MUSIC

This album, crafted entirely within a subharmonic framework and meticulously processed through tape manipulation, stands as Concepción Huerta’s sharpest work to date—undoubtedly her most abrasive, intense, and exhilarating. Her signature remains intact: a practice deeply rooted in drone, musique concrète, and hauntingly visceral textures—a kind of soundtrack that evokes powerful, image-driven narratives.

Conceptually, Huerta’s sonic vision evokes an image of open veins, not human veins, but those of the earth itself, the open veins of Latin America. These nervures are, in truth, rivers of lava; fury transmuted into fire coursing beneath the land until it erupts. The album is, in a way, a reflection on dispossession, resource extraction, and colonization. But beyond being a historical commentary—one that some might relegate to a forgotten past—it is also a reminder of the present, of how these practices persist in contemporary, postmodern guises.

It serves as both a tribute to the literary work of Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential voices of Latin American leftist thought, and a howl from the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, resonating with the Zapatista struggle, the resistance of the Guaraní people in Paraguay and Argentina, and the voices of Indigenous communities across Latin America.

In the 16th century, a book titled Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears) was published in Mexico, compiling Nahuatl texts that presented the unofficial history, the account of the defeated. Concepción Huerta’s album El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) is not a call to action nor a reactionary manifesto, but an invitation to reflection, a historical reexamination. It urges us not to accept the official narrative at face value and serves as a warning, to remain vigilant and, within our capacities, resist the resurgence of fascism and colonialism in all its modern forms.



Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.

This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

Sound Reporters was a Dutch publishing company that specialised in anthropology, religion, and history, releasing unique documents of the cultural multiplicity of human societies and their importance. These recordings were originally released on cassette in 1988, and consist of field recordings made on the Greek island of Amorgos, part of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. The release was jointly credited to the painter Harry Van Essen, who lived for several years on the island and recorded its soundscapes, and also to the ethnomusicologist and founder of Sound Reporters, Fred Gales, who mixed the recordings.

The recordings consist of sketched amalgams of local sounds from Egiali, a port in the northeast of the island. The first half is a soundscape deeply rooted in the island people’s daily lives, alternating sounds of the sea with popular music, recitations of poetry, the sounds of fishing boats, people playing boardgames, a party. The second half takes us out of the village and into the mountains, unveiling the island’s unadorned natural environment: the sounds of cicadas, the buzz of honeybees, the bells of the large herds of goats left out to pasture, etc.

Space in the Sun was one of Akio Suzuki’s major sound projects, a unique construction completed in 1988 and located on the merdian line, which took around 18 months to build. Its purpose was to allow Suzuki to spend one day, on the autumnal equinox, purifying his sense of hearing in nature. This release comprises a 44 page book containing plans and materials from the time alongside texts, and two CDs of environmental recordings created on site at Space in the Sun. To date only tiny fragments of the recordings made between those massive clay brick walls have been used in performances and no environmental recordings of the objective of the project, i.e. the space itself, have been released. The first disk consists of the first release of “person-less” field recordings made at the same spot that Akio sat at during the event (recorded in 1993, 60 minutes). The second disk consists of a performance that took place in the space. Space in the Sun’s earthen walls have since been demolished, so these recordings represent a return to life of their soft echo, an experience accessible nowhere else.

To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.

Alex Zhang Hungtai stands in stillness on 'Dras', but it's the kind of stillness that contains entire ranges of possibility. Recorded in 2019 inside Montreal's Saint Joseph Oratory (right before a piano demolition, no less), these nine pieces sat dormant on his hard drive through pandemic years until something finally clicked. What emerges now feels like watching someone trace the contours of their own interior landscape, each melodic line a careful negotiation with the unconscious. This is only a saxophone record in the barest sense.

The terrain here is tactile and unforgiving. On the title track, difficult melodies get torn apart and molded into emotive drones, dissonance interlocking where tones cut paths through the senses with metallic sheen. "El Khela" refracts into spectral layers that pull with eternal gravity, while "Estado" finds solace inside its own haze, rhythms barely audible but guiding forward with their cadence smeared against grey walls. These are small moments that become cathartic sonic breaths, each one revealing new passages through psychic geography.

