Vinyl


Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously belongs to one of the four substances as well as the whole. These four sections, of uneven durations, embody the different resonances of each « element » upon my imagination. The movements are ordered compositionally and range from the intangibility of the air to the extreme density of the earth. In Eterea, the dual nature of air, a space for the dissemination of sounds and an environment for mobile masses, shaped the work and the development of its forms. Whether it be the vast expanse of particles as organised movement or the displacement of sources in our three-dimensional perception, ethereal air fills the space and drives the immaterial motions and gestures. Aquatica locates the materiality of water in relation to its amazing extremes: from the drop to the ocean, an extensive journey unfolds through the various phases of the reinvented liquid. Still waters, deadly waters, raging waters follow one another, leading to the aerial fusion of a primordial equilibrium eventually retrieved. Then comes Focolaria and the unsteady fires, the elusive and wild will-o’-the-wisps that open and adorn the gates leading to the depths of the earth. The land of Terra is devoid of atmosphere, a land of matters before the advent of life. The sounds of the original matter merge and evolve into purer forms. The motions trigger progressions towards new equilibriums of forces, the ultimate fusion, the very last attempt, needed for the emergence of life. The sphere is now complete, the world ready for creation… Daniel Teruggi — While the theme of the four elements has been a constant source of inspiration in the arts, its setting to music using electroacoustic techniques seems highly auspicious, since the notion of matter and its transformation is consubstantial with the concrete approach. In Sphæra, Daniel Teruggi precisely addresses this question, transcending matter with the help of novel digital audio techniques so as to draw out forms, trajectories, layers, and musical objects, all of which result from the merging or sublimation of primordial sounds. Indeed, this is where Daniel Teruggi’s music and compositional approach stand out: by engaging sounds, with strength, will and inspiration, in a close encounter with energies, whether tectonic or electrical. Such collisions, such metamorphoses, are then appeased in the whole space of the composition, a fascinating landscape, the final destination of all transmutations. François Bonnet, Paris, 2021

Daniel Teruggi – Sphæra

The origin of CRACKFINDER dates back to the concert of SONO GENERA – the trio of Anna Zaradny, Robert Piotrowicz and Jérôme Noetinger – at the Sacrum Profanum festival on October 7, 2016. That evening, the audience experienced a clear aesthetic breakthrough; something important was happening, something special. I instantly felt that the new thing that emerged could not be left unrecorded. Zaradny is a composer, instrumentalist and visual artist; Piotrowicz a composer, author of sound installations and virtuoso of analog synthesizers. They founded and curated the Musica Genera festival and label. Noetinger, an improviser, publisher and instrumentalist from Marseilles, specializes in electroacoustic collages full of permutations on his tape recorder and using all sorts of electronics. What connects these musicians are their methods of work: experiment as the basis of action, controlled accidents, repetition, processing and processuality. CRACKFINDER is intense and saturated, intriguing with fragments that are rhythmic yet distant from the repetitiveness of minimalism. They give a degree of structure to the otherwise loose amalgam of raw electroacoustics and instrumental improvisation at times evoking free jazz (when Zaradny reaches for the saxophone). At any time, however, the division of roles is clear, an impressive feat at such a high density of sound texture. CRACKFINDER the album comprises of two distinct parts. The first is extremely intense and eventful, creating a strong tension, giving the sense of an immense effort or even wrestling between the musicians; a clash of ideas and values. This dialog is not monotonous but dynamic, full of changing and new hypotheses – as if in a process of reaching the truth. We can suppose that these investigated issues are philosophical and existential, giving the impression of greatness and overwhelming significance. The second part evokes a kind of a soothing stabilization. One may think that the interlocutors have reached a consensus. However, no-one is celebrating, and the mood is somewhat melancholic. The discovery proved to be depressing and the truth is not liberating – it becomes a burden. There is a poignant feeling of failure or unfulfilment, despite concluding and solving the task. Finally, we are left with silence, and even emptiness – with a symbolic and absolute dimension of the end. The effort of the first part, motivated by the conviction of the significance and need for proving something, is confronted with the disillusion brought by the end of the road. The effort, however, was not in vain – the discovery of the truth, although painful, can be purifying. The album offers more interpretative hints than just its expressive title. The artwork on the cover is a frame from the video art piece ENJOY THE SILENCE by Anna Zaradny: symbolic flares and cracking of matter in complete silence. The intensity of the image, however, creates a strong suggestion of sound. The back of the sleeve is spread with photos of the musicians holding the #BLACKPROTEST banner, in remembrance of the wave of pro-choice protests in Poland in 2016. Cracks – both material and metaphorical – do not have to be the negative effect of an abrupt event. They can be the beginning of change, an opening for the new, an impulse for action. It is, therefore, worth continuing the search for the 'portals of change'.

