Uploaded September 2021 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Felicity Mangan’s intricate compositions, crafted from her extensive archive of field recordings, explore timbres and biorhythmic patterns to create what she describes as “quasi-bioacoustic electronic music”. On her recent solo release for Longform Editions, titled Stereo’frog’ic, Mangan composed a single piece from recordings of frogs, insects and other animals.
In July 2021, Mangan appeared at Italy’s Nextones Festival, where Fact had the rare opportunity to film the Australia-born, Berlin-based artist performing a specially prepared piece on the banks of the River Toce. The performance responded to the waterside location and also used material prepared by Italian artist Niccolò Tramontana, whose multi-platform Radio Safari project explores animals and their sounds.
“I performed an improvised set playing with biorhythms and timbres sampled from my own field recordings of the Toce river and streams as well as everyday sounds such as insects and cowbells, of the Piemonte mountain region in the north of Italy,” Mangan says of the performance. “I’ve also sampled and mixed in bird recordings by Niccolò Tramontana (Radio Safari) that were recorded in the region during the springtime, which he shared with me.”
“This is a site-specific work that was developed for Nextones Festival 2021 – all field recordings were recorded in locations close to the performance site. I am performing live with an Elektron Digitakt to sample and assemble the biorhythmic patterns as well as Ableton Live for playback and modification of the field recordings.”
As well as her solo releases and performances, Mangan has collaborated with Norwegian vocalist Stine Janvin as part of Native Instrument, a project that brought the archive of Mangan together with Janvin’s abstract sonic vocabulary to create “electro-acoustic bug beats”. Together they have released two records, 2017’s Camo on Shelter Press and 2019’s Fire Cracker on Entr’acte.
In November 2021, Mangan will release her next solo record on One Instrument. Titled Bell Metal Reeds, the four-track release is an exploration of the resonance and pitch of the reeds of the classic Hohner Echo Harp mouth organ.
Felicity Mangan on Instagram: instagram.com/felicitymangan
Felicity Mangan on Bandcamp: felicitymangan.bandcamp.com
Felicity Mangan’s intricate compositions, crafted from her extensive archive of field recordings, explore timbres and biorhythmic patterns to create what she describes as “quasi-bioacoustic electronic music”. On her recent solo release for Longform Editions, titled Stereo’frog’ic, Mangan composed a single piece from recordings of frogs, insects and other animals.
In July 2021, Mangan appeared at Italy’s Nextones Festival, where Fact had the rare opportunity to film the Australia-born, Berlin-based artist performing a specially prepared piece on the banks of the River Toce. The performance responded to the waterside location and also used material prepared by Italian artist Niccolò Tramontana, whose multi-platform Radio Safari project explores animals and their sounds.
“I performed an improvised set playing with biorhythms and timbres sampled from my own field recordings of the Toce river and streams as well as everyday sounds such as insects and cowbells, of the Piemonte mountain region in the north of Italy,” Mangan says of the performance. “I’ve also sampled and mixed in bird recordings by Niccolò Tramontana (Radio Safari) that were recorded in the region during the springtime, which he shared with me.”
“This is a site-specific work that was developed for Nextones Festival 2021 – all field recordings were recorded in locations close to the performance site. I am performing live with an Elektron Digitakt to sample and assemble the biorhythmic patterns as well as Ableton Live for playback and modification of the field recordings.”
As well as her solo releases and performances, Mangan has collaborated with Norwegian vocalist Stine Janvin as part of Native Instrument, a project that brought the archive of Mangan together with Janvin’s abstract sonic vocabulary to create “electro-acoustic bug beats”. Together they have released two records, 2017’s Camo on Shelter Press and 2019’s Fire Cracker on Entr’acte.
In November 2021, Mangan will release her next solo record on One Instrument. Titled Bell Metal Reeds, the four-track release is an exploration of the resonance and pitch of the reeds of the classic Hohner Echo Harp mouth organ.
Felicity Mangan on Instagram: instagram.com/felicitymangan
Felicity Mangan on Bandcamp: felicitymangan.bandcamp.com
![Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K3VzakaaY-Q/mqdefault.jpg "Aurélien Bernard - (reed) [Feat. Shabaka Hutchings]
“I am a big advocate of entry points – when you end that circle you always reach the center point,” says London jazz visionary and band leader Shabaka Hutchings in (reed), a meditative portrait of the musician and treatise on ritual and creativity from filmmaker Aurélien Bernard. “The center point is a point of communality in the way that there is no sense of strain in the sound,” continues Hutchings. “It feels like it is a very direct connection between inhalation and exhalation.” The non-linear trajectory between the entry point and the centre, mapped out by the musician with the audience in tow in the moment of performance, is the space Bernard explores in (reed), tracing how a simple ritual, like preparing a saxophone’s reed, can serve as a window into som of the inexplicable power of sound.
“Since sounds differ in their outer expression, this results in space stretching between function and
existence, between performance and effect,” explains Bernard. “It seems the deeper we explore the mystery of sound, the more we are able to trace what’s connecting them. These links are what the musician acknowledges as harmony, which asks how repetition and movements could impact, through rhythm and expression, the search for this harmony.” Though the path of this search might be uncertain, Hutchings’ ritualistic approach to performance enables an initial certainty, the first firm foothold of complex climb, something Bernard picks out in monochromatic close focus, foregrounding his his fingers, his lips and his throat.
Setting Hutchings’ playing in counterpoint against the foggy ambience of Space Afrika‘s 2018 modern classic, Somewhere Decent To Live, Bernard exposes the process of finding solid forms within clouds of what the musician describes as “an undefined source of energy, or power, or knowledge, whatever you want to describe it as.” As though coaxing raw blasts of blistering saxophone from Space Afrika’s dubbed-out smudges, (reed) itself serves as a glimpse into Hutchings’ process, winding its way from words, the nascent sparks of inspiration, through measured inhalation into an urgent exhalation, a burst of sound that arrives through the musician’s ritual, from grounded reed to transcendent frequency.
You can find Aurélien Bernard on Instagram. You can find Shabaka Hutchings on Instagram and his website. You can find Space Afrika on Instagram and at Bandcamp.")