There's beauty encased in the subtle repetitions of opener "Erg,” and in the glowing progressions of "White Dwarf." Zhang's saxophone becomes a dowsing rod for the uncharted, with electricity running through the album's veins while his breath anchors everything to something wordlessly human. The digital manipulation applied to those church recordings doesn't obscure that human element of 'Dras'. It transforms the raw material into something that navigates between external space and internal landscape.

By the time closer "Mazil" arrives, Alex Zhang Hungtai lets his saxophone speak its full resonance. Low, guttural expressions open up like chasms beneath melodic constellations floating in thick gravity. There’s a finality here even though something in these passages feels weightless. This is music permeated with inner dialogue, a wordless spell dancing above the psychic abyss. Tonal sequences disintegrate into narcotized sonics, a sharp elegant edge that cuts without drawing blood. This lonely work of exploration becomes something communal. 'Dras' is a map for traversing the space between where we are and where we might go.

Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.

This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

"The Sound Leaves" began as an interactive sound performance and installation based around humans’ impact on the environment and how that impact is altering the sonic landscape of our world. As ecosystems change due to climate collapse, the sound of those ecosystems changes too. "The Sound Leaves" used an amplified collection of autumn leaves to encourage participants to listen closely to how their actions alter the sounds of the fallen leaves by walking on and through them for a period of time. By amplifying these sounds, processing and mixing them live, and playing them back via a set of speakers directed at the installation, the performance heightened the sonic changes participants’ actions create. From that performance, a sound piece by the same name was composed using the recorded sounds with additional instrumentation. It was installed as a temporary exhibition on site at Philbrook Musuem of Art during the winter of 2023, emanating from a grove of oak and elm trees. A year later, as the climate crisis worsened, those same sounds were reprocessed and reconsidered, creating a more ghost-like approach, "In Collapse."

“Elemental View” is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere. “Elemental View” invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. Fullman bows the instrument lengthwise with her fingertips while walking, playing multiple strings at once. As she walks, upper partial tones unfold at different rates, in proportion to differences in string length, imparting an undulating wave of continually shifting overtones. The notation for the Long String Instrument contains both temporal indications and spatial choreography, as specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length. Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. To produce percussive sounds on the otherwise drone-based instrument, Fullman designed and fabricated the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which play three, six, or nine strings at once. Varying techniques with these tools produce either open ringing tones or closed dampened ones. With their laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition. In the movements “Environmental Memory” and “Concentrated Merry-Go-Round”, Fullman incorporates Travis Andrew’s primary instrument, the guitar. Andy Meyerson and Fullman accompany the guitar in duo playing box bow and shoveler. For “Surface Narrative in Four Parts”, Meyerson also applies his percussion mastery to the santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer. The santur’s unique tuning is derived from the extended microtonal partials of the sequence played by Fullman on The Long String Instrument.

super high quality, and thick tote, double strike silver print on black by the legends at 7th Disaster.

Akio Suzuki has always been an artist in search of unexpected sound, and curiosity has been his guiding principle. Whether that be curiosity for objects, spaces or places, his work has been guided by a porousness and pliability which has allowed him to explore an enormous sonic terrain. This freedom has also allowed him to develop a language in sound that remains utterly his own. Nowhere is this more evident than in his approach to instrument creation. During the 1970s Akio Suzuki devised a series of instruments that would become his sonic signatures. The Analapos and De Koolmees are perhaps his most readily identifiable instruments and it is these two that make up the core of material from which Soundsphere is created. Soundsphere, recorded in 1990 at Hut Apollphuis in Eindhoven, captures Suzuki at the height of his powers. It is a document of his music shaped by patience and dynamism, in equal measure. Few other recordings capture both the tenderness and the presence of Suzuki’s ways of discovering sound in his instruments. On pieces such as Analapos A: Voice, he creates a wavering oceanic vocal drone that echoes up and down, tracing the coils of the Analapos’ springs. The results are simultaneously minimal and expansive, reminding us that sound exists in the vertical and well as horizontal planes. Similarly his performance on De Koolmees: Suzuki Type - Glass Harmonica shares this intensity of focus. Suzuki’s strikes and strokes on the glass tubes, creating an endlessly evolving array of tonal inflections and pulses. Soundsphere, which is celebrating its 45th anniversary, is an essential capture of the ways in sound Akio Suzuki has developed over his now six decades of practice.

