martina bertoni: music for empty flats

Cello player and electronic artist Martina Bertoni's new album Music For Empty Flats delivers masterfully crafted experimental ambient/drone. Martina Bertoni is a Berlin-based cellist and composer. she started playing the cello at a very young age. classically trained, Bertoni's career soon developed around experimental and film music where her cello has been featured in numerous records, soundtracks for awarded movies and TV series and collaborations, among others with Blixa Bargeld and Teho Teardo with whom she recorded several albums and performed at many prestigious festivals all around the globe. The core of her solo work is based on deconstructing the relationship with her own instrument by combining acoustic sound, repetition, analog and digital synthesis. after the EPs In A Paradise You Would Be Happy (2018) and The Green EP (2019) she released her critically acclaimed full length album All The Ghosts Are Gone with the Reykjavík based label Falk in January 2020. On her new album she continues to explore the sonic possibilities of her instrument which she uses as sound source -- sounds which are then processed, adding reverb, feedback and sub-bass frequencies and thus crafting sonic sculptures, rich of atmospheres and frictions. "The inspiration for the title Music For Empty Flats comes from a fraction of time during last winter, while I was visiting Iceland. I had the strange opportunity to spend lots of time listening to music, alone in a brand new but unoccupied -- therefore completely naked -- empty flat in the suburbs of Reykjavík. it was Christmas, it was constantly dark, outside there was snow, inside there was this strange dystopian empty space in which I could listen to my favorite pieces of music in complete solitude. this is when I started sketching the new record." says bertoni. The resulting seven new tracks deliver masterfully crafted experimental ambient/drone, dense and intense but fragile and sensitive at the same time. Recommended for fans of: Hildur Guðnadóttir, Giulio Aldinucci, Lawrence English.