CHRISTIAN DUKA - PERSONAL AESTHETIC RESEARCH
Self released- Digital
A series of tracks through which I explore my personal musical aesthetic within ambient/experimental electronic music. Each track is a recording of free improvisation sessions using software electronic instruments.
Special thanks to:
Henrique Matias and Mark Geary: you have both been a great source of inspiration for the making of this EP.
Avsluta, Juj and Luca Schiavoni: you have been a great source of inspiration in the process of finding the confidence to release my music.
Last but not least, special thanks to psychotherapist Jan McHugh for guiding me out of depression, a process without which this release wouldn't have been possible.
Produced in September 2019
Released March 28, 2023
Music by Christian Duka
Mixed & Mastered by Christian Duka
Artwork by Christian Duka
Releases April 1, 2022
Experimental, Ambient, Drone
VĀDIN - BLACK TORTOISE
Utter- Vinyl LP
Utter presents the second full-length album by enigmatic duo Vādin - a collaboration between sound artists and performers Christian Duka and Lucie Štepánková (aka Avsluta). “Black Tortoise” is a voyage accompanied by the uncanny, the shadow-dwelling specters and arcane symbolism derived from ancient Chinese astronomy.
“Astrologia” opens the album with an eerie torrent of droning voices and glassy, percussive interventions, leading into the patiently unfolding opening of the “The Presence” with it’s ominous narrative riding the swelling, thunderous rhythms culminating in swarms of hallucinatory chaos. The doom of “Calliope” follows, infused with cavernous, beastly vocalisations which lure the listener into “The Furnace”, a drowsy kaleidoscope of rhythms weaved together with Štepánková’s mother-tongue narration. And further on still, into the make-believe world conjured up by the buzzing and swarming objects overheard on “Plateau”.
Available on limited vinyl and digital formats. A special fold-out pamphlet is included with physical copies.
Spoken word by Lucie Štepánková.
Mixed at SAE Institute by Christian Duka
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.
Transferred and cut by Helmut Erler at D&M.
Artwork designed by Marco Maldarella.
Released April 1, 2022
Experimental, Spoken Words, Ambient, Drone
VĀDIN - TAIYŌ
Utter- Double Vinyl LP
Utter presents the debut album ‘Taiyō’ by Vādin, a new collaborative project from Lucie Štěpánková (Avsluta) and Christian Duka.
“Vādin is a shapeshifter formed through sound, a seismic energy. ‘Taiyō’ is Vādin’s first word. It was improvised and recorded in the Welsh wilderness over three days within a makeshift yurt studio using analogue and digital synthesizers, voice, location field recordings and amplified objects. ‘Taiyō’ is an entity emerging from the process of opening up, inviting, curiously exploring and being vulnerable; it is inspired by the flow of life in all its finite magic, intangibility and imperfection.
The album opens with the drizzling drone scenery interweaved with shivering whispers of ‘The Seven Laws’ followed by the disintegrated rhythms and warm ripples of ‘First Contact’. ‘Merging’ is a multi-layered organism of spiralling undulations, astral droplets and hypnotic pulsations while ‘The Forest’ narrates a sensuous connection with the world where the suggestive monologue and extra-terrestrial pearls float atop galloping liquid rhythms. ‘Sufi Trance’ is a slow-burning cyclone, an ecstatic rite, a hypnotic pilgrimage into the centre of the Sun - ‘Taiyō’ - which brings the journey to a stirring climax with its morphing drops and electrifying trills.”
Available on limited double vinyl and digital formats.
Mixed at SAE Institute by Christian Duka
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.
Transferred and cut by Helmet Erler at D&M.
Artwork designed by Marco Maldarella.
Experimental, Spoken Words, Ambient, Drone
MARMO - INTROSPECTIVE ELECTRONICS
Online PodcastMARMO is a deeply emotive improvisatory collaboration between London-based sound artist and curator Christian Duka and Bologna-based visual artist and producer Marco Maldarella who is also the wizard behind Introspective Electronic's sumptuous visual identity.
