‘Is it difficult to reproduce the sounds of nature?’Environments 12 is a new, speculative addition to the once-popular Environments series: a sequence of 11 records released between 1969 and 1979 that anticipated a mass-market in mood-altering nature recordings. Now, in the era of planetary scale computation, it is the environment itself that’s being updated. The reproduction, synthesis and management of soundscapes has become ubiquitous and automated. Loudspeakers and microphones are laced through the biosphere, all in the name of a cybernetic ecology.Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern, Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation. The collective works across diverse media and modes of production, including writing, installation, curation, software, radio, pedagogy, and performance. And this is the first LP they’ve released. It is a mind-inverting libretto for the anthropocene: a post-historical field recording; aggressively brash and thoughtfully devious, one for the curling of your inner ear.Unfolding across a series of historical, contemporary, and speculative scenes, the work is narrated by an ensemble of vocal performers - Francis Plagne, Jenny Hickinbotham, David Chesworth, Catherine Ryan, Jasper Dockray, Roslyn Orlando - and their generative voice clones. Together, this more-than-human chorus tells and retells stories of ‘psychologically ultimate seashores’, reef lullabies, natural symphonies designed for zoo enclosures, and large language models for whales and crows. The record imagines a world in which the biosphere, human and technology are blurred almost entirely: a hypothetical space in which organic matter has to be exposed to synthetic renditions of itself in order to summon life, a reproduction of a replica.Environments 12 involves, or demands, a suspension of reality. Is this a chorus of real voices or a facsimile? Are animals hostile to microphones? What does it mean when field recordings are treated by as cultural artefacts, interpolated amongst ‘data’ gathered by acoustic biologists? There is no yardstick here with which to discern what is true and what is an abstraction thereof. And the effect is bafflingly addictive: sing-song lullabies slowly spinning into states of total dilation, miming ensembles mimicking ocean sounds in resplendent strains, dream chords built of broken voice humming within the wires.In the same way that Environments 12 feels narratively unmoored from any easily identifiable reality, it also refuses to pigeonhole itself sonically. The effect is something like Walter Maioli, Fred Gales and the Sound Reporters gang being set upon a digital gorilla enclosure, or perhaps Robert Ashley’s Don leaving Linda and instead going to the Osaka Aquarium to listen to dolphins. The palette here is definitely one for fans of the lovely music style (an approach more than an identifiable sound) of Paul DeMarinis’ ‘Songs Without Throats’ or Ron Kuivila and Nicolas Collins’ ‘Going Out With Slow Smoke’. But it’s also supremely off kilter in its dramatics. Not retrofuturist so much as off in its own continuum entirely, and all the more entrancing for it.In sum, Environments 12 is deeply perplexing, beautifully garish, and an unbridled pleasure for all its grotesqueries. Rarely do records strike so deft a balance between high-conceptualism and irreverent absurdity, much less while maintaining a distinct emotional core.

With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.

A tribute to Derek Jarman manifold and vital practice. Gathering together newly commissioned essays by international art critics and scholars devoted to specific—and sometimes lesser-known—aspects of the artist's life and work and extensive portfolios spanning his successive bodies of works, this monograph offers an accessible overview of Derek Jarman, one of the legendary cultural figures of the second half of the 20th century. Conceived as a reader, this volume includes essays by cultural critic Elisabeth Lebovici, Le Crédac Director and Curator Claire Le Restif, Manchester Art Gallery Curator Fiona Corridan, garden historian Marco Martella, and journalist and activist Cy Lecerf Maulpoix, a comprehensive interview with Jarman's collaborator James Mackay, as well as testimonies—among other Jarman's friends—by actress Tilda Swinton and musician Simon Fisher Turner, and an illustrated chronology. Jarman's militant "Queer Paintings" series (1992), his tender Super8 films from the mid-1970s, his emotional assemblages made at Prospect Cottage (Dungeness, Kent) whose cultivation was both a form of therapy and a metaphor for his own survival after he was diagnosed with AIDS in 1986, are considered together to focus on Jarman as a visual artist—a painter and an assemblagist—and how his artistic practice can be understood as a catalyst for his manifold activities and visions.

The Audible Past explores the cultural origins of sound reproduction. It describes a distinctive sound culture that gave birth to the sound recording and the transmission devices so ubiquitous in modern life. With an ear for the unexpected, scholar and musician Jonathan Sterne uses the technological and cultural precursors of telephony, phonography, and radio as an entry point into a history of sound in its own right. Sterne studies the constantly shifting boundary between phenomena organized as "sound" and "not sound." In The Audible Past, this history crisscrosses the liminal regions between bodies and machines, originals and copies, nature and culture, and life and death. Blending cultural studies and the history of communication technology, Sterne follows modern sound technologies back through a historical labyrinth. Along the way, he encounters capitalists and inventors, musicians and philosophers, embalmers and grave robbers, doctors and patients, deaf children and their teachers, professionals and hobbyists, folklorists and tribal singers. The Audible Past tracks the connections between the history of sound and the defining features of modernity: from developments in medicine, physics, and philosophy to the tumultuous shifts of industrial capitalism, colonialism, urbanization, modern technology, and the rise of a new middle class. A provocative history of sound, The Audible Past challenges theoretical commonplaces such as the philosophical privilege of the speaking subject, the visual bias in theories of modernity, and static descriptions of nature. It will interest those in cultural studies, media and communication studies, the new musicology, and the history of technology.

