UPDATE: Sohrab has been refused entry to the UK. BJ Nilsen and John Chantler have now been added to the line-up.

Touch presents a triple bill of exploratory music with 3 artists each defining their own sonic territory. German artist Achim Mohné works across different media formats, blurring the edges between them and exploring unexpected uses of modern and outmoded technology. Sohrab is a Tehran based musician whose ambient works are both a product of his environment and a reaction against it. Korean sound artist Jiyeon Kim's experiments in resonance have led to an unconventional approach to field recording.

ACHIM MOHNÉ

Achim Mohné is a German artist who works across different media formats, blurring the edges between them and exploring unexpected uses of modern and outmoded technology. Previous sound works have made a focal point of the actual media format on which they're released with 2012 cassette release 'And It Could Have Been Dead…' (on The Tapeworm) focussing "on audiotape itself: as material, as body, as signifier and as sculpture". Vinyl release 'One To Another' was a specially-designed one-sided vinyl with an empty groove which collected dust as the needle moved across it, changing the sound from total silence to a crackling and thundering music.

"multimedia artist/musician Achim Mohné, whose sounds sources are almost as interesting and baffling as what he does with those sources, a 1982 instructional tape for a Blaupunkt tape player, that overlaps various instructions in different languages, as well as adding blasts of white noise, overlapping the various different styles of music offered as samples, and messing with the tape speed. A serious blast of Plunderphonia for sure." - Aquarius Records on And It Could Have Been Dead...

JIYEON KIM

Jiyeon Kim started her career as media art project producer, then she moved to the soundmaker/musician field. She mainly uses field recordings with sounds made with handmade analogue sound devices and acoustic objects as her source. Currently she experiments on resonating different materials in various methods with diy microphones, amplifiers, analogue oscillators, which leads her to develop unconventional ways of field recording.

Jiyeon is also working as a sound educator, actively programming and running various sound workshops for young people. She aims to inspire participants to engage with their sonic environments in an artistic and social way.



BJ NILSEN

BJNilsen born in 1975. He has been active with experimental music for over 20 years. For the past 10 years he has been releasing albums on Touch, making music and sound design for documentary film, television and commercials.

He is focused on the sound of nature and its effect on humans, field recordings and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, offten electronically treated.

BJNilsen has collaborated with Chris Watson, Hildur Gudnadottir, Philip Jeck and Stilluppsteypa amongst others. His new Touch CD 'Eye of The Microphone' will be released in December 2013.

BJ Nilsen website



JOHN CHANTLER

Originally from Australia but now a long-time UK resident after a stint in Japan, Chantler will release his third solo LP for the ROOM40 label in early 2014. 'Even Clean Hands Damage the Work' (recorded for the most part at the hallowed EMS studios in Stockholm) follows 'The Luminous Ground' - released in 2011 and included in The WIRE magazine's top releases of that year. That was his first LP release focusing on the analog/digital modular synth system he first explored as part of the trio LP with Lawrence English and Tujiko Noriko - 2009's 'U'. Live, he patches a versatile system capable of self-generated, shifting patterns of sliding arpeggios and visceral noise, pointillist interjections and infinitely variable texture. Chantler's next release - the second volume in his Automatic Music series - will be released via The Tapeworm.

“Hearing this music for the first time has a similar impact to the first exposure to Oval’s Systemisch from 1994, or the early Sähkö recordings like Ø’s Metri, in that it has a beauty partly derived from having travelled beyond the reach of human influence” Rob Young, The WIRE (on 'The Luminous Ground')

John Chantler on Touch Radio