Jérôme Noetinger / Robert Piotrowicz / Anna Zaradny – Crackfinder

Mark Vernon "An Annotated Phonography of Chance" ‘An Annotated Phonography of Chance’ expands upon the soundtrack to an uncompleted 16mm film made in collaboration with English filmmaker Martha Jurksaitis and the Portuguese artist duo Von Calhau! The film ‘Nossos Ossos’ was shot largely on location in the Alentejo region of Portugal in 2013. A1 Succulent Gros (featuring – Von Calhau!) 3:00 A2 Overflown Ellipsis 1:33 A3 The Larum of the Living 2:18 A4 The Consensus is to Delete 4:16 A5 Nossos Ossos (featuring – Von Calhau!) 4:30 A6 Revolving Rivers 4:13 B1 Aspen House (featuring – Von Calhau!) 5:28 B2 Megalithic Circuit 6:03 B3 Shrouded Yagis 5:16 B4 Simmer Dim (featuring – Von Calhau!) 3:23 Mark Vernon is a Glasgow-based artist whose work exists on the fringes of sound art, music and broadcasting. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found recordings. He incorporates these diverse elements into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media and live performances. A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he was a founding member of Glasgow’s Radio Tuesday collective and has gone on to set up several other RSL art radio projects in the UK including Hair Waves, Nowhere Island Radio and most recently, Glasgow’s Radiophrenia. He has produced programmes internationally for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, RADIA, EBU and the BBC. Since 2011 he has co-run Lights Out Listening Group – a bi-monthly listening event focused on creative uses of sound and radio that takes place in complete darkness. His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Staalplaat, Ultra Eczema, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Staubgold and Gagarin Records, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own Meagre Resource imprint.

Mark Vernon – An Annotated Phonography of Chance

The Festival Experimentelle Musik is a music festival in Munich, organized by Stephan Wunderlich and Edith Rom, that has been held annually in December since 1983. One of the festival's unique characteristics is the way the performances are organized: Each is limited to 20 to 25 minutes and all take place in direct succession without pauses, on previously set-up small stages. In 2017, Seiji Morimoto and Yan Jun performed after each other. Seiji's piece was called "ring + balance", he used small speakers, microphones and amplifiers on a table to create feedback rings that were eventually distorted by alarm clocks. Yan performed "solo with background" in which he sat on a chair making vocal and body gestures and had two audience members announce the elapsed time every 3 or 5 minutes, respectively, according to their own inner clocks. As a spectator, I felt that the two performances had something in common. Their very quiet and experimental nature – in the sense that it was impossible to anticipate what would happen and when, if at all – made the audience listen not only to the sounds but also to the situation that had been evoked. When I met Seiji a few weeks later in Berlin, it turned out that he had a similar feeling. We asked Yan and the idea was born to make a split LP of both recordings. Edition of 300. The performances were recorded by Albert Dambeck and carefully mastered for vinyl by Werner Dafeldecker. Audience noises are an intended part of the recordings. Seiji Morimoto (b. 1971) is a Japanese sound artist and performer living in Berlin. He is interested in uncertain acoustic appearances between usual objects. Yan Jun (b. 1973) is a Chinese musician and poet based in Beijing. He works with field recordings, electronics, voice, body movement etc.: sometimes funny – always simple.