Sampling and processing Asuna's arsenal of toy keyboards, computer music pioneer Carl Stone transforms seemingly throwaway sounds into chattering, plunderphonic memories before batting them back to the Japanese producer for further editing. You can tell that 'Imu Plastos' was developed with live performance in mind. Sound artist Asuna, who's released on 12k, Faitiche and White Paddy Mountain, is already notorious for his "100 Toys" and "100 Keyboards" performances, wherein spirals of cheapo instruments are repurposed to create complex, textured electroacoustic compositions. Stone fits into the chain well; they performed together for the first time in 2024 and Stone worked on the audio in real time, taking mental notes for studio sessions that followed. In a more controlled environment, the duo pushed themselves to rethink the process, reversing the flow so that Stone would create the sound and Asuna would sample. The finished album is a set of improvisations from these sessions that keeps rebuilding and deconstructing itself. Early on, you can still hear the creaky source material, but the first two tracks disappear in a matter of minutes - 'As Aural Consent' is the first substantial production and it's far more mysterious, 11 minutes of ratcheting noises and disquieting squeaks. 'A Salsa Nocturne', meanwhile, is a wind tunnel organ jam that you'd never guess was made using a bunch of kid's instruments and on 'Ulina as Ancestor', the duo burrow deep beneath the earth's surface, searching out eldrich resonances and sublime chaos.

Folds of water sanctify the river. Tracing soft, cool hands, the tall oak make way for a child who is older now. The moon gives chase, as clouds attempt to climb her. And choiceless, she falls through, further out of sight. An episodic, dreamlike place; Headwater is an invitation to explore what is fundamental to life – as if asking the listener; what, after losing my compass, is the nature of my experience? The headwater is the childhood of the stream – its beginning. And as though banished from the safety, innocence and purity of this place, the individual is carried through rapids, gashed and sawn, calling for the self to be woven again. In these early moments, the poignancy of this venture is felt in droves – a woman lost in the forest trying to find a way out, silhouette skating through light while something approaches, further out of sight. Everyone is thrown out of childhood – hurled into a life to make sense of something which lives on in memory. The mind catches fragments, painted by ink found in the canals of the veins and rivers within – their headwater, the heart. Like tentacles beneath our skin, their message arrives unannounced, while a great struggle embarks to keep them at bay – the clarity of their awareness polluted. After a time, the river is older now. The forest’s foliage has tuned, sculpted and moulded her – so much so, that the water is barely recognisable. But the girl is no fool, and her sensitivity will not be auctioned. Catching glimpses of the headwater – she cries out to the forest and the valley. This time, unafraid of the pain it wears and hides behind, pretending. She sings to the eclipse, crying for the stars and their breath on the river’s back. Calling for the animals, insects and fish - bowing to the scent of the pine in the evening warmth of the air, weeping to the memory of her childhood, she comes alive. Only in such a surrender does the headwater of her tears make itself known, and all that is longed for arise without having ever been lost. Could she really be creating all of it? And like a child with a boundless imagination, be confusing her role in the play with the candid, honest face of life itself? Humility might yet speak – claiming all she has taken herself to be as the leaves and foliage which pollute and fragment the stream. That a quest to return to childhood is an unnecessary one – because the currents which begun at the headwater still contain, at every step of the river, the headwater itself. And that the cries and memories heard starkly through the forest valley have still come from the deepest waterways the body has pronounced. And so, originate in the heart – and are no threat.

cobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschach inkblot — rotated as if in a whirlpool, and three-dimensional imagery pulsed with strong flicker. What was weird was that the images did not adhere to the surface of the screen. They stood out, almost floating, like holograms. Then, my eyes started catching physical shapes in the depth of the abstract patterns such as faces, hands, the surface of an oil spill, and they appeared and disappeared like ghosts or doppelgängers. “How does Nervous Magic Lantern work?” I asked Ken. The inventor's answer was something unexpected: "I don't know! I dreamed it and found it through experimentations then stuck to it. I'm not that technical." Well, he is an artist who creates a phantasmagoria of mystery; let the neuroscientists explain the mechanism. The self-made apparatus contains a spinning shutter, a light source, and lenses set in a wooden frame. Ken inserts his hand-painted circular slides between the light and lenses and moved them gently with his hands. The lenses enlarged a tiny portion on the slide, while the spinning shutter gave the flicker effect. Compared to Ken's other works, which are often filled with unflinching political criticism, the imagery of Nervous Magic Lantern is patently abstract, and it examines how our brain regulates our perceptions. In Jonas Mekas' Movie Journal, Ken once said, “We’re stepping towards a deeper incline, something challenging our notion of the way things are. Something impossible.” Elsewhere he stated, “Eisenstein said the power of film was to be found between shots. Peter Kubelka seeks it between film frames. I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain. A whole new play of appearances is possible here.” Nervous Magic Lantern offers up this sort of play in stunning hallucinations, strange visions dancing on the screen. Ken's request for my music was to play “sounds of daily life.” He explained that the project “is an escape,” and that he felt “guilty not having any messages or reflecting the real world. By using environmental sounds to surround us,” he continued, “I'd like to be rooted in the real world." Around 2014, I noticed that Ken had a sizable collection of cassette field recordings he had amassed over the last several decades. Street noises in Chinatown, conversations with friends, or any sort of uncategorizable sound around him. I was fascinated and decided to use them as a springboard for composing. One of the unique aspects of Nervous Magic Lantern is that the visual stays abstract while the sound is able to adopt meanings or a narrative sense derived from the quotidian sounds. I wanted to emphasize that point and add almost a sense of documentary. More than that, I simply loved the aural depictions of Ken and Flo’s life. Those also trigger my memories with them. Over the years, during summer time, Ken, Flo, and my wife, Makiko, made a habit of going to their favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Other times, Ken and I had morning coffee at a Puerto Rican restaurant just below their loft. Life and art are inseparable, breaking into one another incessantly. Ken is an artist who always envisioned the impossible. I wanted to see if it's possible to present that vision as something universal, something whole, something running through everyone’s life. A soundtrack for life in the depth of illusion. That is perhaps what this album is. This album was recorded as a soundtrack for Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern at Spiral Hall, organized by Sound Live Tokyo, on November 3, 2015. It was probably one of our best performances. Before the performance, Ken explained to me the selected slides he uses and the ordering he employs, so that I would better understand the flow. Some slides are black-and-white and some color. For a given performance, Ken selects 10 slides or so. However, he might play with just one slide for the entire show or change the order — there was plenty of room to improvise. On my side, I also had a structure and the order of tapes, quite independent from Ken's visual. But I made the system easy to extend or shorten, duration-wise, in order to respond to Ken's ordering and mood. Lastly, I wanted to mention Flo's role, as she is deeply involved in Ken's creative process; as he says: “This is a mom-and-pop business.” From the first day of working together, she was always there with us and took care of all practical matters. Ken is a dreamer and thinks and works intuitively. But Flo — an exceptionally beautiful woman in and out — is rooted in the real world. Not just a pragmatist, however, Flo advises Ken on artistic decisions. Ken always asks to hear her thoughts, as I did as well. As film critic and their decades-long friend Amy Taubin once described it, "Florence Jacobs is nothing less than a producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema." What a perfect couple, and it was an extremely joyous journey with them!

