The debut release of experimental music artist Abigail Toll on Shelter Press: a compositional study using data aesthetics as a means to critically engage with the social and political mechanisms that surround us.
Composed during Abigail Toll's Masters in Electroacoustic Composition at the KMH in Stockholm, the piece is a sonic interpretation of a data set which details higher education trends in Sweden across seven decades. It is placed in conversation with her collaborator artist-scholar Tiara Roxanne's revelatory inquiries into AI bias and data colonialism, where the title references Alexander Galloway's description of atomised points of view "flanking and flooding the world viewed".
The compositional study uses data aesthetics as a means to critically engage with the social and political mechanisms that surround us. Specifically how categorisation impacts the way we move through the world.
Matrices of Vision expands Toll's interest in psychoacoustics and tuning as a durational and experiential response to this data, where flutes, strings, vocals and electronics culminate in an emotional sonic meditation.
Toll transcribes the data through the Matrices of Vision graphic score, which maps the data with frequencies, or partials, that together make up the harmonic series, an approach which she developed with composer Rebecca Lane. What is reflected in the musical gestures—through glissing, beating and cacophony – is a destabilising of rational systems into harmonic chaos, resulting in what Roxanne describes as a kind of flooding of listening and experiencing, from the body and the spaces that surround the body.
Matrices of Vision was premiered as an ensemble performance in Berlin on 30 June 2022 at KM28 and 6 July 2022 at the Klosterruine hosted by KW Institute for Contemporary Art's Pogo Bar series.
Featuring
Lucy Railton, Rebecca Lane, and Evelyn Saylor, along with an introduction by Tiara Roxanne at the Klosterruine.
Performed by
Abigail Toll (C-flute, electronics),
Rebecca Lane (quartertone bass flute, C-flute),
Lucy Railton (cello),
Evelyn Saylor (vocals).
Abigail Toll is an English German experimental music artist based in Berlin. Her psychoacoustic soundworlds combine ambient, electroacoustic techniques which unfold as meditation and upheaval. Her artistic research focuses on data aesthetics and harmonic chaos as a mode for critical thinking, which is often in collaboration with musicians, artists and writers.
Toll studied English Literature and Art History (BA) at Sussex University (Brighton, UK) and is the recipient of numerous scholarships. She was an artist in residence for the Amplify Berlin programme in 2018 with
Caterina Barbieri and Maya Shenfeld, shortly after which she released her first EP Old World | New Ruins in 2019 under the moniker Ionian Death Robes. She is an artistic programmer at HOLON, an interdisciplinary format in Berlin and her work and performances have been shown at ZK/U (Berlin, DE); Klosterruine with KW Institute (Berlin, DE); Kunsthalle Gent (Ghent, BEL); The Lucerne School of Music (Lucerne, CH); LAS – Pawilon (Poznan, PL); Volksbühne (Berlin, DE); Swedish Association of New Music Promoters, (Gävle, SE); l'Ancienne Belgique (Brussels, BEL), UT Connewitz, (Leipzig, DE); Arttheater, (Cologne, DE); Beatpol (Dresden, DE) and with Tiara Roxanne at re:publica (Berlin, DE), Images Festival (Toronto, CA) and AMOQA (Athens, GR) among others.
