Release of the LP truth can you hear me and glass works by Lina Zylla
vocal & voice loops & samples produced, arranged, composed and performed by Lina Zylla
rec, mix & master by Simon Kummer
recorded at Städtisches Atelierhaus Baumstrasse Munich
© 2022
The colours and forms of sound: Soundscapes by Lina Zylla by Fabiola Arellano Cruz
Can sound be formed and materialised, can we touch it? What colours does music have, can we hear them? The merging of senses that are not normally connected, known as synaesthesia, is part of the way Lina Zylla's artwork is perceived. While one of our senses feels stimulated, another is involuntarily also activated. Her mix-media-work crosses the poetic, pictorial, acoustic, sculptural and performative planes. However, all these planes constitute an approach to painting for her. Though, this conception of painting is not purely a two- dimensional pictorial element, limited to the frames of a canvas; instead, it is an aesthetic experience, one that challenges key assumptions about the dimensions and limitations of a genre, and about the notion of reality as a whole.
By experimenting with the element "sound", the artist adds a spatial dimension to her visual language. In doing so, she tries to create new concepts and new connections with the same materials and objects, but in new contexts. Derived from the word landscape, the suffix “scape” denotes “an image or representation” of something, specified by the initial element, in this case “sound”. We move through Zylla’s soundscapes, sometimes at ease with them, sometimes with caution, and sometimes with confusion. Each beat of her performance allows us to enter a timeless and ephemeral space, organically and intuitively. And, just when we think we don't need to understand and can free ourselves from comprehension, her chanted mantras bring us back to a familiar place. We recognise their meaning, or at least we think we do. Her overlapping voice and her singing oscillate between the spiritual and the ironic understanding of reality, without an explanation. On the contrary, it is up to us to grant this sonority an image, evoking our own memories and deriving our own meanings. These images are not static, but in flux and uniquely individual. As can be heard in one of their chanted mantras: “you produce a whole new reality”.
In experiencing these soundscapes, we ask ourselves: if the contours between genres and senses blur, overlap, melt, transgress, clash, twist and only briefly, harmonise, is it even conceivable or desirable to define them? Or isn't contemporary art itself polysemous?
Text edits: Naomi Ho
The producing and the realization of the LP is founded by NEUSTART KULTUR und Stiftung Kunstfonds.