Sonja
Mutić

Have you ever watched one of those online animations about the scale of the universe? The ones that zoom in from a human being down to the smallest fundamental particles, and then all the way back out – through buildings, continents, planets, stars, and galactic superclusters – to the universe itself? Listening to the music of Sonja Mutić (born Croatia, 1984) is like taking one of those journeys across a sonic landscape, from the subatomic to the interstellar.

When she talks about her music, Mutić speaks of “shifting landscapes of almost nothings” (abgrund, 2017), of “moving through intense electric textures to pulsing harmonic spaces in search of the … core” (thrash|hold, 2019), and of “an intergalactic journey … through various landscapes of different density, sound, and colour” (Nebulae, 2022). These are tactile images, of movement and travel, of distance, from one thing to another. But they are also psychedelic and paradoxical. How else to articulate spaces on the scales of both universes and fundamental particles?

Among her recent works, sh[out] (2018), for spoken voice, electronics, and video, is emblematic. Its text describes details of the composer’s private life (the traumatic ending of a relationship), in the form of a one-sided conversation that becomes increasingly raw and exposing: “I see that I’m talking to myself as always … I’ll suffocate. I’m sorry.” It’s a conversation filled with painful silences, and the work’s second half zooms in on these until they become dense walls of electronic noise, while the voice is atomised into fragments of anguish and memory. Placed under the microscope, the distance between two people is magnified into an all-consuming emotion.

Since sh[out], Mutić’s music has increasingly made use of such extreme expressive states. In brightness (2022), piercing bands of high-strung noise are used to create a sonic analogy to staring directly into a blindingly bright light. Both overwhelmed and emptied of all sensation, the mind enters a heightened meditative state. In Kontakt (2021), loud and physically demanding blocks of sound form and discharge: like black holes, these super-dense masses compress time and space, inexorably drawing everything into them. Yet private reality is never far away from these abstract spaces, whether in the form of the spoken text of sh[out]; a whispered Orthodox prayer towards the end of brightness; or, most strikingly of all, a distorted recording in Nebulae of the song “So This Is Love”, from Disney’s Cinderella. These act like landmarks or nuclei around which contrasting intensities orient themselves; for Mutić they represent the core of her artistic output: the personal points from which her music grows.

Text: Tim Rutherford-Johnson