This chapter was improvised and recorded exclusively for Introspective Electronics and features only unreleased original material. It is a cruise through lush ambiances, rich textures, hypnotic rhythms and melancholic harmonies inhabiting someplace between waking life and dreams. An acute sense of tactile intimacy and deep introspection emerges as the air particles vibrate with an abundant spectrum of emotions. Swells and plateaux of sounds move like breath entwined in the fragile existence of life itself
Experimental, Dub, Techno, Ambient, Drone, Noise
CHRISTIAN DUKA - AURAL CINEMA
Binaural Sonic Experience"Aural Cinema" is the binaural version of a piece originally composed for the event "Art In Flux: Levitations" and premiered at the Central St Martins (London) on a 8.2 sound system for a blindfolded audience.
The piece explores:
- The heightening of interoception and proprioception, the awareness of the inner and physical state of one's own body.
- The ability for sounds to produce internal cinematic experiences carrying strong personal meaning.
The composition is based on the psychoacoustic illusion of beating, otoacoustic emissions (the ability of ear canals to respond with sound to particular frequencies, as if they were loudspeakers) and the body's resonance to low frequencies.
All of these phenomena are best experienced on a 3D sound system. This particular version has been decoded in Binaural, giving the impression of a tridimensional sound field when listened to via headphones - listening to the piece in this way, with closed eyes, offers the opportunity for an aural cinematic experience to happen.
I invite you to enter your personal cinema and be entertained by the script of your own subconscious.
Released March 22, 2020
Composed by Christian Duka with Auditif 3D sound software
Sound Art, Experimental, Psychoacoustics
MARMO - ROOMFUL OF MIRRORS
Digital AlbumThis album tells many stories at once; how failing relationships can be truly informative experiences, mainly allowing you to understand what you don’t want. How reaching this conclusion opened the doors to a magical encounter, and how one of us fell in love with love itself by witnessing such connection in third person.
It explains the difficult process of crystallising one’s own identity, which in our case means the confusion we have always felt when attempting to define our music. It tells that in the end we are very simple people and while we have struggled to “curate our public image” or “knock on the right doors”, we've always managed to be true to ourselves.
In the end, it is another chapter of a bigger story about an extraordinary long-distance relationship based on sound and love. The sounds we use when words fail. The love we pour into our passions, our jobs, our relationships and everything that surrounds us.
Collage of excerpts taken from live improvisations.
Written in Bologna on Christmas 2018
Performed by Marco Maldarella & Christian Duka
Spoken words on "Only Lovers Can Tell" by Giorgia Masina
Mixed & Mastered by Christian Duka
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Spoken Words
MARMO - S U B L I M E D E A T H
Digital AlbumS U B L I M E D E A T H is an improvised jam, performed on Christmas Day, 2017. The recording sat on the recesses of backup hard drives, untouched and unlistened to until Easter 2018.
The duo engaged in a long-distance listening session of the album, realising they did not recognise the recording at all. Gobsmacked and tearful by its emotional power, they both convened that the jam was indeed a finished album.
The result is a half hour journey of death and rebirth through relentless slow beats and gigantic drones.
Released December 26, 2019
Industrial, Noise, Drone, Power Electronics
DVKA & F.ICH - Livescaping #Moon
Digital AlbumSecond instalment of a series of improvised music performances inspired by natural surroundings. Recorded and filmed in one take to capture emotions and mental states as they manifest in the moment.
“In 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds.“
~Steve Lacy
Official Video
Location:
Teffont Magna, Salisbury SP3 5QS
51°05'40.4"N 2°01'34.5"W
released January 31, 2018
Drone, Ambient, Ritualistic
DVKA & F.ICH - Livescaping
Digital AlbumFirst instalment of a series of improvised music performances inspired by natural surroundings. Recorded and filmed in one take, to capture emotions and mental states as they manifest in the moment.
