So much of Manja Ristić’s work reshapes my perception of environments and landscapes, and the sonic imprints they leave on us. Lisboa is a unique entry in her vast catalog, born from wandering freely through the Portuguese capital without predetermined paths or agendas. The sounds here feel tactile, almost physical in their presence. Gentle city soundscapes are imbued with emotional undercurrents, heightening the lived-in quality of this work. It is conversational and approachable. The album progresses from intimate ecological details to moments of collective political action, tracing how memory lives inside a city’s acoustic character rather than its monuments. Ristić creates soundworlds with so much depth that we can’t help but be enveloped in these ideas, wrapped wholly in their aural embrace.
Lisboa is OUT NOW. Manja’s website is HERE and her Bandcamp is HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories with sound? When did you first become aware of listening as something active, something you could do with intention?
I recently answered similar questions in an interview for Anxious Musick Magazine, and also in a piece for 15 Questions Magazine about animal sounds, so I won’t go into too much detail here. But to highlight the essentials: I began classical musical training very early, at the age of six, and by nine I had already won Third Prize at the Republic Competition in the former Yugoslavia, performing a full solo violin recital with piano. My musical upbringing was taken very seriously by many pedagogues, some of them internationally renowned, so my earliest memories of sound are inseparable from disciplined, highly intentional listening.
From the beginning, listening was never passive; it was a tool, a method, a form of cognitive and somatic training. Intention, however, developed differently. It required psychological maturity, mental discipline, and a growing awareness of how listening shapes perception, emotion, and action. Over time, this evolved into a complex musical instinct and a deeply intuitive relationship with sound creation.
This legacy is something I now share with my students — whether in violin and chamber music, improvisation, sound art, interdisciplinary composition, or therapeutic work with children and youth with special needs. Listening, for me, has been an embodied, transformative practice since childhood.
You work extensively with field recordings and site-specific listening. When did you first start recording the spaces around you? What prompted that shift from passive listening to active documentation?
It began playfully in elementary school, recording things on a tape recorder. Later, as the use of portable recorders became part of professional music training, recording became a natural extension of my violin practice. Early studio work, radio sessions, and ensemble performances all contributed to a growing familiarity with recording culture.
But the real turn toward environmental sound happened about twenty years ago. I began improvising in nature, experimenting with natural objects, and gradually incorporating field recordings into electroacoustic performance. A pivotal moment was my friendship with Irena Pivka and Brane Zorman from the Cona Institute in Slovenia. Their deep engagement with environmental sound opened a new direction for the organisation, and I joined them in several projects. That collaboration helped crystallise my own approach to soundscape composition.
To answer your question directly: I don’t believe in “passive listening.” Bodies listen continuously, whether we are consciously aware of it. And I was never interested in documentation for its own sake. Traditional anthropology often treated the field as a site to be mined for data and transported back to the centre of knowledge production. I try to do the opposite: to let the field destabilise me, challenge my methods, and unsettle my expectations of control.
“Field recording” is a technical term, but conceptually it’s insufficient. What I aim for is closer to co-listening, co-composing, and entering the field of mutual transformation and co-existence.
You open the liner notes for Lisboa with Pauline Oliveros and her work in the Fort Worden cistern. What is your personal relationship to Deep Listening practice? How has it shaped your approach to recording and composing?
I referenced Oliveros because that moment in the cistern marked a profound shift in contemporary listening practice. Space was no longer treated merely as an extension of an instrument, but as an active responder — a communicative partner beyond the performer’s control, a communication channel, rather than just a tool for an acoustic phrasing. I also wanted to highlight that exact event as the actual beginning of the practice that will later develop into a listening philosophy, and to remind us how much power lies in a space suddenly awakened by sound, even without any additional intellectual or other meaning attached to it. That event opened a philosophical horizon for listening as relational and spatial, and still echoes decades later.
I’m not a formal practitioner of Deep Listening. My training spans meditation practices, Gestalt therapy, energy work (including a therapeutic system called Systemic Constellations), rigorous discipline of classical music, and formal and informal education in the various fields of culture. My creative system is an intuitive synthesis of these influences. Its is evolving, and I consider it authentic, as a compound of skills and experience.
I’m especially attracted to what I call the “negative space” of cognition: the unarticulated, the not-yet-embodied, the unknown. Sometimes this requires unlearning and quieting a complex musical mind. Deep Listening on some topics resonates with this, but my walking into the field emerges from a bit broader interdisciplinary foundation.
The liner notes move between hard physics (gravitational pull, pressure gradients, electromagnetic exchange) and somatic experience. How do you navigate that boundary in your own practice? Are you trained in acoustics, or did you learn through listening?
I don’t see these as separate domains. Physics provides a basic context, a way to articulate the energetic relations I’m trying to describe. But in practice, the boundary between somatic experience and physical reality is nonexistent. They are interdependent, co-constitutive, and share the same energetic context. I am trying to open the space to talk about energy dynamics. There is very little talk about that within the discipline, and in my opinion, it is a fundamental aspect of working with sound.
In Mnemosonic Topographies, I write about sound as a sensory-epistemic force: a medium through which memory, space, and perception co-emerge. From that perspective, the distinction between “hard physics” and embodied experience is an intellectual artifact, not an experiential truth. My point is, the boundary can be placed there only with an intellectual narrative, methodology, or trend that does not question biases.
I navigate my practice with an interdisciplinary approach, different for every subject I choose to work on; it is an adaptive practice. Depending on the project, it may involve musical expertise, conceptual research, field experience, or energy work. Listening remains at the centre of it.
You spent several days in Lisbon in April 2024, in permanent motion through the city. What took you there? Was this a deliberate field recording expedition, or did the album emerge from another kind of journey?
