Marianne Schuppe, voice, lute & uber-bows
music & text by Marianne Schuppe

Marianne Schuppe is part of the Wandelweiser collective and is known for her interpretation of works by Morton Feldman and Giacinto Scelsi. Using the voice and sustained uber-bow, Schuppe presents her first Wandelweiser solo record - eleven ‘songs’ which deconstruct melody, diction, duration and timbre. Engaged in an element of drone, ‘slow songs’ is part folk, part chant, part landscape. Nosongs, her second wandelweiser album, is a consequent continuation of slow songs.

“Basel resident Marianne Schuppe has on past occasions applied her finely controlled yet warmly communicative voice to interpretation of music by Feldman and Scelsi. The 11 tracks on Nosongs are restrained without being austere, somewhat repetitions in terms of melody and cadence, yet sufficiently varied overall. Lapping against her voice, swelling and fading among the words are sonorous arcs that radiate briefly from an electronically bowed lute. Like abstract shapes in a figurative painting, they are integral to the composition and cast mysterious shadows around Schuppe's already enicmatic verbal articulations. Her combination of accuracy and elusiveness, intimacy and distance may also bring to mind Samuel Beckett's most radically reductionist prose works, pure constructions infiltrated by the impure world of given things.” – The Wire, Tabitha Piseno, September 2018

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www.marianneschuppe.com

“Given such a radical re-weighing of all the traditional ingredients of a song, what allows these ‘nosongs’ to still be called songs? Perhaps it is the presence of Schuppe herself, which, refracted and sometimes elusive as it is, remains tangible, in the silences as much as the sounds. “nosongs” takes the ideas and qualities of Schuppe’s previous work and distils and refines them into an even more potent brew. These most tenuous of songs are also song at its most compelling”. – Nathan Thomas, Fluid Radio