“In 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds.“
~Steve Lacy
Music by Christian Duka and Francesco Redente
Mastering by Christian Duka
Location:
Teffont Magna, Salisbury SP3 5QS
51°05'40.4"N 2°01'34.5"W
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Left-field
MARMO - MARMO
Digital Album“The opening track wastes no time in cradling its listener with a dreamy ambience. Marked by heavy breathing and distorted vocals reminiscent of a hypnagogia, before the album swallows you whole. Like the tree / bed on the cover, the music walks the line between that which has been left to flourish in solitude, or else perish from non-use. Somehow it achieves both of these states simultaneously. The individual sounds breathe life, yet together shroud its guests in rest(lessness). Consequently, the listener easily finds themselves in a state of suspended animation. On the one hand the sounds of life support flood the senses - mechanical grinding, industrial humming, machinic heartbeats. Meanwhile the dream world continues to bleed through with its soft melodies, distant gregorian chants, and vocals bearing similarity to auditory hallucinations. It's a liminal state that is as comforting as it is emotionally confusing.
The details of the album converge to similar conclusions, down to the track IDed by file names, or the unedited image album cover. It's unpolished and unfinished. But not in that there is more work to be done, rather as if it has been left in a state unadultered by the outside world. Any more edits and the album risks exiting the threshold between what is man-made and what exists only in a dream, or perhaps in the memory of its creators.
As a whole the work is mature as it is honest - it doesn't pretend to be yet doesn't hide itself either. There's an autobiographical flavour, a journey by its authors to find themselves in sound while uncovering much more than unfamiliar territory. As the album closes, very little is left behind. As quickly as the feeling that something remarkable is happening came, so just as fast does it vanish. Something does linger, but as a question than any lasting impression - is this even real? “ - Maria Kva
MARMO was performed in a state of stream of consciousness in Foce Varano, Gargano Region, Southern Italy.
Released December 25, 2017
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Left-field
CHRISTIAN DUKA - PERSONAL AESTHETIC RESEARCH
Self released- Digital
A series of tracks through which I explore my personal musical aesthetic within ambient/experimental electronic music. Each track is a recording of free improvisation sessions using software electronic instruments.
Special thanks to:
Henrique Matias and Mark Geary: you have both been a great source of inspiration for the making of this EP.
Avsluta, Juj and Luca Schiavoni: you have been a great source of inspiration in the process of finding the confidence to release my music.
Last but not least, special thanks to psychotherapist Jan McHugh for guiding me out of depression, a process without which this release wouldn't have been possible.
Produced in September 2019
Released March 28, 2023
Music by Christian Duka
Mixed & Mastered by Christian Duka
Artwork by Christian Duka
Experimental, Ambient, Drone
VĀDIN - BLACK TORTOISE
Utter- Vinyl LP
Utter presents the second full-length album by enigmatic duo Vādin - a collaboration between sound artists and performers Christian Duka and Lucie Štepánková (aka Avsluta). “Black Tortoise” is a voyage accompanied by the uncanny, the shadow-dwelling specters and arcane symbolism derived from ancient Chinese astronomy.
“Astrologia” opens the album with an eerie torrent of droning voices and glassy, percussive interventions, leading into the patiently unfolding opening of the “The Presence” with it’s ominous narrative riding the swelling, thunderous rhythms culminating in swarms of hallucinatory chaos. The doom of “Calliope” follows, infused with cavernous, beastly vocalisations which lure the listener into “The Furnace”, a drowsy kaleidoscope of rhythms weaved together with Štepánková’s mother-tongue narration. And further on still, into the make-believe world conjured up by the buzzing and swarming objects overheard on “Plateau”.
Available on limited vinyl and digital formats. A special fold-out pamphlet is included with physical copies.
Mixed at SAE Institute by Christian Duka
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.
Transferred and cut by Helmet Erler at D&M.
