MUSIC

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies. Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world. Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream. Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record. Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind. — James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. His work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. Hoff’s multidisciplinary approach begins at the user level—the level at which we interact with consumer technologies, media, and data. He has worked with computer viruses, inaudible data signals, ear worms, culture bound illnesses, dead zones, and hacked google maps as tools and framing devices for works that reimagine and expand the creative potential of digital and cultural networks beyond their economic and corporate-engineered use value. By exploiting and manufacturing technological and cognitive glitches, Hoff illuminates the social, political, and historical context of the software and media that we interact with on a daily basis. Hoff co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books. The organization has published hundreds of titles, including facsimile editions of Art-Rite, Broken Music, Black Art Notes, Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, and Womens Work as well as new works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, DeForrest Brown Jr, Tony Conrad, Dara Birnbaum, Constance DeJong, Alexandro Segade, Martine Syms, and Flora Yin-Wong, among many others. He has exhibited and performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), The Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, The Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among many others.

Composer Ahmed Essyad was born in Salé, Morocco, in 1938. After studying music at the Rabat Conservatoire (Morocco) he moved to Paris in 1962, where he became a student of Max Deutsch and, later, his assistant. Trained in the avant-garde practices of Western musical composition, he also claimed the Amazigh folk music of Morocco as a fundamental source of inspiration for his work.

In 1965, he was already incorporating elements of oral tradition in his work so as to question the language of his time, and therefore had to cope with the limits of musical notation and communication with musicians who did not share his cultural references. It was difficult
to agree on what was implicit, 'behind the notes,' especially regarding the management of musical time and micro-intervals. In search of new compositional tools, he turned to electro-acoustic music. Working in a studio made it possible for him to be the interpreter of his own work, which ensured a certain continuity with music of oral tradition. The pieces presented here were produced between 1972 and 1974 in a studio dedicated to electro-acoustic music, the S.M.E.C.A, which was part of the Music Workshop founded by Jorge Arriagada in Paris. The studio was equipped with EMS and Minimoog synthesizers, a piano, a marimba, a xylophone, as well as various percussion instruments and a tape delay system.

The practice of electro-acoustics may have been a mere parenthesis in Ahmed Essyad's long and prolific career as a composer of contemporary music, but the works presented here are nonetheless important. They show how strongly he both supported North African popular forms of expression and opposed its folklorizing through simplistic and 'exotic' representations. It's not about fusing together East and West - impossible, he says: "the real point is to open up an imaginary space where another modernity can exist outside the largely Eurocentric framework of avant-garde music. Synthesis means anticipation, knowledge. As for me, I'm increasingly ignorant. I write to discover what I don't know. Music feeds me, it pollinates me. It's my daily wine." 

‘Low Fidelity’ was commissioned by Anna Koch / Weld with support from the Swedish Arts Council for the performance Insisting On. Sneak premiere for Issue Project Room, Saint Vitus Bar, Brooklyn, USA in December 2015. First performance at Weld, Stockholm, Sweden in February 2016.

‘Invocation I’ is an excerpt from a live recording at Inter Arts Center, Malmö, Sweden, January 2017 based on Lindström’s ‘giant electronic feedback set-up.’

‘The True Laptop Quartet’ is named after a set of instruments built on electromagnetic feedback principles. Both the instruments and the piece
were commissioned by Bergen Assembly 2016 for Tarek Atoui’s Within project. Track recorded at Sentralbadet, Bergen, Norway, June 2016 with
Mats Lindström overdubbing on all instruments. Official world premiere: September 1st 2016 with Tarek Atoui, Espen Sommer Eide, Mats Lindström and Kaya Molsen as the musicians.

‘Light Vessel 21’ was a collaboration with Anna Koch and presented as an A/V installation on board the historic LV21 vessel. LV21 saw most of her service off the Kent coast on the Varne and East Goodwin stations. The piece was commissioned by Töne Festival, Kent, England. World premiere: June 20th 2014.

‘Sotto il Ponte’ was recorded live, with Alba G. Corall on live video, at Huset Under Bron, Stockholm, Sweden in February 2014.

‘Shadow of the Dutchman’ was an overture to the Wagner opera in a version for three pianos and live electronics. The piece was commissioned
by Folkoperan, Stockholm, Sweden. Its debut performance was in February 2013.

I first saw Hugh and Jackson play together at Good God’s ‘Soft Future Piano Bar’ at the Sydney Opera House in 2017. That year was a fruitful year for the two as artists and for the Sydney music community in general. I remember that all of us, along with Greville and Brad, hosted a DIY party in a tunnel under a highway somewhere near Sydney Airport. Is that the same tunnel that Tunnel Dancers derived their name from?

7 years after that first meeting at the Sydney Opera House, Hugh and Jackson have released an album. Listening to these songs there is an audible patience and understanding between two musicians. They probably could have released something else a long time ago, but chose to wait - instead enjoying bowls of laksa on their lunch breaks and sharing long, quiet conversations at The Babylon Sauna & Spa.

When the next warm bowl of noodle soup arrives on your table, how long will you let it sit before you dive in? Soup first or noodle first? If you learn from these songs, perhaps you will know to first observe the whole bowl. Observing in this way, the moment settles and hovers and remains for much longer than a moment.

