MUSIC

Faitiche presents Beispiel (German for example, also suggests playing together), a joint project by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek. Muster is their first album. Free electronic music, the result of spontaneous improvisations. “Meaning” is a concept that is overused in connection with music. Muster does not call for the same kind of air quotes. With its title, German for patterns/exemplars, Beispiel’s album frees itself from the ballast of teleological semantics. There is no overarching theme, no preparation, no reading list, no reason for this music. Just two facts: Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek have known each other a long time and appreciate each other’s work; and they share a love of modular synthesizers and of experimental set-ups designed to capture surprise. Bretschneider and Jelinek got together for their first joint session in 2016 and the years that followed brought more such meetings at Jelinek’s studio for open-ended musical dialog – at irregular intervals and with no clear objective. The improvisations were recorded in two stereo tracks: one track for Bretschneider’s audio, one for Jelinek’s. After each session, the recordings were processed separately, the options essentially limited to cutting and altering the frequency range. The nine pieces for Muster were selected from the resulting material. This approach reflects an ideal: music is when you play your first note without knowing what the third or fourth will sound like. When your 290th note still sees you leaving the beaten track, and when curiosity grows as the piece unfolds. Duping is part of Beispiel’s practice. Improvisation is about disagreement. It’s a matter of addressing the right issues. What’s happening here? What’s mine, what’s yours? Are “why” and “where next” legitimate questions? Muster is an exemplary work. Nine suggestions for what can be. Nine ideas for possibilities of listening. Arno Raffeiner

Wolfgang Voigt makes a return to Astral Industries, seeing the continuation of his long-running Rückverzauberung (Reverse Enchantment) series. In line with previous volumes, one may expect the unconventional, idiosyncratic sound Voigt is reputed for. ‘Im Tunnel’ however, takes a more concentrated viewpoint - a metaphysical transmutation that brings with it an experience of mind-melting drones and swelling intensity.

Entering the tunnel is like opening a portal, but as the fabric of time-space begins to collapse on itself, it feels more like a rude awakening. Pulsing undulations rise and fall like the turbines of a spacecraft, marked by dissonant chords and a simmering cloud of complex and ever-shifting textures. Pushing thresholds and expectations, the unearthly nature of the tunnel over time disintegrates any proposed state of completion. A treacherous voyage, and possibly bewildering for some, the work is both unrelenting and uncompromising. Should one decide to step into the tunnel, be sure to take all necessary precautions and procedures.

This expansive double pack from Silentes finds each side of vinyl taken up by one long, ever-evolving piece of music based around one original. Gianluca Favaron & Stefano Gentile go first with their take on 'Landslide,' which goes from whirring machines sounds to brain cleansing sine waves and found sound abstraction. Dub techno don Rod Modell explores emptiness on 'Landslide' (Reworked) and Carl Michael Von Hausswolf's take is an eerie one with scratchy textures and filtered synth meanderings. Rod Modell then closes out with another rework of his own remix that will leave you adrift in space.

 

