Svetlana Maraš (1985, Serbia) is a composer and a sound artist with a significant experience in performing experimental and improvised music. She composes acoustic and electro-acoustic music. She is the author of several music installations, tape music, music for experimental films and a number of pieces in the field of applied music and new media.

She studied composition at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade, and gained advanced training by taking numerous  courses  around  the  world.  She  received residency at the prestigious “Bang on a Can” festival of contemporary music, where she worked alongside some of the biggest names of American contemporary music, such as David Lang, the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for music, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon.

In her work, Svetlana examines the boundaries of musical being, realizing her musical ideas through sound, text, physical objects and digital technology. Her fascination with connections between objects and music resulted in her post-graduate thesis Embodied composition: Treatment and meaning of physical object in experimental music and sound art, which she wrote during her studies at the Media Lab at the Aalto University in Helsinki.

Poetica micro-mix is a tape composition created in April 2011. It was made with an original technique of micro cut-ups and was formed as a combination of already existing recordings of exclusively vocal music, vocal improvisations and pieces of sound poetry. As the main (and only) material, the capital pieces by artists belonging to this genre are used, such as Lilly Greenham, Luciano Berio, Maja Ratkje, Cathy Berberian and many others, and they are combined in an electric mix, corresponding to the “dj mix” idiom which originates from the contemporary pop culture. By combining very short cut-ups of diverse sound qualities, I constructed sections of a specific and complex texture, or opposed to them, I reconstructed what can be understood as rhythmic and melodic patterns. Adopting the influences of the afore-mentioned idiom, this composition, with every performance, has to be accompanied by an enclosed list of tracks it consists of, even though they don’t occur chronologically in my composition.

For more information on her work go to www.svetlanamaras.com