Martyna Basta - Making Eye Contact With Solitude (2021)

Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spontaneous and confessional improvisations, despite that fact that making them was a way of “making peace with myself and the reality around me” for the Kraków-based artist. The artwork created by costume designer, sculptor and illustrator Julita Goździk and track titles also allude to an interest in rituality, repetitiveness and the cyclical nature of our existence.

Constant listening, instinct and intuition are key to Martyna Basta’s practice. Having studied classical guitar for many years as a child, Basta now focuses her energies on more abstract forms of art as a photographer, musician, member of the PROGREFONIK collective and Radio Kapitał resident. Making Eye Contact With Solitude follows a string of shorter self-releases and is her label debut, and a wonderful introduction to her back-catalogue for many. Slotting in somewhere between the vocal mantras of Cucina Povera, the emotional immediacy of Claire Rousay’s recordings and the carefully crafted sonic environs of Félicia Atkinson, Martyna Basta is carving out a unique corner of the ambient world for herself.