We rely so much on our mediated exchanges that we often forget the importance of a passing moment, the power of a single deep breath in this world, a spark that we can feel with our whole body and soul, the sounds and colors of our surroundings, the dawn and the dusk, the wind, the smell of spring. We perform an inundation of repeated tasks only to hide further away from this spark and to be removed from our living, breathing body and the world around us, further down into a silo of disproportionate non-living, fabricated breaths.
Olga Anna Markowska’s ISKRA is a journey of search for this spark, an attempt to break away from a certain bubble of the past, an ignition towards a new way of making and thinking about music and a search for new values. Beautifully crafted, ISKRA’s sound textures balance between the modern classical and ambient genres, always moving between the two with delicately performed melodies on cello, zither and electronics as in tracks like “A heart is an eye.”
Markowska’s spark resembles revisiting a journey from Dawn to Dusk and all the colors, sensations, breaths and memories in between. From the quiet cinematic musings of “Unfolding”, “Borderland” and “Helix” to the evoking “Blue Spring” and “Train Ride Home” or the Basinski-reminiscent vaporous “Fever Dream”, we find Markowska laying out a wonderful, wide and diverse collection of compositions and approaches that consistently stay true and close to her intimate vision of new values. The cello-centered opening and closing tracks fittingly titled “Dawn” and “Dusk” allude to these two powerful moments when a new day is born and its exit through the sun setting to sleep and perhaps the end of the journey.
ISKRA offers a deep, inviting and engaging listen through Markowska’s new microcosm in the making. We hear her intimate past resurfacing as a fleeting memory through her experimentations on her instruments of choice. Each piece marks a closure and a departure and it forms a kind of tribute to places, sounds and memories as they are revisited and metamorphosed through new lenses of making and being with sound and music. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