With concentration, or elevated tension as he has called it, Akio Suzuki enters completely into the substance of sound, its emergence and its passing. What he does with sound may propose a rarefied world to many people, and yet it possesses a persuasive quality of rightness. One of the most difficult aspects of music and soundwork to explain is the concept of ‘right action’. How is that music can be evaluated almost immediately, just as quickly as a fire alarm or a baby’s cry? When Akio performs, certain qualities (grace, warmth, a quiet authority of mind and action, an engagement with the vessel of nothingness through which sound can emerge) are evident as presences, as soon as he begins. He begins from a state we call silence, by listening, yet at the same time raises questions about our ideas of what this silence might be. Time passes; fixity gives way to destruction; visual perfection is relinquished within the faintest of sound fields. As for the work, this ceremony returns us to nothing, ‘to the feeling of not knowing exactly what is before us’, so to the uncanny, to the shell-like ear found by the sea, the ‘ungraspable phantom of life’, the record of a haunting, time regained. The sound is a parabola, a finger tracing on skin, a brush point, bird in flight.

In May 1984 I appeared at a German festival called Pro
Musica Nova, organized by Radio Bremen. I then travelled to
Berlin by car with Rolf Langebertels, the owner of Galerie
Giannozzo who had driven to Bremen to hear me perform. I still
remember very vividly the experience of passing through the
checkpoint to enter West Berlin, a city that floated like an island
in the middle of the still socialist GDR. I had previously visited
Berlin in 1982 to perform at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien at an event
that Rolf had organized. This time too Rolf had organized a
concert for me at the Technische Universitat. Playing off the title
of the piece (“Study Time”) I had performed at Pro Musica
Nova, I titled the piece for this concert “Zeitstudie”.

I owe Rolf a great deal of gratitude, as it was him who
encouraged me by releasing my very first cassette tape,
“Zeitstudie von Akio Suzuki”. In recent years it has become
difficult for me to carry heavy instruments around with me, and
I have started to do simpler performances with objects
assembled on site. So it feels wonderful to have the sound of
the battery of instruments I used back then to be returned to the
light of day.

On “Zeitstudie von A.S.” I used an ANALAPOS, the echo
instrument I invented in 1970, and the Suzuki-type glass
harmonica that I created in 1975. The ANALAPOS resembles the
tin-can telephone that children used to play with: two metal
cans, open at one end and connected by a coil spring. You
play it by stretching out the spring horizonally and then
projecting your voice into the open end of one of the
cylinders. The second piece features a variation, where I
would suspend several ANALAPOS vertically and play them like
a percussion instrument.

The Suzuki-type glass harmonica is in a simpler form than the
pre-existing glass harmonica, and consists of five long glass
tubes of varying diameters suspended horizontally in a metal
frame. As well as rubbing the tubes with wet hands, I developed
my own style of playing it using sticks. Once when I was
practicing with it in the Netherlands, outside the window I was
surprised to hear a bird imitating my sounds. However, later I
discovered that the bird always sang that way, and as a token
of my regret for having ever doubted it, I borrowed the bird’s
Dutch name, De Koolmees, and I s till use it for my instrument.
Recently, as I listened back to the cassette of “Zeitstudie von
A.S.”, one of Hiromi Miyakita’s drawings was lying in front of me.
There was a sympathetic resonance between the sounds and the
drawing, so I decided to use it on the cover. This is a joyful music. 

In 1979, Akio Suzuki recorded a performance, ¡ÇNew Sense Of Hearing¡Ç, at the Nagoya American Centre. During the performance, Suzuki used voice, turntables, glass harmonica and his self-designed instrument the Analapos to create a series of improvised pieces that effectively charted out his sonic investigations for the proceeding decades. In 1980 these recordings were issued by ALM records as Analapos, the first work made publicly available by Akio Suzuki. For going on six decades now, Akio Suzuki has been responsible for creating amongst the most otherworldly, yet deeply affective sound works of his generation. As a musician, sculptor and sound artist, Suzuki¡Çs work threads an important linkage between Eastern and Western sound art practices. His approaches, that focus primarily on intense states of listening, ¡Çthrowing and following¡Ç and a relentless sense of open curiosity, have allowed him to continuously deepen his work. Originally published in an edition of just 200 copies in 1980, Analapos has been out of print literally since its release. Clocking in an over an hour, the original pressing of the recordings to a single LP, presented some technical limitations. This 40th anniversary edition of Analapos is entirely remastered and is published with a booklet that includes a long form interview with Akio Suzuki conducted by sound artist and collaborator Aki Onda, plus extensive photographic documentation of the development of the Analapos. The publication of this edition is announced in conjunction with the Sense Of Ekō retrospective exhibition which opens at The Substation in Melbourne late January.

