Merce BLASCO – Lucie VITKOVA
“Blasco/Vitkova/Anette”

2023 release
On this album, Lucie Vítková and Merche Blasco explore cyborgness through their relationships with their instruments. Lucie perceives the accordion as an extension of their body — sound, matter, and movement locked in a self-generating cybernetic loop. Merche built Anette, a 3D printer, as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space; in return, Anette printed thimble-microphones Merche wears on her fingers, which render the machine’s unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears. Performed through an octophonic system, the wearable microphones expand Merche’s hand gestures to sonically fill the performance space, surrounding the audience with the sensation of being within Anette’s busy, mechanical body. For this album, the eight signals broadcast by Merche’s thimble-microphones were later mixed down to stereo, replicating the spatial image created live. This album is the record of an inter-material conversation among the trio of Vítková, Blasco, and Anette (technically a quartet since Merche was six months pregnant at the time), in which human and nonhuman elements of the cyborgian system are in constant interflow. The album includes a text written by Shelley Hirsch.