Hjärtrot is a sonic work born from the meeting between Johanna Ståhl’s vocal expression and Cha Blasco’s electronic soundscapes.

The piece draws its point of departure from Johanna’s folk ballad Gertrud, reimagined into an entirely different musical landscape, far from traditional form, yet carrying its emotional resonance in new and abstract layers. Rooted in the Swedish folk tradition, yet unbound by it, the project asks:

What remains when the ballad is stretched, deconstructed, and performed in an expanded sonic language? When does a ballad cease to be a ballad — and what emerges in its place?

On October 9, 2020, in a brief moment when pandemic restrictions were lifted, Hjärtrot was performed live in a vast underground water reservoir — a place of eerie acoustics and natural reverberation, with up to 22 seconds of feedback. Rather than resisting the acoustic challenges, the performance was composed to enter into dialogue with the space itself — treating the room not as a neutral container, but as an active instrument.

All electronics were created live in real-time, with no backing tracks or pre-recorded arrangements. Johanna’s voice served as the sole sonic source — sampled, transformed, and expanded into immersive soundscapes through Cha’s live processing. The electronic world unfolded in direct response to the voice, moment by moment.

Audience members descended several meters below ground into the heart of the mountain — a symbolic gesture during a time of collective vulnerability and social isolation. The atmosphere was intimate, fragile, and charged. The piece was performed only twice, on the 9th and 10th of October, to a very limited audience, rendering it both rare and ephemeral.

This marks the beginning of a series of ongoing collaborations between Johanna and Cha where voice and electronics meet in experimental forms, guided by intuition, presence, and shared resonance.
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