Octavia M Sheffner is an Almaty, Kazakhstan-based producer, writer and visual artist. Their music is a kaleidoscopic collage, hypnotic while perpetually reformatting, longform with a hook focused immediacy. Previous releases have appeared on labels including Suite 309 and Blorpus Editions, alongside a sprawling catalogue of self-released albums and aliases. With 'Shivering;' their new tape on Bezirk, this approach steps into a darker zone without losing the vibrant energy that makes their work so crucial. The tracks on 'Shivering;' were recorded in November 2022, which contributed to their murkier tone. “For me, November is a cursed month. It has a sour, dour aura to it. A time of transition when the weather won’t make up its mind. I was going through November fever, a sense of uneasiness and unreality. And that’s partly why I made this really melancholy, distant, voidy record,” Octavia explains. When listening to these tracks, you get sucked into a hypnagogic netherworld. There’s a feeling of descent, but no despair. An acquiescence perhaps, to slipping into the darkness and taking in its trippy scenery. The first track, ‘Eris & Aneris...’ comes from Sheffner recycling an older recording from another project. Propelled by a chugging metallic pulse, snippets of vocals and other sound blend into a blur over the perpetual motion groove. Things deepen on ‘Insomnie a deux’, compiled from a bank of Youtube vinyl rips of everything from church chorals to old folk songs. “Vinyl rips to Youtube have all this annoying high end to them,” Octavia explains. “These clicks that I really can’t stand. I spent so long trying to filter them out, and that’s how the track ended up sounding so washed out.” Like so much of Octavia M Sheffner’s music, each track acts as a nexus point, an intersection of strands from the online archive somehow wrestled into, if not harmony, a peculiar equilibrium. “I think of the album as being two spiral staircases eating each other, like an ouroboros,” they explain. The ominous tone is matched in the artwork. Like all the visuals for their releases, it was done by Octavia themselves. Intrinsically tied to the sounds, this time they took inspiration from the heavy negative space found in Daguerreotypes. The power that comes from washes of black. It taps a deep rooted fixation. “The ‘Alone’ episode of Spongebob changed my sensibilities forever,” they explain. “Speech bubbles in the void. It’s psychological horror in a kids cartoon. I love it deeply, it ruined my life. It resonates with this album.” It's not all darkness though. On the closing track, a gorgeous mesh of overlapping strings underpins a spoken word sample of someone going through the mundane practice of tuning up an instrument. “It’s to bring the record back from the dark world. To lure you back into physicality with recognizable sound or space. Rather than an abstract realm where rainbow lights flash in the dark periodically. “

‘Harmonium II’ is the new album from London-based artist Zheng Hao. Across two side long pieces, she manipulates feedback into clumps of pure tone and interruptions of chirping, chirruping high frequencies. It follows her recent album for Krim Kram, "Breaks", and more directly, "Harmonium", released on Hard Return in 2022. With her duo, Oishi (alongside Ren Shang), she released "once upon a time there was a mountain" on Bezirk in 2023. As Hao explains, Harmonium II should not be viewed as a follow-up to the first Harmonium but a parallel exploration of the same ideas and themes: “’Harmonium’ refers to a type of balanced feedback, more specifically, a resonance,” she says. Where the first Harmonium involved controlling tones from a harmonica, no traditional acoustic instruments are present on this installment. Instead, Hao explores loops of recording devices and listening technology fed into a modular synth. On the first side, 'I', she turns a Zoom recorder – a tool used by field recordists to capture sound - into an instrument. Placing headphones close to the Zoom’s microphones, she tuned the feedback tones generated into sine waves from her modular synth. In a poetic twist, this approach creates an electronic world with the verdancy of a soundscape. Low, rumbling tones give the impression of an aircraft passing overhead. Squeaking high frequencies sound like voluble wildlife. Hypnotic pulses and beating tones emerge as her movements shift the system. Through recursion and gesture comes a tentative approximation of organic life. “I’m moving the headphones around so that it feels a bit like insects coming in and out,” Hao explains. “There’s also a low frequency feedback from the Zoom recorder itself, and I’m fading that feedback into a modular generated low sine wave as a transition, and then gradually fade the modular sound to a phantom rhythm. Then again and again.” For the second side Hao uses a reverb pedal and a mixing desk. Opening with a bed of stridulating bleeps and buzzes, human gestures can be heard in the system once more, gentle sweeps and waves eventually held in a suspended drone. Equilibrium arrives as humming tones bend, curve and fold into each other. It’s a more meditative piece than the first side, a bed of sounds that could be coarse and jarring frequencies coalesced into something utterly other, and utterly compelling. In Hao’s practice, conventional relations between performer and sound sources are twisted. Sound becomes malleable. Graspable without the obstructions and limitations of a conventional instrument or a DAW. Reference points for her music could be the visceral sound explorations of Maryanne Amacher, the haptic feedback sculpting of Rafael Torral, and the no-input mixing board experiments of Toshimaru Nakamura. It undoubtedly also chimes with the recent release on Bezirk by Regan Bowering. Although using different tools and reaching different outcomes, for both, signal paths are hacked and rearranged, feedback is embraced, and gestures are translated into sonic phenomena. Sounds that are typically discarded or avoided are held onto for their affective, textural and interactive possibilities. The unfamiliar sensations residing in unconventional sound sources are embraced. “Feedback- for me, is less about the sound output and more about enjoying the 'control' during the performance process,” Hao explains. “It’s like a tug-of-war between me and the feedback, listening very intently to the sounds in the speakers, my fingers tightly pressing on the mixer knobs cautiously to prevent any distortions. I enjoy the feeling of this back-and-forth and the vibrations that occur when feedback happens, which feels warm to me, or maybe it’s because I’m usually sweating when I’m playing with feedback…” Zheng Hao is a sound artist and experimental musician, born in Wuhan, China, currently based in London, United Kingdom. She is a member of the duos Oishi (with Ren Shang) and ecm (with Joseph Khan). Her solo works explore electronic and electro-acoustic instruments, including modular synthesis and feedback. She has released music on Otoroku, Falt, Molt Fluid, Krim Kram, and Research Laboratories.