★Mappa
Sing Nightingale
Tip! Two musicians, two different folk music traditions, two soundscapes hundreds of miles apart and one nightingale song. Nightingale melodies inspired this intoxicating folk album by Slovakian flautist Michaela Antalová and Norwegian double bassist…
Explicit Isolation
Tip! Explicit isolation is the third album by the international collective E/I, led by composer and percussionist Szymon Pimpon Gąsiorek. The group’s seven core members came together while studying at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory and the …
Sueños acuáticos
Water ripples all around, and echoing sounds stretch out into a shady sub aquatic habitat. Its dark corners slowly burst into view as cresting noises reveal fresh caverns teeming with liquid life. This is Sueños Acuáticos, the latest sonic exploratio…
Alene Et
On "Alene Et", Michaela Turcerová, a Copenhagen-based, Slovakia born musician, takes minutiae — the tiniest scrapes and breathiest hums — and distorts them into sprawling, collaged webs that barely resemble the instrument in its natural state. Each s…
Aspect Of What
The learning process is just as much an act of healing as betterment. The enabling of solutions through sheer willpower and openness to discovery, or a noble mission, never completed. In that spirit, the latest album by Berlin-based Slovak duo Päfgen…
De Silenti Natura
Biomes are little worlds of organic relationships, full of struggles, symbiosis, and sheer obsolete noise. In "De Silenti Natura," Henrique Vaz is meticulously crafting synthetic auditory biomes, sprouting from their own fuzzy logic. Unfolding across…
m Helux
Budapest’s Alley Catss wants m Helux to serve as both a new station in their work and an homage to the new age-influenced and sample-heavy synthesis of previous albums (such as 2020’s "compassion & paralysis", 2016’s ℶ, or 2021’s "exophage"), and it …
And I Saw My Devil And I Saw My Deep Blue Sea
Inspired by witnessing the broken tension and renewed possibilities of a laptop breaking down at a gig – not to mention the void left behind by the sudden end of a relationship – Pentu’s latest release is a jump-cut menagerie of musical moments. Sewn…
Worlding With Earth
The post-Anthropocene planet isn’t going to be one without humans. It’s going to be a planet where the interdependencies of nature and man are realigned, the lines between the organic and synthetic blur, and we ultimately become something more-than-h…
Mardle: Daily Rhythms of a Pond
Tip! Musician and field recordist Action Pyramid finds magic in the everyday on Mardle, a compelling and confounding suite of hydrophone compositions revealing the sonic 24-hour cycle of the UK’s freshwater ponds. Rooted in Jack Greenhalgh’s sonic re…
Synthetic Bird Music
When you listen to birds, they usually talk about food, sex/family, or anxiety. If they knew about the true nature of humanity's cruel and exploitative relationship with birds, they would be discussing rebellion. Humanity's current trajectory about b…
Ne Lépj a Virágra
A year and a half has passed since Slovak-Hungarian artist Adela Mede self-released her debut album 'Szabadság'. Its liner notes described it as "a navigation", a search through "the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past …
UŠAMI / Sound Mapping Camp: Gemer Gothic Route
*2023 stock* UŠAMI / Sound mapping camp is a project of the mappa editions label. The aim is to bring curatorial activities more to the field, trying to map various cultural and social phenomena from the sonic vantage point. For that we use marginal …
In the End We Begin
Already in its title, Plume Girl’s debut thoroughly lets things go and takes them in – all at once. “In the End We Begin” is the first solo full-length from Sowmya Somanath, a Hindustani classical singer/composer and half of alt-pop duo Felt Out. Plu…
Chimæras
Named after the mythological hybrid of the chimaera, Forces’ first collection for mappa was put together in a similar fashion. The sounds all stem from a fruitful residency at Stockholm’s EMS Elektronmusikstudion in May & June 2022, leading to a boun…
Cave Acoustic
In 2018, New York based composer and improviser Lucie Vítková made recordings in caves in the Czech Republic and an abandoned Gothic church in Slovakia. Their album Cave Acoustics combines a beguiling exploration of the physicality and acoustics of t…
sifting through heaven
Accepting the darkness can be a liberating experience. Realising, and struggling with just who we are and what world we live in requires it. By further complicating the fractured sense of beauty found on his droning 2022 release, ‘I dreamt we found a…
Symposium Musicum
The ever-wonderful mappa continues its liquid/sonic cartographic explorations with a fascinating new album by Symposium Musicum.