Songs of St. Mary

“Songs of St Mary” marks the first solo album by Elisabeth Haselberger – recorder player, live electronics artist, and composer, among many other things. As a soloist and in ensembles such as DUO RECORDRONIK, one half of the duo Recorder Recorder or the five-piece Joel Penoan Collective, she has spent more than two decades fearlessly expanding the sonic possibilities of the recorder and developing a compositional language that embraces both advanced noise techniques and pop-inflected structures. attenuation circuit is proud to present this landmark release.

Since April 2024, Haselberger has been working with music technologist Josef Häusel within the framework of the church-based cultural project “St. Maria als …”, exploring the acoustic and spatial reality of the church of St. Maria in Stuttgart. All the sounds used on the album derive exclusively from field recordings made inside the church itself: choreographed or intentionally provoked sound captures, long-term audio observations, and a live-recorded church service form the raw material for the compositions. As St. Maria is scheduled for a complete renovation between 2026 and 2027, “Songs of St Mary” can also be regarded as an aural legacy of the church space as it existed in 2025.

Haselberger approaches the church as a kind of acoustic observer of the people active within it, granting the space itself the status of a conscious, collaborating entity. Through engagement with human-machine interaction and the dynamics of collective and individual coexistence in sacred architecture, the artist developed “Songs of St Mary” as both an artistic and a research-based project.

The term “song” in the title refers to the narrative and empathetic sonic elements within the electroacoustic compositions. While drawing loose inspiration from figures such as Leonard Cohen and Jimi Hendrix, Haselberger also retains a deliberate naïveté toward the genre — a creative stance that allows equal parts inspiration and freedom. Taken together and framed as an album, the “Songs of St Mary” may be heard as a tribute from electroacoustic music to the art of epic songwriting.

For Haselberger, producing “songs” means to open space for the evocative power of acoustic gesture and imagery. For listeners, these pieces invite immersion in a sensuous, ecstatic world of sound.