Founded by performer-composer Mercedes Krapovickas and composer and vocal artist Mareike Dobewall in 2025, the label focuses on acoustic instruments and the diverse ways they can be performed, extended, and reimagined.
Our releases explore the intimate dialogue between performer, instrument, and sound: from solo portrayals to collective explorations. Each release offers a space to listen anew, explore deeply, and expand our relationship with sound.
Genre and style are secondary; what matters is the instrument itself, its resonance, its possibilities, its breath.
Buen Ayre (meaning Good Air) takes its name from one of the earliest names for Buenos Aires, the city of Mercedes’ origins. It evokes a gesture of connection — between continents, between traditions, and between the past and what is yet to come — spreading free and good airs through sound.
We aim to amplify women’s voices in music, not exclusively, but with intention, fostering a space of openness, curiosity, and care.
We chose lichens as the symbol of Buen Ayre Records because they are an aerial life form that senses its surroundings with its whole body, taking in what drifts by and responding to light, humidity, dust, and time. They endure in harsh conditions not by resisting the world, but through radical receptivity.
Lichens are also a living collaboration: a symbiosis of fungus with algae and/or cyanobacteria, different intelligences sharing one surface and shaping something neither could become alone. That kinship mirrors our relationship to acoustic instruments—familiar bodies that unfold unexpected depth when approached with care, extended techniques, and imaginative attention. We value this kind of listening: slow, mutual, and porous, where sound grows through contact between performer and instrument, instrument and space, individual voice and collective breath—attached to the world, yet always reaching outward, carrying free and good airs through music.
Mareike Dobewall is a director, scenographer, musician, and composer whose work moves fluidly across film, theatre, dance, music, and installation. Her practice has a strong focus on sound as a spatial and performative element in live contexts.
She studied at the Norwegian Theatre Academy (NTA), HZT Berlin (Inter-University Centre for Dance), and Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH).
Dobewall came to composition through her long-term work with spaces, bodies, and sound. In her PhD thesis Voicelanding (2021) at SKH, she investigated how acoustic sonic scenographies can be created by choreographing musicians in space, attending to the changing bodies of sound as they interact with architecture and spatial elements. Working closely with musicians, she explored how a space can become a transformative partner — an active presence that invites variation, extension, and reimagination of sonic expression.
This research has developed into an ongoing practice she calls Spaces as Voice Teacher, in which she approaches sites bodily and vocally to discover new vocal expressions that can only emerge through this kind of situated listening. In recent years, her work has expanded from architectural spaces to other environments, with nature becoming a strong influence. She creates nature scores which are visual musical notations shaped by formations, rhythms, and patterns found in landscapes, as invitations for collaboration. These scores guide performers through embodied processes that often lead to unexpected musical and performative expressions, foregrounding the intimate dialogue between performer, instrument, sound, and space.
→ Websites: www.mareikedobewall.com
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1148192/1294346
With a background as a bandoneonist, pianist, and composer, she has performed for over two decades across Europe and Argentina, both as a soloist and in collaborative settings. Her work pushes the expressive and physical boundaries of the bandoneon, combining extended techniques, electroacoustic processes, and improvisation, while also revisiting overlooked avant-garde works from the 1960s.
Krapovickas studied electroacoustic composition at the University of Quilmes, musicology at the University of Helsinki, and piano and composition at the Sibelius Academy, and holds a Master’s degree in Sound in New Media from Aalto University. Her artistic practice is driven by experimentation and collaboration, frequently engaging with dancers, scenographers, and light designers to expand the bandoneon’s role within contemporary and interdisciplinary performance.
→ Websites: www.mekrapov.com / www.extendedbandoneon.com
Contact
buenayrerecords@gmail.com Instagram
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