'Wet On Wet' was originally set to be released via Klammklang label, whose team (Julia Sharifullina, Stas Sharifullin, Elina Bolshenkova, Diana Romanova and Misha Kurilov) curated the compilation from Felicity Mangan's archives and produced the cassettes in 2021. After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th of February, the label is not releasing any new music. Thus, it is being presented by Warm Winters Ltd.
A portion of the proceeds from physical sales will be donated to humanitarian aid.