Nik

Written by J. Fester & H. Burridge in various locations. TD would like to thank MAx Berry for his trust and inspiration in seeing this project come to light and Nik for his nostalgic words and noodle soup references. On this record Hugh plays the Jazzmaster Guitar and various delay and tremolo pedals. Jackson plays his Modular Synthesizer. Artwork by Max Berry. Design by J. Greville. Mastered by Marco Pellegrino at Analog Cut Mastering.

Madelyn Byrd’s practice is built on the intersections of hydrofeminism and neuroaesthetics, an exploration into uncanny interactions between ecology and technology. Under their Slowfoam moniker, they have produced a string of intoxicating EPs, synergizing acoustic and synthetic sounds. In a mutated evolution from 2000’s glitch and micro-tonal experimentalism, Slowfoam’s queered ambience oozes with sensual tactility, an effervescent gurgling of digitally processed organic material. On their debut LP, Transcorporeal Portal, aqueous field recordings are stretched, compressed and elongated into a symphony of celestial purls, smudging all sense of time. Digital ripples are traced by murmurs of the body; the steady pulse of a heartbeat and the intimate breath of whispered words. Slowfoam embraces the glossy tonality of the hyper-digital, metamorphosing samples through deep manipulation. Sounds are sequenced in intricate arrangements like branching fractals of living organisms, with complex patterns forming at every scale. This process, layered and enigmatic, evokes the unfathomable processing of AI algorithms, offering prophetic glimpses inside the shimmering portal. Through all the digital rendering, there’s a profound vitality to their sound, evident of the immensely rich source material. Collaborator Pablo Diserens, founder of the forms of minutiae imprint, contributes exquisite, esoteric field sounds, too strange to be fictional; bubbling sulphur pools, gushing, glacial streams and the intense, shrill calls of krías (birds of death), interlacing the record with mythical wonder. Elsewhere recordings are sourced from the delicate thrum of a hand-made lyre harp, the spiritual flute playing of Diane Barbé and the digital instrumentation of composer Ran Park. From the rumbling inception of Enlightened Smudge on the Machine, Slowfoam’s sound world erupts into life in rapture, like sparkling light through opalescent glass. As quickly as they appear, these heightened reverberations decay, revealing the deep depths below the surface, radiant drones drifting and rolling eternally. The allure of these unadorned drones evokes altered states of consciousness, a full-body tingling of erotic synesthesia. There is a meticulous balance in the way sounds materialise and disintegrate, hypnotizing in their free-flowing sway. Byrd describes their creative process as resonant with the alchemic manifesto ‘solve et coagula’ and Transcoporeal Portal is teeming with the remnants of former encrypted layers that were ripped away. They find catharsis in the transformative cycles of regeneration, reconstructing their narratives with a tender embrace of the present through interconnection with the fluttering of life in the here and now. “Degenerate to regenerate, rend to reconstruct, in art, and in life. All circles back to Earth, and our exuberant fidelity to the Now, the Here, and the Tomorrow. Slowfoam teaches us that speculative melting yields radical presencing.” - Lou Croff Blake

UEVPD - Usage/Efficiency/Variance/Platform/Domain - is the solo project of Dominic Goodman, a former member of Mosquitoes and currently one half of Komare. The self-titled UEVPD debut LP, released on 22nd November via World of Echo, consists of eight sequentially numbered electro-acoustic tracks made over approximately five years, living recordings that have morphed in shape over time, each systematically stripped back to their elemental form before being deemed complete. From the outset, Goodman purposefully deployed a relatively limited array of equipment and adopted a determinedly minimalist approach to composition, a practice in restraint that privileges detail and nuance. Field recordings, made using a combination of dynamic, condenser, contact and electret microphones, geophones and hydrophones, were allied to a basic modular/analogue synth setup, allowing for little in the way of excess or indulgence. The results are markedly defiant, displaying an expert exercise in control and restraint that lets in little light but plays a great service to space and time. This is patient, claustrophobic sound design that bears out the value in attentive listening, a meditation on the acceptance of passing time, change, growth, death and regeneration. As such, listeners might connect associative lines with the likes of Pan Sonic and Mika Vianio’s solo work, Emptyset and Civilistjavel (who’s Tomas Bodén shows up on mastering duties here), though this remains distinctively Goodman’s vision, a continuation of his interests shown in Mosquitoes and Komare that further pushes out into the murky unknown.

how it thrills us, the bird's clear cry...
any cry that was always there.
children, playing in the open air,
children already go crying by
real cries. cry chance in. through crevasses
in that same space whereinto, as dreaming
men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes
they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.
where are we? freer and freer, we gyre
only half up, kites breaking
loose, with our frills of laughter flaking
away in the wind. make the criers a choir,
singing god! that resurgently waking
may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.

The seven compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialize and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.

To this end, THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR engages two references to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Claudio Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. The myth of Orpheus tells the story of a musician who, grief stricken by the passing of his wife, Eurydice, descends to Hades to persuade the deity of the dead for her return. Along the way, Orpheus seduces those who would block his passage with the deeply lamenting music he conjures from his lyre. Hades agrees but with one condition: Orpheus is not to turn around and look at Eurydice until the pair once again breach the world of the living. Not surprisingly, as they approach the surface, Orpheus grows anxious and turns around to confirm Eurydice’s presence behind him, therein sending her back to the underworld forever. As the story goes, Orpheus then sings for death to take him away; with his wish finally granted by a group of maenads, Orpheus’ detached head and his lyre float down the river, continuing their mournful song.

