Wet On Wet

The latest release by Australian, Berlin-based artist Felicity Mangan collects a series of works created during 2020 and 2021 and reveals the artist's fascination with all things water and other related phenomena. Featuring a wide scope of works – a recording of a performance utilising biorhythms and timbres collected from river banks sits next to a monophonic installation piece inspired by both amphibians and amphitheaters or recordings of a human-frog conversation – 'Wet On Wet' is fascinating both in concept and sonics, continuing to expand on Mangan's previous interest in biophonic patterns, quasi-bioacoustics and aural illusions.

"Digging The Pedospheric Vibes" – a major part of the album presented in three parts – is a new electronic music composition by Mangan focusing on farmscape ecology and the important role soil plays in climate change. Assembling sounds created by the flora and fauna of a soil's ecosystem and utilising a variety of bio-acoustic techniques and microphones to capture seismic vibration from substrate as well as hydro- and airborne sounds, provided the composer with a range of frequencies, timbres and biorhythms to be used as instrumentation for composing electronic music. It's a disorienting, rhythmically complex piece which seems to point to new frontiers in the relationship between ecological practice and sound art. Felicity Mangan's artist notes indicate a deep interest in sustainable farming and regenerative agriculture and suggest that this will continue to be a topic of her sound practice going forward.

In other places on the album, the artist toys with our perceptions and expectations. "Dolphin Tricks" is just that – playful, bouncing – but it retains a seriousness through its seeming use of dolphin sounds to create complex, almost urgent polyrhythms. "When Do Frogs Go Out" is the closest to a raw field recording, but the conversation audio is warped, sped up, so how can we trust that the sounds are real? "River Toce" is a piece responding to a waterside location, but Mangan's sound manipulation causes the sounds to stutter, flow in unnatural patterns and appear in strange order to disorienting effect.