In with the in(mate) crowd

Maria W Horn is a Swedish composer whose work explores the inherent spectral properties of sound.

Using everything from analogue synthesisers to choirs, string instruments, pipe organ and various chamber music formats, she loves to mix synthetic sound with acoustic instruments. Horn combines spectralist techniques and site-specific source material in order to explore the inherent memories of buildings, objects or geographical areas.

She’s got two successive albums emerging in the next few weeks. A week tomorrow (January 26), her six track collaboration with folk musician Sara Parkman Funeral Folk is re-issued on Sweden’s Supertraditional label.

Then, on the following Friday, February 2, Panoptikan is released via her own highly respected label XKatedral – the soundtrack to a site-specific installation at an abandoned Swedish prison where inmates were subject to extreme social conditioning, kept in solitary confinement for the first year of their sentences. Its title comes from the shape of the prison, which gave prisoners the impression that they were being observed at all times.

Horn has exclusively shared the second track from the album with Juno Daily readers here.