Magda MAYAS & Tina DOUGLAS
“Objects of Interest”

From Magda Mayas
Tina and I met around 10 years ago in Melbourne through mutual musician friends.

Tina has heard me perform in various context and I have visited her studio and seen her perform on multiple occasions. There was an immediate personal and aesthetic connection and conversations over the years revealed shared ways of working – a collaboration seemed natural and exciting.

We are both drawn to improvisational and intuitive processes and we both use individualised objects or tools to create and develop close relationships with these. For me, it’s a symbiotic process: the objects generate ideas, they afford and limit what I do and structure a piece in a fundamental way. Tina’s scores are very sculptural and tactile – the piano and my objects and preparations in them likewise feel sculptural, tactile, embodied -objects, materials and relationships crossing over.

When I started recording music to respond to Tina’s scores, I had a wish to slowing things down, to expose a certain fragility or imperfection and to let one melody or one chord or one little noise be enough. With the piano you can have such an orchestral approach, and I often do that, but with this collaboration I didn’t feel like I wanted this kind of complexity.

There is a certain fragility that I like about the project and the scores: the fact that they are thin paper scores and I transported them from Australia to Berlin, the cut-outs… it’s all very fragile and beautiful and I kind of felt that I wanted to allow the music to be like that too.
Tina Douglas: scores, 2019 -2020
Magda Mayas: piano, clavinet, rhodes, objects

Recorded in Berlin January 2021
Tony Buck: Recording and Mixing
Lawrence English: Mastering