A note from Lawrence English
 In late 1975, Annea Lockwood realised her composition World Rhythms. It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was. World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into the world, and beyond. It expanded outward from many of the compositions and themes Annea Lockwood had been exploring since the 1960s. It sought to take those learnings and apply them to a new set of terrains and circumstances. Moreover, it suggested a sensing of sound that was drawn from profound curiosity, matched only by patience. In 2019, I reached out to Annea and started a conversation about a revisitation of World Rhythms. My initial proposition was a simple one: a re-issue that was remastered and touched up, reflecting Annea’s thoughts on the piece in this moment. The conversation quickly spun outward though, and before long Annea had asked if I might be interested to revisit the master tapes with the thought that the work could be revived and prepared for performance presentations going forward into this century. On listening to the materials, during the period of restoring the audio from the original master tapes, I was struck by the profound dynamism of the recordings. Each of the sound-fields held an attentive flux, a rhythmic pulse that was breathing. Each one a story of the pulses of the world, and our universe, that spoke to a possible reading of reality that sits in excess of our everyday capacities. A poetics of pulse if you like. Here then is the result of those conversations and also the presentations of the piece that followed - several of which Annea has overseen herself. On this newly rendered imagining of World Rhythms, new relations, listening paths and ways of exploring her sound-fields are brought into focus. The core of the piece remains, a prioritised zone of listening, but emerging from deep within it new sonic formations emerge, a reminder of the dynamism of our energetic world and its surroundings.

Félicia Atkinson’s Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one’s creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson’s music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it’s a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. « Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) », de Félicia Atkinson, s’aborde comme une méditation, non pas comme une musique méditative, mais bien comme une réflexion autour de l’art de créer ; comment habiter sa création, comment la porter, la domestiquer et vivre avec. En puisant son inspiration chez l’artiste Georgia O’ Keeffe, à la fois dans son travail de peintre, mais également dans les maisons dans lesquelles elle a vécu, au Nouveau-Mexique, ou même dans les paysages qui les environnent, Félicia Atkinson compose ici une pièce qui évoque et célèbre, de manière poétique et holistique, le mystère de l’art, le balancement somnambulique qui accompagne l’acte de créer. Mêlant voix fragmentaire, îlots de piano, textures et trames électroniques ou encore enregistrements de terrain, la musique que nous offre Félicia Atkinson est une musique sincère et inspirée, une méditation, donc, mais aussi une leçon qu’on oublie parfois : être artiste, ce n’est pas une activité, encore moins une profession, c’est une façon singulière d’aborder le monde et, par là même, de le densifier. — Richard Chartier’s music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier’s music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier’s music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis. La musique de Richard Chartier se loge aux frontières de l’audible, dans cette lisière où le son se diffracte dans une inter-dimensionalité où les sons, l’espace sonores, l’écoute et le silence se recombinent en une arborescence de devenirs qui se présentent à nous et disparaissent. L’espace-temps dans lequel se déploie la musique de Richard Chartier est un espace-temps étiré, affleurant à peine dans le monde sonore. La délicatesse, la précision et la justesse de la composition Recurrence.Expansion réside précisément dans ce dialogue entre une forme exposée, déclinée, de manière inspirée et maitrisée, et le biotope sonore dans lequel cette forme se développe. C’est d’une telle rencontre qu’émerge la singularité de la musique de Richard Chartier, musique d’écoute attentive, mais également musique sensible, habitée, une musique des métamorphoses discrètes. —Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023

Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the swiss mountains.

A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.

Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evokation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.

A discreet but essential figure in the field of musical creation, Horacio Vaggione has been crafting an ambitious, precise and highly significant body of work for over the last fifty years, coupled with a demanding research activity. This disc offers four purely electroacoustic pieces which illustrate, each in their own way, this singular and fascinating grammar developed by Horacio Vaggione, a complex but fertile grammar which establishes a very special relationship between structure and texture, between matter and formula, to create a fascinating musical space, made up of polyphonies and metamorphoses.