In her artistic practice, Magda Drozd is deeply concerned with listening. The artist and musician not only investigates the ways her audience listens but also continually hones her own auditory sensibility. For her second album, 18 Floors, Drozd trained the latter on the Lochergut, an iconic residential estate in Zurich’s Kreis 4, which she called home for several years. Over the past two years, she compiled a corpus of field recordings in and of the apartment building, which became the basis for an examination of how sound produces knowledge. The result challenges current assumptions about buildings, urban living, and the ecologies of cohabitation. In the context of her project, Drozd conceives of the building as a living organism rather than a collection of static material. The field recordings served as raw material for the compositions, which were woven into eleven speculative tracks consisting of analogue and digital sounds, including violins, guitars, synthesizers, drum machines, and Drozd’s voice. The music moves between sound art, ambient, and experimental electronics, occasionally showing flashes of pop, indie rock, and R&B.
