Merche Blasco / Lucie Vítková Blasco / Vítková / Anette CD1: Studio Session CD2: Live Performance On this album Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco explore cyborgness through their relationships with their instruments. Lucie perceives the accordion as an extension of their body - sound, matter, and movement locked in a self-generating cybernetic loop. Merche built Anette, a 3D printer, as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space; in return, Anette printed thimble-microphones Merche wears on her fingers, which render the machine's unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears.
Performed through an octophonic system, the wearable microphones expand Merche’s hand gestures to sonically fill the performance space, surrounding the audience with the sensation of being within Anette’s busy, mechanical body. For this album, the eight signals broadcast by Merche’s thimble-microphones were later mixed down to stereo, replicating the spatial image created live. This album is the record of an inter-material conversation among the trio of Vítková, Blasco, and Anette (technically a quartet since Merche was six months pregnant at the time), in which human and non-human elements of the cyborgian system are in constant interflow. The album includes a text written by Shelley Hirsch. Merche Blasco is a multimedia artist and composer based in New York, and currently living in Berlin. She designs and builds imprecise technological assemblages that catalyze embodied forms of live electroacoustic composition and new modes of listening. Through her constructed devices, Merche attempts to establish a more horizontal relationship with other entities, distancing herself from parameters of precision, power, and control. As an alternative form of performance, she engineers collaborative spaces with instruments that are given their own agency, in compositions where her body and the live exploration of organic materials are central elements. Her work also increasingly focuses on designing participatory sound performances in public spaces to connect strangers and their surroundings through collective music-making and listening. Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice, and dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects), while in their improvisation practice, Lucie works with the characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Lucie's recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes and instruments. They have put together two ensembles – the NYC Constellation Ensemble (focused on musical behavior) and the OPERA Ensemble (for singing instrumentalists). Their teachers and collaborators include George Lewis, Miya Masaoka, and Petr Kotík, among others.

 
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