Artwork designed by Marco Maldarella.
Experimental, Spoken Words, Ambient, Drone
VĀDIN - TAIYŌ
Utter- Double Vinyl LP
Utter presents the debut album ‘Taiyō’ by Vādin, a new collaborative project from Lucie Štěpánková (Avsluta) and Christian Duka.
“Vādin is a shapeshifter formed through sound, a seismic energy. ‘Taiyō’ is Vādin’s first word. It was improvised and recorded in the Welsh wilderness over three days within a makeshift yurt studio using analogue and digital synthesizers, voice, location field recordings and amplified objects. ‘Taiyō’ is an entity emerging from the process of opening up, inviting, curiously exploring and being vulnerable; it is inspired by the flow of life in all its finite magic, intangibility and imperfection.
The album opens with the drizzling drone scenery interweaved with shivering whispers of ‘The Seven Laws’ followed by the disintegrated rhythms and warm ripples of ‘First Contact’. ‘Merging’ is a multi-layered organism of spiralling undulations, astral droplets and hypnotic pulsations while ‘The Forest’ narrates a sensuous connection with the world where the suggestive monologue and extra-terrestrial pearls float atop galloping liquid rhythms. ‘Sufi Trance’ is a slow-burning cyclone, an ecstatic rite, a hypnotic pilgrimage into the centre of the Sun - ‘Taiyō’ - which brings the journey to a stirring climax with its morphing drops and electrifying trills.”
Available on limited double vinyl and digital formats.
Mixed at SAE Institute by Christian Duka
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk.
Transferred and cut by Helmet Erler at D&M.
Artwork designed by Marco Maldarella.
Experimental, Spoken Words, Ambient, Drone
MARMO - INTROSPECTIVE ELECTRONICS
Online PodcastMARMO is a deeply emotive improvisatory collaboration between London-based sound artist and curator Christian Duka and Bologna-based visual artist and producer Marco Maldarella who is also the wizard behind Introspective Electronic's sumptuous visual identity.
This chapter was improvised and recorded exclusively for Introspective Electronics and features only unreleased original material. It is a cruise through lush ambiances, rich textures, hypnotic rhythms and melancholic harmonies inhabiting someplace between waking life and dreams. An acute sense of tactile intimacy and deep introspection emerges as the air particles vibrate with an abundant spectrum of emotions. Swells and plateaux of sounds move like breath entwined in the fragile existence of life itself
Experimental, Dub, Techno, Ambient, Drone, Noise
CHRISTIAN DUKA - AURAL CINEMA
Binaural Sonic Experience"Aural Cinema" is the binaural version of a piece originally composed for the event "Art In Flux: Levitations" and premiered at the Central St Martins (London) on a 8.2 sound system for a blindfolded audience.
The piece explores:
- The heightening of interoception and proprioception, the awareness of the inner and physical state of one's own body.
- The ability for sounds to produce internal cinematic experiences carrying strong personal meaning.
The composition is based on the psychoacoustic illusion of beating, otoacoustic emissions (the ability of ear canals to respond with sound to particular frequencies, as if they were loudspeakers) and the body's resonance to low frequencies.
All of these phenomena are best experienced on a 3D sound system. This particular version has been decoded in Binaural, giving the impression of a tridimensional sound field when listened to via headphones - listening to the piece in this way, with closed eyes, offers the opportunity for an aural cinematic experience to happen.
I invite you to enter your personal cinema and be entertained by the script of your own subconscious.
Released March 22, 2020
Composed by Christian Duka with Auditif 3D sound software
Sound Art, Experimental, Psychoacoustics
MARMO - ROOMFUL OF MIRRORS
Digital AlbumThis album tells many stories at once; how failing relationships can be truly informative experiences, mainly allowing you to understand what you don’t want. How reaching this conclusion opened the doors to a magical encounter, and how one of us fell in love with love itself by witnessing such connection in third person.