Seiji Morimoto / Yan Jun – Ring + Balance / Solo With Background

The Kollektiv für Kommunikative und Ästhetische Forschung was an artist commune that existed for about 2 years around 1970 in a former monastery in Mariental (Lower Saxony), West Germany, close to the then inner-German border. It was founded by members of the West Berlin free art and music scene, many of them having been part of the scene based around the short-lived Zodiak Free Arts Lab. Among the residents were drummer Sven-Åke Johansson, guitarist Norbert Eisbrenner and bassist Werner Götz who had formed the experimental trio MND (Moderne Nordeuropäische Dorfmusik, Modern North European Village Music) in West Berlin in 1968. One of the communal activities was to jointly make music, thereby including both the trained musicians as well as the inexperienced players and non-musicians. This led to the formation of a larger communal group around the MND core, named Schlangenfeuer (Snake Fire) by Eisbrenner; other names like Norddeutsche Dorfmusik Mariental appeared on concert posters, too. The concept of bringing together players from different backgrounds in order to improvise was followed elsewhere at that time, too, though many of such enterprises evolved around one or more leaders who clearly left their mark on the resulting sounds. Unlike such groups, the Mariental undertaking was distinctly egalitarian, with the experienced players giving leeway to the others to express themselves, while never overreaching with disproportionate virtuosity or soloing. For these reasons, their music sounded different from many jazz-based free improvisations, rather closer to early Faust or, more specifically, Kluster, Eruption and Human Being, similar endeavours from the West Berlin underground music scene. "New things were in the air; long arcs; building up – swelling – breaking down – dying away – a kind of continuum with a rather straightforward tonality and rhythm. Even quite lulling sometimes. The more complex and in a different way expressive free jazz which we were pursuing at the same time was somewhat put aside in favour of a joint performance of the 'commune'. The result was a new kind of monastery music, nourishing the youth in their longing for community." (Sven-Åke Johansson) Edition of 300. Double LP containing a full concert recording from the festival "Art Information 71" in Kiel in June 1971, one of three public performances of the Schlangenfeuer group. Players: Norbert Eisbrenner (el. guitar), Peter Dyck (cello), Rita Eisbrenner (vocals), Elke Lixfeld (vocals), Boris Schaak (vocals, bassdrum, bell), Werner Götz (double bass, viola), Sven-Åke Johansson (drums, oboe d'amore). Gatefold sleeve with photos and extensive liner notes by David Toop. Includes a reprint of the festival poster.

MND / Schlangenfeuer – Freedom Suite

Christopher A. Williams (born 1981) is a contrabassist, composer and theorist of experimental and improvised music whose artistic research takes the form of both academic publications and practice-based projects. "On Perpetual (Musical) Peace?" (PMP) is one of his projects – an experiment in musical cohabitation with large improvising ensembles. It is inspired by Immanuel Kant's essay "Zum Ewigen Frieden: ein Philosophischer Entwurf" which speculates that nations do better for themselves by sorting out their differences through an international federation instead of through warfare, thus proposing a path to lasting peace. (It later influenced the UN Charter and EU Constitution.) Williams argues that Kant's idea of hospitality, publicity (transparency), and perpetuality (sustainability) may help players in improvising ensembles to articulate and transform their ways of playing and thinking, thus opening up new ways of interacting with each other. Composing in this way becomes less about giving the players a compositional structure to realize, and more about tweaking inherent constellations that are already present within the ensemble. This LP features the results of PMP realized in Mexico City in 2019 with Liminar, a Mexican ensemble that works at the boundaries between composed and improvised music, performance and sound installation, and regularly performs in Mexico City's main chamber music halls as well as in museums, galleries and alternative venues. An extensive PMP concert took place at Bucareli 69, an art and concert space in a late-19th-century villa near the city's historical centre. The recordings for this LP were made afterwards in the studio NAFF. Edition of 300 pressed on UN-charter-blue vinyl, with printed inner sleeve.

Christopher A. Williams & Liminar – On Perpetual (Musical) Peace?