For many years, I sought to largely separate my studio practice from my live performance practice, with the awareness that the unique limitations and possibilities of each domain were almost sacred to their individual characters. THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR is a supplement of sorts to TWO SISTERS (2022) and ANTIPHONALS (2021), which were attempts to begin bridging this gap between the fixed electroacoustic pieces that emerge in the studio context and the somewhat open and slow-paced chamber writing that I do, in which each performance presents a new structure and in which each iteration offers the path to a new composition and deeper meaning. I am, as always, greatly indebted to the talented and incredibly sensitive musicians who appear on this album, many of whom are regular interpreters of my music: Andrew McIntosh (viola, Los Angeles), Mattie Barbier (trombone, Los Angeles), Lisa McGee (mezzo-soprano, Los Angeles), Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba, Montréal), Eyvind Kang (viola d’amore, Los Angeles), and Rebecca Lane (bass flute, Berlin), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet, Berlin), Michiko Ogawa (bass clarinet, Berlin), M.O. Abbott (trombone, Berlin), and Weston Olencki (trombone, Berlin) of the Harmonic Space Orchestra (Winds). For my part, I again return to my favourite keyboard instruments on this album: Mellotron (in particular, the brass and woodwind samples that I so adore), electric organ (the Korg CX-3), synthesizer (the Prophet 5 and Korg PS-3100, which are both extremely useful in their tuning capabilities), and, of course, pipe organ.

There are four pipe organs featured on this album: a mechanical-action instrument built by Tamburini in 1968, located in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi of Bologna, Italy; an electric-action instrument built by Veikko Virtanen in 1969, located in the Temppeliaukio Church of Helsinki, Finland; a meantone mechanical-action instrument built by John Brombaugh in 1981, located at Oberlin College’s Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio, USA; and, a mechanical-action instrument built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1864, located in the Église du Gesù of Toulouse, France. The organ pieces on THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR focus more heavily on the instruments’ pedals as well as the textural variations made possible by the mechanical tracker actions that most possess. The Brombaugh organ at Oberlin College offered a particularly meaningful compositional opportunity both in its use of the meantone temperament that was typical of the early seventeenth-century organ designs it’s based on, and in its use of split accidental keys, which accommodate for the lack of enharmonic equivalence in an extended meantone system. ‘Possente Spirto’ is a loose conceptual reference to the aria ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ in l’Orfeo. As in Monteverdi’s version, my piece also emphasizes the use of strings and brass and observes a particular order in which they enter and exit, and also incorporates a sort of continuo framework. I depart from there to focus on a slow-moving chord progression and its variations in voicing, inspired by renaissance concepts of harmony as a vertical structure, set within a standard quarter-comma meantone temperament. The piece employs the same structure that I use in most of my chamber writing, where each iteration of a performance is slightly different, calling on players to respond in real time and engage in a more direct form of listening. Several different colours of interval are heard throughout: the typical meantone minor third of 310 cents, the wolf minor third of 269 cents, the wolf fifth of 738 cents, and finally the standard meantone major third of 386 cents, which is one of a few intervals that this tuning system shares with just intonation. As with essentially all of THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR, this piece is also quite variable in duration. ‘Trio for a Ground’ continues this feeling of partitioned instrumentation, with the organ providing the continuo throughout and the choir handing off to a duo of strings. In this recording, I chose to work with baroque strings – the viola da gamba and the viola d’amore, the latter of which incorporates a set of sympathetic strings that exist entirely for resonance. ‘Res Sub Rosa’ was composed specifically for a wind quintet formation of Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra, and employs a system of septimal just intonation as well as a similarly variable structure that allows the players some discretion in how the piece is shaped at any given moment and which encourages different harmonic and acoustic encounters in each performance. ‘Constants’ functions as an electronic counterpoint to ‘Res Sub Rosa’, substituting human decisions with the natural interruption and decay cycles of sound-on-sound tape delay to achieve a similar sense of pacing and unpredictability.

- Sarah Davachi, 2024

In 2007 an Italian film festival invites Mouse on Mars to score a film of their choice. The organizers claim to be able to clear the rights for any movie the band chooses. Werner Herzog’s fictional documentary Fata Morgana, which merges footage of several desert explorations by Herzog and his team into one continuous association, has long been a band’s favorite. The film comes with a soundtrack by Mozart, Leonard Cohen, Third Ear Band and field recordings. Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner are sent a DVD to Düsseldorf and start working. The idea is to score the film in real time so instrumentation has to be readily at hand: guitar, percussion, electronics, mouth harp, pedals, software, tapes, samplers. Once the arrangement for the three-part film is sorted Mouse on Mars bring their score to stage. Herzog Sessions is performed twice: first when the band still thought the rights had been cleared, and a second time at London’s Southbank Center knowing that Herzog had never approved a new score.

Mark Templeton is a Canadian media artist and the founder of Graphical, an audiovisual label dedicated to publishing his own musical and image based experiments. Mark’s audio compositions are constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops and sampled cassettes that are contrasted with contemporary sound techniques. In his published photobooks, he incorporates his own 35mm pictures and found images, focusing on intangible fantasies and realities. During his audiovisual performances, he utilizes digital instruments while projecting his own photographs, VHS footage, Super 8 film, and other sampled video. 

Mark Templeton’s reinterpretation of outdated media as musical instruments makes him a compelling artist for the Faitiche label roster. For his debut on Faitiche, he browsed his old hard drives and invited Andrew Pekler to listen through and co-produce a selection of Mark’s unreleased works. The compositions act as a series of snapshots: a look back at a decade of archived sounds, re-envisioned and re-imaged for Faitiche.

