magda mayas + tina douglas: objects of interest

The translation of the visual into the acoustic is a powerfully esoteric practice. For Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, this nexus of sensory curiosity has provided a perfect point from which they have maintained a decade long conversation around light, vibration, and the score as a provocation toward unlocking new approaches and methodologies to seemingly known instruments. On Objects Of Interest, Mayas takes her cues from Douglas's scores in an exchange of materiality and a dialogue of interpretive acoustics. Together they unlock a dynamic, but refined interrogation of the piano, clavinet and Rhodes expanding these familiar musical objects into points of unfamiliar resonance and unexpected beauty. From Magda Mayas: "Tina and I met around ten years ago in Melbourne through mutual musician friends. Tina has heard me perform in various context and I have visited her studio and seen her perform on multiple occasions. There was an immediate personal and aesthetic connection and conversations over the years revealed shared ways of working -- a collaboration seemed natural and exciting. We are both drawn to improvisational and intuitive processes and we both use individualized objects or tools to create and develop close relationships with these. For me, it's a symbiotic process: the objects generate ideas, they afford and limit what I do and structure a piece in a fundamental way. Tina's scores are very sculptural and tactile -- the piano and my objects and preparations in them likewise feel sculptural, tactile, embodied -objects, materials and relationships crossing over. When I started recording music to respond to Tina's scores, I had a wish to slowing things down, to expose a certain fragility or imperfection and to let one melody or one chord or one little noise be enough. With the piano you can have such an orchestral approach, and I often do that, but with this collaboration I didn't feel like I wanted this kind of complexity. There is a certain fragility that I like about the project and the scores: the fact that they are thin paper scores and I transported them from Australia to Berlin, the cut-outs... it's all very fragile and beautiful and I kind of felt that I wanted to allow the music to be like that too."