I remember when Fe-Mail was a "thing". Already like 20 years from the album that seemed anomaly at the time, two female artists making noise. Got the early stuff, but missing couple things. Recently got link from person who sends a lot of links to me. Like mentioned, a lot of things posted on forum, interview links etc, is something people send me. Not myself actually surfing online and searching noise, hah...
Thanks to the reminder and link to website of Ratkje, I read some of the material on the site and listened some new recordings. Checked out what has been said about her on the forum. Not much, but clearly there are some fans here!
Quote from: Lazrs3 on December 19, 2021, 11:45:59 AM
Quote from: Pigswill on December 19, 2021, 10:48:47 AM
Mara S.K. Ratkje - Mara
I want to get her Voice album, her solo album Stalker is good. Her Fem@il project with Lasse Marhaug - All Men Are Pigs was my first Paypal purchase overseas off GameBoy Records.
https://majaskratkje.bandcamp.com/album/maja-s-k-ratkje-corona-lockdown-concert-for-tusk-festival-2020Some of the latest work are on fine line of being a bit too playful for me, while others feel inspiring. Fast moving, very detailed and always shifting highly textured experimental pieces. Like the covid lockdown concert from 2020.
QuoteThe building block of Ratkje's soundworld is her own voice, sampled, manipulated and processed in real time. Whispers and babbles are rolled into micro-loops of rhythmic texture. Sung notes are stretched into choral drones. Samples sped up as if in whirling tape decks sound like sci-fi laser beam battles. Talking voices come and go the mix, chattering, whispering conspiratorially, then pitching up into chipmunk squeaks. Other speaking voices sound like aliens, distorted, unintelligible, as if they are tuned in from the stratosphere or the ether. There are burbling, watery, bubbling bath sounds, layered over whispers and squeaks. It is an amazing palette of sound from a simple set up.
It feels alchemical, the base human voice transmuted into clicking, clanging, crackling ambient dub noise gold. It feels like a dream, in that it all seems to make sense and yet you never quite know how you arrived where you are. The changes in the flow of the music are constant, yet almost imperceptible, as each layer fades in and out independently of the others. As the last delicate, floating voices are rolled up into whizzing overclocked tape reels to bring the performance to an end, the camera lingers for a moment on a piece of calligraphy pinned to the wall. "Lyset du treng finst" it says, "The light you need is there" in Ratkje's native Norwegian, from a poem by Helge Torvund. A positive message in times of pandemic, and maybe also a user guide to this open-ended music that can be interpreted differently by every pair of ears.
Perhaps being legitimate artists, she has neat website to read, see & hear things, unlike most of noise projects:
https://ratkje.no