 The album contains nine tracks that follow an AB song structure. Each piece begins with verse A, transitions into verse B, and then ends. This simple formula creates a dichotomy that is also present in Mark’s diptych photographs, featured in the artwork. Throughout the album, both juxtaposition and inherent connections are simultaneously at play. One way or another, Two Verses provides a beginner’s guide to Mark Templeton's highly idiosyncratic catalog.

'XV XXVII III XXI IX: Variations & Coda' by composer Luka Aron is a suite in four parts, in which a selected acoustic ensemble, consisting of bass clarinet, contrabass, euphonium, foghorn organ, harpsichord, serpent, shō, and trumpet coalesces with analog as well as digital synthesis, into one unified mass of sound. Following 2022’s 'Tinctures', which centered on raw and unadorned chord-zither and pipe organ recordings in just intonation, Luka Aron’s new work expands the landscape manifold. Emerging as his solo debut on Warm Winters Ltd., 'XV XXVII III XXI IX: Variations & Coda' connects to tropes first developed on Minua’s 'Simulacra' (also released by the Slovak label), to which Aron contributed significantly. An opaque juxtaposition between the steadfastness of electronic sound synthesis and the fragility of the human touch inherent in acoustic instrumentation is a through line in Aron’s work and at its most developed here. By painstakingly tuning sustained tones towards precision upon occupying the same pitch space, the various timbres in 'XV XXVII III XXI IX: Variations & Coda' are as much canceled out as reinforced, resulting in flux states of spectral fusion. This effect is further achieved through traversing a labyrinthine structure of multiple closely related overtone series, serving as a harmonic framework for the piece’s ever-shifting bedrock. Via the appliance of heavy distortion, a secondary structure (that, in fact, exposes the undertone series) is gradually unveiled: like light rays meeting the surface of water, partially reflecting back to air, and refracting at once, as they pass from one medium to the other. As per the title, numerical relationships are ubiquitous here—and yet, this is not music merely arising from mathematical calculation; instead, it is one shaped by the direct experience of sound phenomena themselves, prior to preconceived ideas or beliefs about their potential symbolic meaning or function. During studies at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, Aron spent days on end observing the physiology of hearing through minute listening tests, not seldomly resembling a visit to the ear doctor. The specific tone combinations he discovered in this empirical process quite instrumentally “play the ear” and are potent catalysts for reaching states of mind that transcend the mundane, challenging matters of subject-object relations. As such, 'XV XXVII III XXI IX: Variations & Coda' stems from an artistic approach where one’s perception is not only an endpoint but also a beginning—and the composer’s task is to uncover what is already present. On a structural plane, the pieces stem from multi-layered golden mean relationships that permeate all levels of the composition, ranging from the overall arc to the formal and rhythmical aspects of each variation. Every sound event spirals out of the previous one, and the final instant is determined right at the initial stroke before ever unfolding over a total runtime of 38 minutes. Put forth by an almost self-generating system (here, the math does come into play), the time domain is determined with minor algorithmic interventions set beforehand. Gradually, the omnipresent sequence nests in consciousness and instantiates arresting attention in the listener. With Aron operating the Buchla 200 and EMS VCS3 synthesizers, in addition to the SuperCollider and Pure Data coding environments, the cast of musicians includes an array of Stockholm-based artists, such as Mattias Hållsten on shō—a Japanese mouth organ—and Susana Santos Silva on trumpet (both members of the late CC Hennix’ Kamigaku ensemble), just intonation contrabassist Vilhelm Bromander, along with Amina Hocine and her unique self-built foghorn organ. Frequent collaborators Fabian Willmann on bass clarinet and Raphaël Rossé on serpent and euphonium join from the electroacoustic group Minua, which Aron co-founded.

Faitiche is delighted to release a short version of the radio play Zwischen (German for ‘between’). Devised and produced by Jan Jelinek for German public broadcaster SWR2, Zwischen brings together twelve sound poetry collages using interview answers by public figures. Each collage consists of the brief moments between the spoken words: silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles. These voice collages also control a synthesizer, creating electronic sounds that overlay and merge with the voices to make twelve acoustic structures. We all know the speaker’s fate: you falter, you mispronounce, there are breaks, silences and false starts. This results in delays, a language noise compared by Roland Barthes to the knocks made by a malfunctioning motor. Such gaps can be disconcerting, standing as they do for a failure of the speaker’s rhetorical skills. But what happens when they become a constitutive, poetic factor? Zwischen consists of twelve answers to twelve questions. The answers were all recorded in interview situations. From the speech of the interviewees – all eloquent public figures – the pauses are extracted and edited together. The result is a series of sound collages of silence. But this silence is deceptive, as it is only meaning that falls silent. What remains audible is an archaic body language: modes of breathing, planning phases, seething word particles in search of sense that can break out into onomatopoeic tumult or drift off into sonorous noise. In a further step, each of the twelve collages controls a modular synthesizer via its amplitude and frequency. Supposedly defective speech acts conduct synthetic sounds and the speakers regain their composure – not via the spoken word, but through sound. The opening questions in the various interviews are answered by: Alice Schwarzer, John Cage, Hubert Fichte, Slavoj Žižek, Joseph Beuys, Lady Gaga, Ernst Jandl, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marcel Duchamp, Friederike Mayröcker, Yoko Ono and Max Ernst.