Tracklisting: Side A - 17:21 1: LAURIE’S ARRIVAL2: CORNER OF A ROOM WITH SOUND3: DISARRAY SEQUENCE Side B - 19.36 1: PNEUMATICS2: VOICE CORRESPONDENCE3: MEMORY IS CURRENT"Obstacle #79: MEMORY IS CURRENT offers a sequence of works for player piano, a device which captured Rick Myers’ imagination in 2017. Divining a method from mathematical measurements and intuitive drawing systems, Myers obstructed piano rolls using adhesive tape. Performed in this altered state on a player piano in the hallway of Easthampton Machine and Tool in Easthampton, Massachusetts, the music embedded in the rolls was extricated from its history and given fresh life. Restriction forged a pathway to expanse. Here are the enchanting results.The workings of the machine are evident throughout, wistfully recalling music box fantasias, even as the tumbling notes confound expectations. The meticulously constructed scenarios invariably run amok, and in between chaos and melody, frustration and freedom, an impossible helix fashions its own celestial music. The sounds grumble against one another, summoning subterranean promises and unearthing unexpected delights.As the tracks run into one another, Myers interposes spoken dispatches, detailing aspects of the story behind the record. Like the sounds of the piano, they transcend mere reportage. Increasingly obscured over the course of the two sides, these ghostly interjections are part of the sonic fabric, enhancing both the narrative and acousmatic aspects of the project.Rick Myers is an artist whose decades-long career has studiously disregarded the confines of medium – there are books, drawings, sculptures, installations, exhibitions, videos, performances, design projects, texts, and combinations thereof. Sound, as evidenced by his recent focus on recorded material, is but another potent arrow in his quiver. Plus, it’s nothing new – he cut his teeth as a DJ.This record is an interior travelogue shot through with ecstatic truth. In furthering the process of obstruction by which the player piano makes its music possible, Myers is, in his own words, looking to “cast and dislodge time.” Like God or Loss or Love, Time is one of the bedeviling bottomless wells from which the most affecting art springs. This is the real thing.Rick Myers is not in search of lost time, he is attempting to lose it, and in so doing to chart the inevitable trajectory of that loss, of its apparent disappearance, its peculiar habit of hiding in plain sight." - Matt Krefting --- Released on Vinyl LP in an edition of 250Jackets screenprinted by Alan Sherry

Rick Myers – Memory is Current

After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk. Up in Air is sewn from threads of everyday life: trails of thought, small stories and conversations with his daughter. Collecting, layering and condensing the world around him, his musings spill out in a palimpsest that renders both the material and metaphysical world. From describing a time where he inadvertently found himself on a hunting trip, recalling stories from doing role play and drawing together with his daughter, or scribing observations on the strange dedications people make in their lives, he explores the banal and the fantastical; the whimsical and the serious; the light and dark. Each line, aphorism or vignette carries with it weight that is looking to free itself, to embrace the impossibility of life distilled into simpler parameters. Ben's music acts as a motor for his words, weaving wistful melodic mantras and creaking guitar lines in and out as each song finds its feet. Although the album finds a rich array of influences dancing in an awkward balance, the emotive register of the music drinks from the fountain of the US rock continuum, with Supreme Dicks' uneasy indie, Low's slow unfurling grace and Neil Youngs' heart-worn drawl lifting each song to new heights. Expanding on this soundworld are collaborators Sholto Dobie (self-built organs) and bassist Otto Willberg, who provide drones, dissonant jolts and detuned paths for the music to open itself, but also curl into its own. Sounds are folded into one another, birthing new shapes, layers and sonic possibilities. Ben describes the album as "permeated by the sense that came from being around this sort of connection to the world where everything is immediate and fundamental." The album is representative of this shift inwards: on his own, socially, as a parent. But with that it also represents a confidence to deal with everything. The album is an excavation, both finding strange joy in simple findings and an unburdening himself of everything else, letting every thought and feeling whisks itself away up in the air. -- Fielding Hope (curator Cafe Oto, London)

Ben Pritchard, Otto Willberg, & Sholto Dobie – Up in Air

Second LP release by The Oval Language on Edition Telemark after Hibernation in 2017, this time showcaseing Klaus-Peter John's Waldkonzerte (woodland concerts), recorded in 2016.The Oval Language is an autonomous art project founded in 1987 in Leipzig, East Germany, by Klaus-Peter John and Frank Berendt. Since Berendt left in 1995, it has been continued by John, sometimes with collaborators, but recently mostly for solo activities. Its fields of activity have included sound-noise performances, conceptual works in open spaces, installations, land art projects, photography, and more.From the beginning, the space or location itself has been a central aspect within many of their site-specific sound-noise performances. When working at a certain location, the performers tried to not bring in anything from outside, but exclusively use material already available at the space. This way, it becomes possible to thoroughly feel out and explore the site, allowing a distinct site-specific sound to emerge that is integrated into the performance. Throughout the 1990s, the sites used often were abandoned buildings in Leipzig, available in nearly unlimited quantity, from vacant factories to unused former public bathing facilities.   During the recent years, Klaus-Peter John has focused on a minimisation of means and developed a unique vocal technique without amplification that he has used in a number of performances. In 2016, he attempted to integrate his voice into pure nature, in his own words the biggest challenge to date. His goal was not to perform any kind of singing or the like, but to use voice as a means similar to the site-specific tools used in previous performances by The Oval Language.He performed five concerts without audiences in a forest ravine in Döben, near Grimma, between June and November. The concerts parallel the course of the seasons and their related acoustic changes and conditions.This double LP is presented in a die-cut single sleeve with two printed inner sleeves. The inner sleeves contain one photo made during a Waldkonzert on each side. By switching the order of the inner sleeves, four different front sleeves can be generated.

