Freezer is an album of raw and emotive improvisations by Serbian violinist-vocalist Tijana Stanković. Her chosen theme, the proverbial ‘freezer’, makes for a stark setting, serving as both a musical metaphor and literally the echoey meat freezer in Bratislava where the music was created and recorded. “Freezer is a place of cruelty and hope,” Stanković says. “It is a metaphor – an inner place where thoughts and feelings wait to be addressed.”

Though a dedicated free improviser, Stanković’s background in folk and Ethnomusicology puts her in touch with an ancient emotional syntax. Her key tools – violin and vocals – both yearn with an organic and creaking fragility, tied irrevocably to old cultures. As a means to express, they offer boundless possibilities (something Stanković has long explored in a vast array of collaborative groups, ensembles, and projects), but locker herself in the Freezer, on these recordings Stanković gains access to some potent introverted sonic realms, putting them in stasis to keep them at their most genuine, honest, and revealing. “To freeze,” she explains, ”is to preserve.”

Each of the four lengthy improvisations captured on Freezer takes its aesthetic to a logical endpoint. For example, ‘From dust and shine’ is a trip into gentle bow strokes over jarring and… more
credits
released February 2, 2020

Vocal, prepared violin and bow by Tijana Stanković
Recorded by Jonáš Gruska in LOM freezer in Petržalka
Mastered at The House of What You See
Cover by Jonáš Gruska and Lucia Kovaľová
Text by Tristan Bath
Released by LOM as LOM17 in 2020