Digging deep into the legendary Igloo Records catalog, Holidays Records returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of the imprint's sixth outing, the Belgian composer Henry Krutzen’s astounding 1981 LP, “Silances”. An entirely singular gesture at the borders of sound poetry, musique concrète, and radical electroacoustic practice that draws upon disparate elements of drone, jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditions of music from across the globe, decades on from its original release it remains as striking, unique, challenging, and compelling as it did upon its release. * Deluxe edition in screen printed cover + insert * Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward-thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music. Every step of the way, they’ve seemed to step up the game. Their latest, the first reissue of the Belgian composer Henry Krutzen’s astounding 1981 LP, “Silances”, takes a deep dive into the legendary Igloo Records catalog. Once described by Keith Fullerton Whitman as being “nestled somewhere between Ghédalia Tazartès' mutant Sound Poetry, Anton Bruhin's acoustic / Alphorn drones”, drawing on a palette of vocals, hand percussion, piano, harmonica, saxophone, synthesizer, it’s a truly engrossing immersion into spaciously bristling sonority that remains as radical more than forty years down the road, as it did the day it was released. Issued in a very limited vinyl edition, beautifully reproducing the original sleeve, accompanied by Krutzen’s original liner notes, this is one for the heads that can’t be passed by. Henry Krutzen is a relatively shadowy figure in the history of experimental sound. Between the early '80s and the 2010s, there are only a handful of albums that bear his name, and little to no information about how they come to be. A multi-instrumentalist and composer who studied percussion, saxophone, and harmony in various schools and jazz clinics across Belgium, over the years he played in a diverse range of musical projects across the idioms of jazz, new wave, heavy metal, experimental, chanson française, world music and progressive rock, before relocating to Brazil during the early 2000s. Had he disappeared completely and done nothing else, “Silances”, his lone 1981 LP for Igloo Records - the Belgian imprint founded in 1978 by Daniel Sotiaux to “promote diversity, allowing expressions of more marginal music to be heard and supported in a musical context that lives under the threat of standardization” - would have ensured his legend. Sitting alongside astounding and remarkably unique albums by Leo Küpper, Jacques Bekaert, Henri Chopin, Arthur Pétronio, André Stordeur, and numerous others, in the label’s early catalog, it’s a truly stunning piece of work. Reflecting back in a note that Krutzen penned in 2022 when he was contacted for the reissue of “Silances”, Krutzen recalls: “Since I was 16, I had been experimenting with concrete music with a technician friend and we used all a teenager’s room could offer to make sounds into music: faucets, glasses of water, metal springs on ladders, objects of any kind… I had hours of recordings I pitched to Daniel [Sotiaux, of Igloo Records], to see if he was interested in making an album. I also had other ideas I wanted to be able to develop. What a joy when he accepted to work on the project! So I got to work. First, I set up a vocal improvisation quartet, and we spent long afternoons rehearsing using input I provided… We went into the studio and recorded almost two hours of improvisation, from which I then chose the best moments for the final product”. The resulting nine compositions, when viewed as a cohesive whole, unfold as an endlessly surprising journey into a diverse means of expression, incorporating elements of concrete poetry, phonetical vocal utterance, musique concrète, drone, nods to jazz, minimalism, ecstatic tribalism, and various traditional musics from across the globe, creating a fascinating counterpoint to the roughly concurrent DIY experiments of projects like Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and Organum. While radically open and experimental, one of the most striking aspects of “Silances” is how undeniably tight and considered it is, appearing as though each structure and chosen elements is exactly as it should be, and for which there would have been no other option. From the vocal squawks and ambient detritus of “Des Voix” or the incredibly constrained minimal beats and clangs of “La Machine” - a piece through the consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines - and the droning harmonics of “Froid”, which incorporate excerpts of Krutzen’s teenage experiments in concrete music with records

"In the core of the album’s creation, lies my fascination with unveiling the piano overtones by harnessing the properties of complex systems, which emerge when competing oscillations of strings interact with room acoustics, microphone placements, the piano's pedals, and its soundboard. Through long forms, incremental gestures, and nuanced timbral artifacts, the album aims to distort the perception of time and invite an introspective experience of multiple and expanded temporalities." - Zoe Efstathiou. "Following collaborations with Egil Kalman and Oda Dyrnes, Greek pianist Zoe Efstathiou investigates chaotic overtone systems on this pecuilar solo piano excursion, teasing inscrutable, hypnotic drones that sound utterly alien. RIYL Akira Rabelais, John Also Bennett, Kassel Jaeger." - Boomkat. Bio: Zoe Efstathiou, pianist and electro-acoustic composer, originally from Greece, has lived in Sweden since 2015. Her interest shifts between the intricate relationships of the overtones of acoustic instruments, electro-acoustic textures, and the sonic potential of light installations. Her music interpolates the momentary with the ever-evolving, exploring ideas related to time, expectation and memory. Physical copies of the ltd LP is available from Boomkat, A Musik, Discreet Music, etc!