The Oval Language – Waldkonzerte

As an artist and a thinker, Massimo Magee has been consistently drawn towards patterns: traditions, lines of influence, schools and the unexpected intersections of each. This album, Toneflower, presents a solo programme, meditating on many of those concepts. As an entirely improvised set of pieces, it is also inspired by Anthony Braxton’s solo alto tradition and the larger solo saxophone canon. Similarly, it draws from Magee’s prior percussive experimentations with Tim Green and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s use of contact microphones. In Magee’s words, it offers rich parallels with many other saxophone schools, “the ceaseless streams of broken air column wizardry of Evan Parker, the angular atonalism of Tim Berne, the earnest beauty of a Pharoah Sanders melody, the breakneck urgency of Kaoru Abe, the sinuous and unpredictable ebullient elegance of Eric Dolphy, the eerie whistling of Tamio Shiraishi, the satisfyingly round-toned repetition of Steve Lacy, the heavy low-end honking of John Coltrane in a certain mood. The listener might even hear a dash of the motivic minimalism of Terry Riley.”  Throughout the album's 5 tracks, Magee pays close attention to the siloed divisions of each school, as part of a larger interrogation of a music industry that privileges singular musicians, cultivating musical traditions and loyal fanbases. Following diverse and distinct musical lineages, Magee curates an informed, thoughtful constellation of influences and traditions, captured through his particular lens of reinvention.

Massimo Magee – Toneflower

Remastered from original tapes by Paradigm Discs' Clive Graham, 'Rock and other four letter words' is a genuinely psychedelic obscurity originally pieced together and released in 1968. The work of one J Marks (1930-2001) and his buddy Shipen Lebzelter (1942-1986), it revolves around a stockpile of cut-up quotes taken from Marks' interviews with rock stars of the time for his eponymous book (essentially a book of photos by Linda Eastman, soon to be McCartney). The likes of Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Brian Wilson, Grace Slick etc. all feature, spliced with progressive rock, wigged-out electronics, tape loops and even gospel songs about baked beans in a unique conflagration of sound poetry, Stockhausen-esque compositional strategy and free-ranging, experimental '60s psychedelia. It's understandably achieved cult status since then, not only for its sampled sources, but also an illustrious cast of contributors including jazz players Alan Silva, Andrew Cyrille, Roswell Rudd and Burton Greene, alongside the studio assistance of John McClure, who produced this, along with 100s of other recordings at CBS, including the Harry Partch records. Placed in context with other seminal records of that pivotal year - Zappa's 'Lumpy Gravy', Terry Riley's 'In C', Walter Carlos' 'Switched On Bach' - it stands out as a real anomaly, offering similarly positive, mind-boggling sorts of sonic possibilities on one hand, whilst providing an incisive, perceptibly sardonic attitude towards the times, on the other.

J Marks And Shipen Lebzelter – Rock And Other Four Letter Words

New release from London's Mosquitoes out on Knotwilig Records, due to land in April. *UPDATE - NOW DUE MAY 12th* "Music fans, journalists and so on have been puzzling words and phrases to describe the impact of the music of Mosquitoes. I am indeed talking about "impact".Lumping them in the nowave/postpunkdub/rockdeconstructivism bin is way too easy. Of course there are references, but then again: not really. I honestly believe every single second they released not only set a bookmark, but also stands out as a landmark in music history such as PIL's Metal Box, Oval's Diskont and Stockhausen’s Kontakte for instance.Every note is an evolution in an oeuvre which specialises in having an immediate impact on the listener. Reverse Drift / Reverse Charge is a natural progression, and a step forward from their previous output. Like ocean waves gently invading dune territory.Muffled vocals, haunting bass fragments, deconstructed loops/guitars and a crumbling rhythm in a world which barely holds itself together. This music deserves to be played through grant speakers, even in silenced mode.Everyone who ever had the chance to catch them on a stage know what impact they have on an audience. Mostly baffled, speechless and holding breath because your guts just tell you so. The new tracks are of a similar calibre. They immobilize you instantly in whatever you are doing. You simply need to surrender and listen to it, again and again and again... What would the world be without these 22 minutes of sheer beauty?"

Mosquitoes – Reverse Drift/Reverse Change