Magda Drozd – Songs for Plants (vinyl)

The title of Magda Drozd’s debut album, Songs for Plants, goes beyond the invocation of an unusual implied audience and indicates her desire to challenge conventional listening experiences. Plants have been central to the writing-process of the eleven-song LP by the musician, artist, performer, and curator. Drozd’s sound palette includes synthesizers, field recordings, a violin, guitar, her own voice, and recordings of cacti, the latter of which were made using the latest recording technology that allowed Drozd to render audible the sound of the prickly pear for example. In this way, Drozd raises questions about authorship while she also shows up the absurdity of the relentless pursuit of new sonic sources in contemporary experimental music. All this leaves Drozd with a highly poetic album located somewhere between experimental electronics, ambient, off-pop, and dub techno. Tender and abrasive at times, she manages to combine the melancholic, critical, hopeful, and distanced—as if Grouper, Jan Jelinek, The Space Lady, and Hierglyphic Being got together to re-record Alec Empire’s Low on Ice.

Written, recorded, and produced by Magda Drozd, 2019
Published by Präsens Editionen
Text on B1 written by Nicola Genovese
Additional mixing on A1, A3, A4, and A7 by Roman Drozd
Additional mixing on A4, B1, B3, and B5 by Samuel Savenberg
Mastered by Stefan Betke
Graphic design by Kaj Lehmann
Drawings by Magda Drozd
Executive production by Remo Bitzi