Daphne X - The Plumb Sutra (2022)

“I wanted to make neopagan folk songs that would imitate the local muiñeiros, taking the interlacing lines of the landscape as harmonic progressions. And this is what came out,” says Greek sound artist Daphne X, about her new album, The Plumb Sutra.

The seven tracks here take in everything from the synthetic chirps and splashes of ‘Irimia’s Bones Crackle’ through spooky piano laments on ‘Eliseo’s Teeth Chatter’. While ‘Halo Dragon’ is a rabble rousing electro-acoustic folk dance of bounding percussion and polyphonic vocal lines. Mostly, the eight tracks are a beautiful document of Daphne X’s playful openness to the sounds and stories around her.

The Plumb Sutra was recorded in an isolated rural house in a semi-abandoned region of Galicia. Specifically, along the banks of the Miño, a river which, according to Galician folklore, was home to witches, animals and amphibian human in peaceful coexistence. The site is now threatened by pollution from a major landfill in nearby Eiroás.

“There we spent our days with the only other neighbour, Otilia, an 85-year-old farmer, who had never left the place,” explains Daphne X. “Her presence and the stories we heard from her, the soft rain that would fall continuously, the absolute serenity of the place, the fog that would cover everything in the absence of sun, the distant moans of the cows, the little squeals of the mink that would nest in our walls, the hooting of the owl in the attic, the purring of our shared cat, the sole company of the birds, the frogs, the crickets, the apparent discretion of human intervention in this vast area that sheltered us in those 6 months made us turn inward and grow like Otilia´s giant zucchinis.”

From collages of rain drops to diaristic travelogues with her friends, Daphne X’s recordings are dominated by moments and settings seeping into her music. No doubt the magic and history of Miño and its colourful inhabitants permeate every sound in Plumb Sutra’s fantastic sonic world.

“During this time, I moved a few centimetres away from the computer and instead sat at the piano and by my typewriter, researching local folk stories, polyphonic singing traditions and byzantine music notation, and recovering minor Asian refugee songs from the back of my glottis.”
Daphne X is a Greek sound artist, based between Barcelona and Linz. Equally infatuated with mundane and virtual objects, she uses collected, amplified, and synthesized sounds, and voice, to explore and expose chimeric and unconventional forms and textures. Her music has been broadcasted on BBC3 Radio, Noods, and Tuskio.se, and written about by publications such as A Closer Listen and the Quietus.

Her work discusses the relationships between human and non-human agencies, emerging technologies and spirituality, mundane life, and fiction. Through a variety of formats, she explores economies of collective composition, environmental listening, and communal healing.

She’ s currently hosting a show on movement_athens radio called Sonic Utopias, participates in the Linz-based label Wirtshaus Secret, co-running the curating platform Cachichi.