Christina Vantzou - The Reintegration of the Ear

To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. An act beneath language. Through this reintegration, the ear becomes a quiet form of resistance.

Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello). Rather than a formal structure, the composition unfolds through intuition led by breath, resonance and subtle intelligence. What emerges is an acoustic ecology: an ongoing negotiation between perception and expression. An ethical act that reorients us toward the elemental.

Paired with "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness", a companion suite of domestic fragments and temporal drift, the album unfolds as a dialogue between the inward persistence of what is felt and the outward pull of what remains unresolved. A continuum that traces the porous boundaries between the intimate and the infinite. Through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instrumentation, Vantzou maps atmospheres charged with psychic and temporal residue. "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness" unfolds as a precisely sequenced constellation of sonic impressions gathered across nearly a decade, where the real and the imagined bleed into one another, like the mutable moods of places where time folds, drifts and reassembles itself.

Time here is embodied, a porous medium through which perception drifts and reforms, stretches, contracts, and suspends itself, blurring the boundary between presence and impermanence. Within this fluid temporality, intuition replaces structure; sound becomes a site of renewal rather than arrival. Each resonance carries the trace of what has passed and what is yet to unfold, an ever-shifting threshold where listening becomes a form of existence and time reveals itself as both instrument and witness.

The two side-long pieces are presented alongside digital renderings by the Belgian visual artist Eva L’Hoest, a longtime collaborator, extending this sensorial language into image. Her surreal images, containing fragments of Greek iconography - a sphinx in a coffee cup, votive ears, arrangements of laurel leaves - mirror Vantzou’s sonic landscapes in texture and tone. In Vantzou’s work, sound becomes a portal to states of perception where time bends and consciousness softens. The Reintegration of the Ear listens not only to the world but through it — a quiet, expansive meditation on presence, transformation and the invisible architectures of relation.

The Reintegration of the Ear will be released by Editions Basilic on February 20th, 2026 as an edition of 300 LPs with printed inner sleeves.