It explains the difficult process of crystallising one’s own identity, which in our case means the confusion we have always felt when attempting to define our music. It tells that in the end we are very simple people and while we have struggled to “curate our public image” or “knock on the right doors”, we've always managed to be true to ourselves.
In the end, it is another chapter of a bigger story about an extraordinary long-distance relationship based on sound and love. The sounds we use when words fail. The love we pour into our passions, our jobs, our relationships and everything that surrounds us.
Collage of excerpts taken from live improvisations.
Written in Bologna on Christmas 2018
Performed by Marco Maldarella & Christian Duka
Spoken words on "Only Lovers Can Tell" by Giorgia Masina
Mixed & Mastered by Christian Duka
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Spoken Words
MARMO - SUBLIMEDEATH
Self released - Digital AlbumS U B L I M E D E A T H is an improvised jam, performed on Christmas Day, 2017. The recording sat on the recesses of backup hard drives, untouched and unlistened to until Easter 2018.
The duo engaged in a long-distance listening session of the album, realising they did not recognise the recording at all. Gobsmacked and tearful by its emotional power, they both convened that the jam was indeed a finished album.
The result is a half hour journey of death and rebirth through relentless slow beats and gigantic drones.
Released December 26, 2019
Industrial, Noise, Drone, Power Electronics
DVKA & F.ICH - Livescaping #Moon
Digital AlbumSecond instalment of a series of improvised music performances inspired by natural surroundings. Recorded and filmed in one take to capture emotions and mental states as they manifest in the moment.
“In 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds.“
~Steve Lacy
Official Video
Location:
Teffont Magna, Salisbury SP3 5QS
51°05'40.4"N 2°01'34.5"W
released January 31, 2018
Drone, Ambient, Ritualistic
DVKA & F.ICH - Livescaping
Digital AlbumFirst instalment of a series of improvised music performances inspired by natural surroundings. Recorded and filmed in one take, to capture emotions and mental states as they manifest in the moment.
“In 15 seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have 15 seconds.“
~Steve Lacy
Music by Christian Duka and Francesco Redente
Mastering by Christian Duka
Location:
Teffont Magna, Salisbury SP3 5QS
51°05'40.4"N 2°01'34.5"W
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Left-field
MARMO - MARMO
Digital Album“The opening track wastes no time in cradling its listener with a dreamy ambience. Marked by heavy breathing and distorted vocals reminiscent of a hypnagogia, before the album swallows you whole. Like the tree / bed on the cover, the music walks the line between that which has been left to flourish in solitude, or else perish from non-use. Somehow it achieves both of these states simultaneously. The individual sounds breathe life, yet together shroud its guests in rest(lessness). Consequently, the listener easily finds themselves in a state of suspended animation. On the one hand the sounds of life support flood the senses - mechanical grinding, industrial humming, machinic heartbeats. Meanwhile the dream world continues to bleed through with its soft melodies, distant gregorian chants, and vocals bearing similarity to auditory hallucinations. It's a liminal state that is as comforting as it is emotionally confusing.
The details of the album converge to similar conclusions, down to the track IDed by file names, or the unedited image album cover. It's unpolished and unfinished. But not in that there is more work to be done, rather as if it has been left in a state unadultered by the outside world. Any more edits and the album risks exiting the threshold between what is man-made and what exists only in a dream, or perhaps in the memory of its creators.
As a whole the work is mature as it is honest - it doesn't pretend to be yet doesn't hide itself either. There's an autobiographical flavour, a journey by its authors to find themselves in sound while uncovering much more than unfamiliar territory. As the album closes, very little is left behind. As quickly as the feeling that something remarkable is happening came, so just as fast does it vanish. Something does linger, but as a question than any lasting impression - is this even real? “ - Maria Kva
MARMO was performed in a state of stream of consciousness in Foce Varano, Gargano Region, Southern Italy.
Released December 25, 2017
Electronic Music, Drone, Ambient, Left-field