"Stunning recordings from Norwegian pianist Anja Lauvdal, who follows-up last year’s Laurel Halo-produced ‘From a Story Now Lost’ with an album of improvisations made on a Wurlitzer electric piano, featuring the great Lasse Marhaug on mastering duties. Pastoral, personal, heartbreaking gear that’s required listening if you’re into Harold Budd, Loren Connors, Dominique Lawalrée, Robert Wyatt, Vincent Gallo." - Boomkat

Scottish experimental/electronic musician Drew McDowall’s lifelong interest in an elegiac solo bagpipe style called pibroch (ceòl mòr in Gaelic) has been an inspiration for much of his previous work (including Coil’s legendary Time Machines). This form, often traditionally used for laments and for tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody evoking an ancient, solemn mood. His latest work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, both incorporates and transforms these elements via exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced. Co-produced with engineer Randall Dunn at Circular Ruin Studios in Brooklyn, the collection’s four pieces capture McDowall at his most elevated and elusive, in thrall to "the ineffable – that which refuses to be spoken." McDowall’s palette here is unusually eclectic, sourced from a dynamic orchestral ensemble arranged by Brent Arnold and comprised of cello, viola, violin, harp (Marilu Donovan of LEYA), and french horn. Ebbing between shrouded electronics and enigmatic, sometimes spectralist orchestration, the album moves with a seething, simmering energy, surging into elegant, uneasy crescendos. The first two pieces are inspired by a liberatory hijacking and inversion of a grim biblical story (and by a cryptic and strange UK simple syrup branding). Opener "Out of Strength Comes Sweetness" shivers with short echo and resonant pads, before shifting into the album’s centerpiece: the 14-minute saga "And Lions Will Sing with Joy." A murmuring electrical storm of keening strings and disorienting drones gradually grows darker and denser, until suddenly there’s a crack in the clouds, revealing mutated choral voices and sparkling harp. McDowall describes the track as "an incantation to help usher in a break, and a new beginning." The record’s latter half evokes a deep untamed animism shot through with spiraling radiance. "In Wound and Water" sways with harp, plucked strings and eerie cello undertows while lush layers of disorientated electronics hang in the dusk. There is no resolution, only a faint gradient of fragile dissipation, leading into the album’s harrowing and climactic closer, "A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves." Processed voices (credited on the liner notes to "The Ghosts Who Refuse to Rest") contort, whisper, and gather as the rest of the ensemble sharpens, poising to strike. Then it does – grand, tragic stabs of strings and horns lashing the sky, storming heaven by force. The fallout is poetic and inevitable, raining embers into a dark sea. But the journey and catharsis of A Thread linger long after it goes silent. Like so much of McDowall’s multifaceted catalog, this is music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane, to the tile and the mosaic.

"nehan is a Japanese free improvisation and avant-garde rock quintet formed in August 2022. Their performances are initiated by a 9hz brain wave emitted from a testee who has been brought into a deep meditative state via either hypnosis or acupuncture. nehan doesn't begin until the testee has gotten into the state of 'nothingness.' It is only then that the improvisation can begin. The role of improvisation has been key to all the musical projects of Masaki Batoh. In 2010, as Batoh was winding down the activity of his long-standing 'heavy chamber folk' group, Ghost, he became involved in the design of a machine to generate sonic data based on brain waves. An acupuncturist as well as a musician by trade, his interest was spurred by the rhythms of the body and the brain, and a desire to access the 'pulses' of brain waves to initiate improvisations. Following the release of Brain Pulse Music, Batoh toured Japan and the US, making demonstrations of his process using a local volunteer and guest performers, when available. Today, nehan arrive at their performance space prepared with a Brain Pulse testee, bringing a wide array of instruments including gongs, timpani, tabla and other drums and percussion, Crumhorn, bagpipes, mellotron, oscillators and additional sound effects. Their performance is a transformative electro-acoustic display that passes through the prism of music styles, from east to west, from traditional folk and classical to rock, jazz, and avant electronic. While nehan's performance presentation invokes a sense of ritual, they understand their process as being far removed from any type of spiritual endeavor; this is an action of improvisation, occurring in reality between the five musicians on stage, in response to the brain waves of an individual. For the personnel of nehan, Masaki Batoh asked players with whom he had good previous experiences in improvisation: Futoshi Okano (Ghost, Acid Mothers Temple, The Silence), Haruo Kondo (Espvall & Batoh) and Junzo Tateiwa (Ghost), along with female Brain Pulse testee Gozen on oscillators. The performance here, recorded live in August of 2022 at GOK SOUND in Tokyo, demonstrates their communal dedication to the improvisation. The players act as listeners and musicians simultaneously, inspired to make extended pieces of music out of the 'nothingness' of brain waves. The possibilities of nehan's chosen approach are almost infinite; An Evening With Nehan is only the beginning of their journey."

