Serbian sound artist Manja Ristić’s work often relates to the environmental degradation of seas and oceans. Sargassum aeterna moves further into the future with a conceptual composition framed by a fantastical narrative set in a dystopian, apocalyptic future in the year 2221, when today’s social and ecological contradictions have reached their most extreme conclusions. Ristić warns about the outcomes of disregard for human life and the planet’s ecology in the Mediterranean and along Europe’s borders, the looming imperial wars, the genocides committed with impunity, and the steady rise of fascism.
In this dystopian future, the Sargassum Vortex would have skewed the planet, making the magnetic field erratic and unstable. Rainless days would become scarce, and the oceans would be excavated destructively. Human rights politics are nonexistent; the rule of law bends with the value of weapons and algorithms. Only the island of Mljet, once in the Adriatic Sea, and the Scottish Isle of Arran, «home to the child-God Luka» (presumably depicted on the album cover), would remain as the last natural zones outside the Vortex, sheltered by a dome that recreates the ancient climate, alongside insects, small mammals, and the few remaining traces of marine life. Communication between the Global North and Global South is possible only in one place: a portal within the old Yugoslavian brutalist monument named Popina. All other interactions occur solely in the realm of dreams.
Ristić created a four-part suite of evocative, almost cinematic, and highly immersive soundscapes made of field and hydrophone recordings (with contact mikes made by British sound artist Jez Riley French) at Nazaré, Portugal; Isle of Arran, Scotland; Islands of Mijet and Vrnik, Croatia; and Popina, Serbia, with subtle electronics and violin playing. These meticulously crafted but quite sparse soundscapes use «the technique of estranging familiar sounds» and create a sense of ominous stillness, a deep meditation on ecological apocalypse.
These soundscapes radiate faithfully the fragility of our planet, and an existential melancholia about the future that may have already begun to bleed into our present. Still, the beauty and the compassionate spirit of Ristić’s haunting and moving music may mark the way to saving our planet and may motivate us to take action for a positive change. Therefore, Croatian musician-journalist Lujo Parežanin describes the listening experience to Sargassum aeterna as ‘listening-as-speculation’.
Eyal Hareuveni
Manja Ristić (field recordings, hydrophone recording, violin, EMS Synthi 100, Atlantic shells & found sounds)