I was invited to a residency in Barreiro, across the Tagus, by OUT.RA – Associação Cultural, for a collaborative programme with Portuguese artists Joana de Sá and Joana Guerra. I used the opportunity to visit Lisbon beforehand — a city I had long wanted to experience.
It wasn’t a deliberate field recording trip. My first sonic encounter with Lisbon was simply lived experience. I don’t always plan locations in advance; I prefer to be chosen by the place rather than impose a preconceived agenda. Sometimes the recording is witnessing, sometimes performative, sometimes simply the joy of co-existing with a place and its inhabitants.
I love your description of the Lisbon recordings as “free roaming and intuitive movement.” What does that look like for you? How do you move through a city when you’re listening this way?
In this case, I moved freely, without fuss, without elaborate rigs, and mental states verging on catharsis. Try to imagine the conceptual filmmaking from a single continuous take, but with sound only. That’s the closest analogy.
You introduce the concept of “mnemopolitics” in relation to Lisbon’s layered history. Can you explain what you mean by this term? How does memory become political through sound?
Mnemopolitics refers to the ways memory is shaped, contested, and distributed across a society, not only through monuments or narratives, but through sensory experience, personal histories, and various cultural and subcultural appropriations. In Mnemosonic Topographies, I describe sound as a potential carrier of spatial memory: a medium through which histories, traumas, and cultural identities are continuously renegotiated. The concept of mnemopolitics challenges and extends mainstream history, trapped in the biases of power distribution, and rather unfolds subtle mechanisms of building memory through the turbulent evolution of the social fabric, and its effects on the environment. The political aspect of the memory of the place penetrates energy dynamics and is inseparable from it; that is, the possibility for the soundscape to capture both. If you ask me what the political aspect of the place could be, the answers are inter-directional: from social activity, significance, environmental treatment, the nature of human activity, or simply any form of life occurrence, which is always interrelated to some system.
“In Lisbon, memory is not a monument but an acoustic phenomenon, dispersed, refracted, and continually renegotiated.” How is this different from other cities you’ve recorded? What makes Lisbon’s relationship to its own history audible in this particular way?
Lisbon’s soundscape carries a unique interplay of openness and density. The city’s geography, wind corridors, hills, and the ocean movement create a specific fluctuation of energy through uniquely resonant chambers. Its history, marked by maritime expansion, colonial entanglements, and monumental seismic catastrophe from 1755, all of it trapped in the sonic imprint: the port, the multilingual street life, the echoes of cultural appropriations, the specific infrastructural hum, the closeness to nature. Lisbon’s memory is less about fixed symbols and more about atmospheric continuity, like a living archive carried by voices, tides, and thresholds. Every place has its sonic imprint; some are lush perceptually, they sound “nice”, but some are lush energetically, their complexity unravelling a deep entanglement with the past, and containing complicated historical dynamics. I tend to be attracted to those places.
The album moves through a sequence you describe as “sonic waypoints,” from micro ecologies to collective action. Can you walk me through that trajectory? Why structure the album this way?
I wanted to play with and gently place a critique of the conventions of field recording by creating a quasi-archival form that is intentionally misleading. The “waypoints” are a kind of fake cartography: they point to specific locations while concealing the many others that surround and shape them, showing that there is no such occurrence as an isolated sound. The poetry of the place trapped in sound stays intact and is not biased by my own poetic perception. For example, the album starts with an airport; there are sounds of an airport in it, but then suddenly one can hear me entering an elevator, and when I exit it, I enter a different space, a vibrant city street with a lot of traffic and people. Those transitions are hidden narratives, and they tell the parallel stories about the place and about how memory constructs continuity from discontinuity.
I had a conversation about this with Mark, to whom this album is dedicated, and he asked me the same question. I believe there is a huge importance in exploring the form conceptually, and playing with contradictions, decomposition, and all possible tools one can employ while structuring an artwork that are making deflection from general trends. The structure emerged from the material itself. I followed the internal logic of the recordings, allowing the arc to self-generate.
The infrastructure sounds — transit, labour, thresholds — appear later in the sequence. Why position them there rather than earlier? What role do they play in the album’s arc?
The textual narrative moved intuitively from environmental to anthropogenic. If the work had been focused on a specific research question, the order might have been different. But here, the arc reflects the lived encounter: from natural atmospheres to human-made systems, from micro-ecologies to socio-cultural articulations. It intuitively went from Nature to the socio-cultural articulation of the overall effort in experiencing the place. But again, in its essence, the whole thing emerges from the material and dynamics of my movement through the place.
The text ends with an urgent statement: “It is a soundscape that must be preserved at all costs.” What’s at stake? What would be lost if Lisbon’s soundscape changed?
Identity. Cultural memory. The accumulated historical effort of countless generations. Lisbon’s soundscape carries the traces of Portugal’s vast maritime and colonial history, from the Age of Discovery, establishing a vast global empire from Brazil to Macau, trade routes, and making one of Europe’s first colonial powers — the last to dismantle its overseas territories, with its rule ending as late as 1999. Shaping of the world as we know it. Soundscape could be perceived as one of the last living witnesses.
How do you balance documentary impulses with compositional ones? Are you trying to capture Lisbon as it is, or are you creating something new from what you recorded?
I follow the source within the material, but the encounter is mine. There is no such thing as capturing a place “as it is.” The moment we listen or record, we intervene. We change the field; the field changes us. Different people recording the same place will produce different results, unless they are intentionally mirroring or plagiarising, which unfortunately happens and is deeply harmful to the integrity of sound practice. There is a lot of that too, and I find those practices quite abusive and toxic for the art of working with sound, which in its very essence carries the power of holism.
My aim is reciprocity with the field I am entering, not extraction. Composition emerges from the relational event, not from a desire to fix or represent data.
Lastly, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sound of my son’s giggle.
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