Espontaneamente se Tenta: Aventuras Sonoras de Djalma Corrêa is an album of deeply exploratory pieces by legendary percussionist and composer Djalma Corrêa. This double-LP set features previously unreleased recordings that cover a wide range of sonic experiments, revealing an unknown side of the prolific and groundbreaking Brazilian artist. Most of the tracks on this album were digitized for the first time – directly from the original tapes – and were compiled in collaboration with Corrêa just before he passed. The result is a wild and unsettling collage that shows us just how original and intense Corrêa could be: from the unorthodox electroacoustic piece Evolução (Para Fita e Filme), which channels ancestral African inspirations to create a sonic cosmogonical narrative, to the proto-mixtape Exemplo de Sintetizadores, in which he transitions from transcendental drones to astral cha-cha-chas. While the compilation might seem disjointed at first listen, it is in fact the most accurate translation or representation of his central concept: spontaneous music. Djalma's relationship with sound was always guided by his fearless approach to listening, and by his audacious and dynamic interaction with both musicians and equipment, which enabled him to work across a wide array of genres: from jazz to completely abstract music, always through a personal DIY ethic. Corrêa developed a strong bond with experimentalist and inventor Walter Smetak, with whom he shared a studio during his formative years at Universidade Federal da Bahia. Suite Contagotas, featured in this collection, is no less than a sonic materialization of that bond: an experiment revolving around dripping water and its randomness – a tentative exploration of the ideas and possibilities envisioned by Smetak for his audacious, albeit unrealized, Estúdio OVO. Djalma, however, is best known for his studio work in historical albums, including many by Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben, and for his own polyrhythmic opus Baiafro. The last track is an early recording called Bossa 2000 dC, first performed by Djalma at the 1964 Nós, Por Exemplo concert, an event which is often cited as marking the beginning of the Tropicalia movement. At the time, he was the only artist in the lineup using electronic devices to create sounds, e.g. medical oscillators and contact mics to augment his percussive palette. The artwork is an amalgamation of material found in the Djalma Corrêa Archive (currently managed by his son Caetano Corrêa) and other material created during the period in which the record was being put together. The intention is to guide the listeners through this possibly tempestuous soundscape, giving them additional resources so that they may draw their own meanings and make their own sense of this extremely immersive and original experience – which is like nothing we've ever heard before.

Bent Lorentzen is widely considered one of the key figures and pioneers of early Danish electronic music and he was one of a few classically trained composers seeking out the possibilities of the new technology in the 1960’s. Lorentzen composed a fairly large number of electronic works, – mainly in the 60's and 70'es. Furthermore, he developed a significant educational practice in and around electronic music, conducted workshops, taught at courses, and published articles in both national and international journals, while also producing several educational records on electronic music.

'Electronic Music' was originally released in 1987 as a retrospective album, collecting three of Bent Lorentzen's electronic works from the 70'es. The three works clearly demonstrate Lorentzen’s close familiarity with his equipment and his great technical proficiency regarding the creation and manipulation of all sorts of electronic and recorded acoustic sounds – typically in the form of speed changes, reversed sounds, and reverb and filter effects. The music is often quite dramatic with distinct narratives and multiple dynamic layers of sound, but still with a clear sense of disposition and restraint, possibly stemming from Lorentzen’s experience with classical instrumentation, and orchestration.

'The Bottomless Pit' (originally Afgrundens brønd) on side A was composed as the musical score for a ballet by the Norwegian dance company Høvik Ballett, commissioned by NOMUS (Nordic Music Commitee) and staged at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo during the Nordic Music Days festival in 1972. The piece was originally composed for four channels, but mixed down to stereo for the 1987 release.

Side B’s 'Visions' (originally Visione) and 'Cloud-Drift '(originally NUBES) were also both composed as 4-channel works. The back of the original LP-sleeve contains small prints of graphic notations accompanying the two compositions, here reproduced in enlarged versions for better readability.

The music on the record has been carefully remastered for this reissue. The Bottomless Pit and Visions are new stereo mixes made from 4-channel versions obtained from Gunner Møller Pedersen’s private archive. These versions had much more clarity, detail, and depth than other masters we were able to find. The mix from four channels to stereo has been done with careful regard to how the stereo versions appear on the original record. Cloud-Drift was not to be found in its 4-channel version, but comes from the master tape for the 1987 release from OH Musik / Point Records. This piece appears a bit rougher and with less detail in the higher frequencies, but it is the exact same version, as the one on the original release from 1987. 

Opéra Mort - collaborators of the late, great Ghédalia Tazartès in Reines D’Angleterre - float their first new suite of roving, hallucinatory electro-acoustic works in 4 years on a return to Brittany’s Editions Gravats label. Èlg & Jo Tanz’s hard-to-classify project Opéra Mort has been in operation since early moves on Jo Tanz’s tanzprocess label paved the way for a 2010 split release with the legendary Smegma, a cult pair of Reines D’Angleterre sides with august outsider Ghédalia Tazartès, and beguiling works for Luke Younger’s Alter label. On their new album ‘Le Présent’ they typically keep everything ambiguously out-of-reach and etheric in forms comparable to experimental ambient musick, electro-acoustic minimalism, and outsider psych-folk, never fully tilting to any of them, preferring a style of shapeshifting that works beautifully well on the back of calm, shut eyelids. Through a process of improvisation, active listening, and highly attuned intuition, Opéra Mort proceed to induce hypnotic states of mind that encourage the imagination to wander, following a labyrinthine breadcrumb trail of sonic artefacts and fine timbral detail. Their reticence to supply any explicit cues works to the benefit of suspending the listener’s disbelief, reserving the right to surprise and colour the mind with reeling tapestries of phantasmic, fathomless apparitions. ‘Le Monde’ first splashes on the senses with piquant arps and bass drones coaxed into a lush lather that’s pregnant with theatric dread, threaded with alien whispers on ‘Secrets’, and spangled with spring reverb in the eerily naif creep of ‘L’humanite entiere’. Their organic, fractally shifting collage of tape loops and synths in ‘Oeufs’ feels as though we’re combed backwards below the waves on a dreamlike shoreline, where they metamorphose into discordant, howling rave hoovers and caterwaul with ‘La nouvelle fin du mode’, and the deliquescent lounge music ooze of ‘Damien Schultz’, leaving us with no firm grasp of what the hell we’ve just been listening too, but totally enthralled nonetheless.

