"People often think that I'm the "Venus" and I'm coming from the machine, but actually, the term deus ex machina is where got the name," explains artist and researcher Nontokozo F Sihwa, who uses her Venus Ex Machina alias as a vehicle for instrument and circuit building, audio programming, workshop leading, performing and composing.

"Deus ex machina - it's a resolution to a plot that has all of these threads," she continues. "The reason is often something completely absurd, but it explains everything. Then instead of Deus, added Venus, because I was also thinking about Venus as the goddess of love and beauty. was thinking of myself putting love into my computer, and then hopefully getting beauty out."
 
As soon as a resolution appears, Venus Ex Machina unravels it, and the potential to make new connections is infinite.

Sihwa's earliest experience of making music was composing for her choir in Zimbabwe, where she spent her adolescence before moving back to her birthplace Scotland as a teenager. The journey from then up to now and the release of her second album Doxa has been one of continuous questioning across diverse studies and practices. A trained mathematician and audio engineer, she has been delving deep into music theory and history from a young age. But for Sihwa, being interdisciplinary is not just about sustaining her many interests, but also her way of considering questions from many different perspectives. 

When I say interdisciplinary, she tells me the word was popularised in the 1920s by students of humanities and sciences who felt subject classifications were becoming too remote from one another, and a more holistic approach was needed. "It's something that I really stand by," asserts Sihwa over Zoom from her current residence in Providence, Rhode Island, where she's undertaking a PhD in music and multimedia composition.

‍This kaleidoscopic approach is audible on Doxa, which incorporates a larger palette of sounds and tools than her 2021 debut album Lux. Doxa features experiments with aleatoric techniques, Shepard tones, no-input effects sound paths, samples and found sounds, resulting in an assembly of varied rhythms, intermittent visceral noise, distorted melodies and outlying voices. On the beatless stretched-out track "The Abyss", lush electronic oscillations are paired with ghostly wind instruments seeping through radio static; the high-technomad glide of "Galaxy Crimewave" recalls the electro ballads of Drexciya or Legowelt; and the intense folding and unfurling beat of "Katak" has a hard and resolute edge, perhaps influenced by Sihwa's formative years participating in Northern England's free party scene. "When I am creating sounds I look for crunchiness, feedback or something that makes my ear tingle," she says, citing Throbbing Gristle as an influence. "Most recently, have been exploring darkness in timbre."

Thematically, the album continues Sihwa's explorations into future cybernetics and ancient mythology. Her juxtaposition of these seemingly remote topics is also a way of questioning the periodisation of time itself. These ideas intersect on "Zeus And Metis" - where the track's title, taken from an ancient Greek myth, converges with the composition's shimmering digital sounds-providing an opportunity to reflect on the way history and the future are organised and presented to us. "Who do those distinctions serve?" Sihwa asks, questioning both the structuring of epochs, and the colonial imposition of Greenwich Mean Time. "Because, as we know, this myth of progress is often used to sell us certain political ideologies: this idea that there's a linear history of progress from then until now, and then the future will be better. And that's really not what's happening... these terms that take, I don't consider them as dogmas."

This is underlined in the album's title, Doxa: a common belief, rather than justified truth. "There's much that we also know without it having been given to us through the classroom," she continues.

In addition to composing. Sihwa's sound art work considers listening practices and sound transmission. When building an effects unit called Scree, fort she created the controller circuit from scratch and programmed in C++ using the Bela platform, she added an extra dimension: "What's new or unusual about it is that added a radio transmitter to the output circuit. Meaning that the unit can be used to broadcast a live performance on the FM spectrum, and I am keen to trial this in the near future."

In addition to composing. Sihwa's sound art work considers listening practices and sound transmission. When building an effects unit called Scree, fort she created the controller circuit from scratch and programmed in C++ using the Bela platform, she added an extra dimension: "What's new or unusual about it is that added a radio transmitter to the output circuit. Meaning that the unit can be used to broadcast a live performance on the FM spectrum, and I am keen to trial this in the near future."

The Venus Ex Machina vehicle has also led Sits to work in intensive collaborative projects. In 2018 at CTM Hack Lab in Berlin, she took part in the development and production of a "pirate Al opera”, an experience she found particularly profound a she saw her own ideas "transformed through other people's minds". The same year she led a workshop at Moogfest in North Carolina, teaching attendees to build their own radio transmitter, a DIY exercise again designed as an opportunity to reconsider a regulated system. "It was really magical," she fondly recalls. "You tuned the radio, and amidst all of the commercial radio, there was your own signal. The principle behind it was this idea that we have the spectrum of frequency, and it's so pervasive and permeates our bodies, we walk through it, we live in it, but we're not allowed to access certain parts of it. What's that all about?

"That was kind of what was challenging," she concludes. "I was asking people to do a thought exercise on what it feels like and what it means to claim some of that space for yourself." ˚