EXCERPTS FROM SELECTED REVIEWS

"I guess I always thought of harp as a delicate instrument suited for Debussy and played by long-haired pretty women. I had no idea it could be souped-up, amplified and multi-tracked, producing a blow-your-socks-off new sound—indeed a whole new realm of sound. Victoria Jordanova, originally from Yugoslavia, lives in America now and we are the richer for it, as she has single-handedly revised the script for harp and harp music. As performer, composer and curator, as well as producer of her own CD label, Jordanova is breaking new ground not only with the harp but with performance, improvisation and concert programming to boot."
-- Fanfare Magazine

"An atmosphere achieved through research and conscious use of electro acoustic techniques in order to create sound spaces and dimensions yet unexplored."
-- Fred Audin, Classique Info Disque

"Jordanova uses a variety of harps and swings their lofty or humusy properties through technologies of her choice, always shaping new realms of audio; never playing it safe, never retorting to clichés or down-home formulas or principles. She never lets tradition wear her down. On the contrary, she shakes all those gluey, sticky memories off. This is a rare quality, not least among contemporary and avant-garde artists, who oftentimes are the most traditional ones, sticking to and canonizing an avant-gardism that was in swing a few decades earlier, in the 1960s or -70s. Victoria Jordanova, on the other hand, breathes fresh air and moves through uncharted sonorities, which may contain shades and nuances of familiarities, but which, nonetheless, never completely enters those well-trodden paths. Her music moves in that spellbinding dream angle where everything is a wee bit off; rubbing off that hard-to-define strangeness on your present moment in the continuous flow of existence. Such an originality and non-conforming stubbornness can't be found many places."
-- from Ingvar Loco Nordin's review of In A Landscape album

"Suspended was a lovely piece presented through a delicate and subtle performance. Jordanova beautifully captured a mood that she is known for, a kind of contemplative, simple, and powerful aural motif combining minimal harp sounds and pitch-shifted percussive noise. It's all suggestive of a kind of sound blueprint for a structure yet to be built. She has a tightly controlled focus to her work, a singularity of vision."
-- NewMusicBox Magazine

"Friday night opened with harpist, Victoria Jordanova, performing her piece Suspended. She pulled many wonderful sounds from her instrument, starting with octaves and sitar-like overtones, moving into deep moaning drones, profoundly calming as they vibrated and resonated through the hall."
-- San Francisco Classical Voice

"Victoria Jordanova once again delves into a distinctive and subtly intricate soundscape in her 9/11 commemorative Outer Circles... Although Outer Circles is decidedly digital, the composer sustains a tactile veneer by processing the sound of her own voice as she whispers and intones the names of the dead. The finished result drifts somewhere between Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room and Alan Lamb's long wire music. The disembodied sound floats inside the brain like a blurry distant memory that refuses to be suppressed. It's constantly transmitting, ensuring that its presence will not be ignored."
-- NewMusicBox Magazine

"Panopticon deliriously blended music by Victoria Jordanova with a mosaic-like video by Relja Penezic...the score kept our interest, with its rueful, aloof rewiring of folk influences."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Jordanova's work illustrates a unique lexicon of timbre, sonority and color ....Full of guitar-like timbres, microtonal pitch bends and percussive sound box work, Dance To Sleep is as solemn, dark and mysterious as Miles Davis' tribute to Duke Ellington He Loved Him Madly... Her work is mysterious, evocative and thought-provoking throughout, yet never is it brittle or jarring."
-- Stereofile

"Dance to Sleep, Birds, In-Between, Paddleboat, The Saw, and Static Jam conspire to demonstrate Less as More—as compelling events within great, dramatic sweeps of spaciousness, achieved most economically."
-- Fanfare Magazine

"Dance Moments come and go as the rhythm falls into mysterious grooves. The wispy sound world might call George Crumb to mind, but the aesthetic is much more Cagean, continuous, dramatic only in the atmospheric sense."
-- The Village Voice

"Victoria Jordanova will confound your expectations of what the harp can sound like. Her music is alarmingly beautiful"
-- San Francisco Bay Guardian

"As much as anyone alive, Victoria Jordanova has tried to haul her harp away from the shadow of the raised Steinway lid. She has added a bark to the plucky voice by using electronic enhancements. She often abjures the conventional, subserviently seated position, stands up to her instrument and berates it with dozens of tools from her magic bag..."
-- 20th Century Forum News Letter

"Beautiful, chilling, and on-edge, all at once."
-- metrobeat.com, New York

"Jordanova writes music of haunting, elusive beauty..The piece strings fragments of folk themes and little upwellings of emotion over an ongoing rhythmic puls and Jordanova's precise sensual playing was as striking as the music itself."
-- San Francisco Chronicle

"the player's virtuosity is unquestionable."
-- San Francisco Examiner

"... haunting Requiem for Bosnia by Victoria Jordanova on Bang on the Can Marathon, America's most significant new-music event."
-- Village Voice

"... darkly moving work for harp and tape."
-- New York Times

"...the world premier of Mute Dance by Victoria Jordanova was far more impressive. A 16th - Century folk tune...is carefully wrapped in 20th-Century manners - spiky piano shards, a prerecorded drone and exotic percussion cadences."
-- Los Angeles Times

Top Ten Classical Recordings: CRI, CD 673 Requiem for Bosnia "...Haunting music for harp, tape and broken piano - politics and music are rarely combined with such felicity and dignity"
-- New York Newsday

"strange and appealing... deeply serious (music) and yet not at all difficult for a susceptible listener...unsettling, cathartic,and yet still very beautiful...in the traditional sense. Solo harp pieces expertly made...employing elements of folk music,minimalism, and (no slight intended) elements of intelligent New Age"
-- New York Newsday

"A handful of living composers have worked in a style...that is an attempt to express the unconscious and the dream-state in musical terms. A glorious example of the genre is Elliott Carter's Night Fantasies, and this eloquent new Requiem by Victoria Jordanova. The fury of her vaunted predecessors, including Mozart, Verdi, and Britten is sublimated, but no less powerfully expressed...lovely solo harp pieces."
-- Fanfare Magazine

"In her harp playing Jordanova is always searching for and using peculiar techniques to bring out new timbres and tone colors on her instrument. the rediscovery of improvisation is one the less recognized tendencies in the new music. In Jordanova's improvisation a wholeness is composed where rhythms,sound and pitch find each other"
-- German Berlin Radio