In the midst of a wave of hybridizing ambient, drone, folklore and experimental electroacoustic music, Roxane Métayer has gained a cult following with only a couple of releases to date. Following her debut album (Éclipse Des Ocelles) for Morc with a split EP and a limited cassette for Wabi-Sabi, Roxane now turns to Marionette with her intimate narrative based multi-instrumental recordings, a match made in the heavens if you ask us. With her violin, woodwind, voice and various effect pedals, Métayer takes the listener on a newfound journey into the ancient, medieval, and primordial. Perl​é​e de s​è​ve is Métayer’s second full length, a sophomore to the critically acclaimed Éclipse Des Ocelles, where Métayer continues to sonically realize the map of the fictional habitats that inhabit her mind. Coming from a background of studying narration and different animation mediums, it’s no surprise that her recordings evoke vivid imagery and carry a trace of the environment they were conceived in. The instruments morph as extensions of her body and ultimately become new organs, a means of communicating these bio-memetic stories and creating a dialogue between herself and her surroundings. Meandering melodies intertwine with accompanying drones, mantra-like fragments and a handfeel percussion lend themselves as living and breathing elements in Roxane’s beguiling and spellbinding anecdotes. Roxane is an observer of the world, her projects conceived from elements that inform her reality, such as the organic imagery and sounds of nature, then transforming that into a strangely familiar parallel universe that would not exist otherwise. Whether it's active research or taking her instruments to the forest, Métayer opens up her imagination by taking this mental journey to discover locations, creatures, and time periods then channeling that into her own fairy tales. The album and track titles act as a portal into those worlds, like chapters in a book where the protagonists are animalia, plantae, and fungi. As Métayer wrote in an interview: “Stories are a privileged way to create an awareness of a specific subject.”

Ulla returns with ‘Foam’, a surprise new album unlocking variants of ambient pop and looped jazz/dub styles coiled inside a glitched matrix that reminds us of Huerco S’ ‘Plonk’ as well as Ekkehard Ehlers fractal treatments and those incredible, smudged and disneyfied edits of Celine Dion released earlier this year by elusive outfit Romance. It’s an absorbing, quietly significant album for 3XL, on its most substantial release to date. Responsible for one of contemporary ambient’s finest breadcrumb trails in recent years, Ulla leads on from an acclaimed run of albums toward a more filigree style on ‘Foam’. Deploying fragmented morsels resembling glass-cast confectionary with a burbling vernacular, these ephemeral new works dissolve into a supine, shoe-gauzy and jazzed bliss that’s best compared with Jan Jelinek’s efforts in this dream-staged arena, the subs x piano minimalism of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s revered collabs, as well as the memory-frothed echo of claire rousay and Co La’s fractal baubles. Aye, it’s a sound close to our hearts and one weft with a certain sort of magic that sparkles on the nerves and imagination with delicacy. Intending it to “feel like a keychain”, the album follows a logic that’s almost algorithmic with its haphazard mutations, but which ultimately displays a more human pulse on pieces like ‘foam angel’, weaving forlorn brass around jazz samples and Ulla’s disjointed voice murmuring unintelligibly like some cyborg liz frazer speaking into the sublime. Effusive solo keys and strings cascade like petals on ‘song’, where familiar leitmotifs become wind-dispersed like seeds. We’re snagged on the bittersweet tang of ‘popping out’, and the unexpected dance between marina’s jazz guitar lilt and the aerosoul thizz on ‘sad face’, while the tongue-tip sensitivities of ‘blush’, and ‘for your love’ sound like Rihanna produced by a Systemisch-era Oval. As tangled and complex as it is filled with improbable ohrwurms, ‘Foam’ is unlike anything we’ve heard from Ulla before, and it just might be the weirdest ambient/pop dislocation of the year so far.

Nicole Lachartre: “Mundus” 3LP box – Metaphon 012 - 2023 Hardboard linen LP box with silkscreened titles, 12 page booklet with track info and text by Vincent de Roguin and Mark Harwood, notes by Lachartre and a rare portrait photo from 1969. Edition of 200 copies Available through the La Scie Dorée webshop First ever release of French composer, musicologist and writer Nicole Lachartre (1934-1991). This 3LP set comprises most of her electronic music and musique concrète compositions recorded in the 60’s and 70’s, all previously unreleased. Lachartre had a classical formation, studied with a.o. Darius Milhaud, Iannis Xenakis and Michel Philippot. Her broad formation and interest as well as her profound commitment and singular vision created a solitary voice even within the field of electronic music and musique concrète, strangely enough unheard till this day. Her first tape composition from 1968 was recorded in Pierre Henry’s Apsome studio and most of her other electronic and electro-acoustic compositions included in this box set were recorded at the IPEM in Ghent.

継続的な研究と探求の道を歩む、実験的な音響作品を出版するためのプラットフォームであるというロンドンの新興レーベル〈Titrate〉からは、同地の実験的ダンス・ミュージック・プロデューサー/レコードコレクターであるHenrique Matiasによるソロ・プロジェクトHemsによる2022年度デビュー・アルバム『Chaotic Affair』がアナログ・リリース。実験的なトーンを軸にしながらも、全体的に瞑想的な雰囲気を持つこの一枚では、リスナーを聴覚的没入へと誘う豊かなテクスチャーが含まれた先鋭的な電子音響/エクスペリメンタル・ディープ・テクノをたっぷりと堪能できます。

LTD stock from The Trilogy Tapes !! Adam Badí Donoval is the founder & curator of Warm Winters Ltd.