Counter Culture Chronicles proudly announces the reissue of Dr. Timothy Leary – The Radicalization Of Timothy Leary, a remarkable archival collection from the early days of Counter Culture Chronicles. This powerful audio document captures one of the most dramatic and controversial periods in American counterculture history, focusing on the period following Dr. Timothy Leary's spectacular Weather Underground-assisted prison escape and flight to Algeria in 1970. In September 1970, Leary escaped from California's minimum-security prison by climbing along a telephone wire over a 12-foot chain-link fence, aided by the Weather Underground in a daring operation that cost $25,000. This escape led him first to Algeria, where he sought refuge with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, before eventually being captured and returned to the United States. This cassette contains a fascinating 1966 interview of Leary at the Millbrook estate, where he and Ram Dass (then Richard Alpert) continued their psychedelic research after being dismissed from Harvard. Both men were formally dismissed from Harvard in 1963 - Leary for leaving Cambridge without permission and Alpert for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate. The recording captures Leary during his transition from academic researcher to counterculture icon, offering insights into his evolving philosophy and growing radicalization. The collection includes a reaction to Leary's escape and Algerian exile by Ram Dass, his former Harvard colleague and lifelong friend. The two had launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960, conducting clinical studies that dramatically reduced prisoner recidivism rates through guided psychedelic therapy. Their friendship endured despite taking dramatically different paths after Harvard, with Alpert becoming the spiritual teacher Ram Dass while Leary evolved into the counterculture's most famous advocate for consciousness expansion. Most dramatically, the tape features a 1971 communique by Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther Party's Minister of Information, in which he distances himself from fellow-exile Leary. Cleaver had placed Leary under "revolutionary arrest" as a counter-revolutionary for promoting drug use, reflecting the tension between the Panthers' political militancy and Leary's psychedelic evangelism. In this statement, Cleaver renounced any alliance between the Black Panthers and Leary, and also renounced involvement with psychedelic drug culture as a whole. The recording concludes with a 1983 interview of Leary following the publication of his autobiography Flashbacks, offering retrospective insights into this turbulent period. President Richard Nixon had called Leary "the most dangerous man in America," and during the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested 36 times. This collection captures the complexity of a figure who went from respected Harvard psychologist to fugitive revolutionary to eventual government informant. Reissued as Counter Culture Chronicles 4 with new artwork and including two inserts with militant quotes from both Leary and Cleaver from the Algeria period, this release documents a pivotal moment when psychedelic consciousness met revolutionary politics in the cauldron of 1970s radicalism. The tensions and contradictions captured in these recordings illuminate the broader conflicts within the American counterculture movement itself. This is essential listening for anyone seeking to understand the intersection of consciousness research, political radicalism, and the underground movements that defined an era. As the insert notes: "Brains on fire and souls on ice."

A certain post-peak revelry and shaky fidelity of memory triggers and recall underlies Sebastian Carghini’s subtly trippy debut bow for topo2, the label run by erstwhile Dekmantel programmer Bert de Rooij and home to upsammy and Windu.

With a compelling poetic quality Carghini seduces us deep into hypnagogic states of mind with the mercurial ephemerality of his ‘Ramble’ album, an idealised iteration of the peculiar, subtle sound he’s developed over the past decade for the likes of Second Sleep, enmossed/Psychic Liberation, and Total Stasis. 

Leading on in the steps of upsammy’s gently febrile ‘Strange Meridians’, and the featured flows of ‘Juxtapose’ by Wind, the 11-part suite chases a frayed thread of memory looping logic thru processes that appear to uncoil and re-stitch the strands into forms of smudged dub tech and decayed electronica shades away from Actress’s iridescent greyscale, the Peak Oil x False Aralia dubtech soul axis, or even the sounds Andy Stott’s machines make when he’s not listening. 

I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind.
The sky and its forces: our ally.
A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined.”
Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves
François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg compose a modern symphony for virtual choir on 'Joy, Oh I Missed You', muddling sound poetry with Nuno Canavarro and ‘Systemische'-style machine-damaged surrealism. It's mindbogglingly good, like a mashup of Lee Gamble's 'Models', Akira Rabelais' 'Spellewauerynsherde' and Robert Ashley's timeless 'Automatic Writing’ screwed to perfection in a mode that will also appeal if you’re into work by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Nozomu Matsumoto, Theo Burt, Olli Aarni, Sydney Spann, Hanne Lippard.

Duncombe and Wennborg have been chewing over ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’ for four long years, working their process until they were "queasily intimate" with their arsenal of artificial voice tools. Tracing the history of the technology, from voice synthesisers and chatbots to AI voice analysis tools, the duo experiment relentlessly to develop a digital-age response to IRL extended vocal technique - think François Dufrêne, Yoko Ono or Phew. Less interested in replicating human sounds exactly, they instead test how various tools might cough up their own idiosyncratic tics as they stretch and stutter through attempts to mimic their "fleshware" counterparts.

Duncombe's got prior form here, most recently re-synthesising her voice on the brilliantly oily 'Sunset, She Exclaims' 45 for Modern Love, following a stunner for 12th Isle in 2021. Wennborg brings along experience from her tenure as one half of microsound duo soft tissue, whose 2022 LP 'hi leaves' was a haptic treasure. These approaches mesh remarkably well on their first collaborative full-length, with Duncombe's eerie bio-electronic incantations providing the ideal foil for Wennborg's carbonated hardware processes. It's not completely clear where the human voice ends and the zeroes and ones begin on 'Your Lips, Covering Your Teeth', as rolling cyborg syllables tumble over OS-startup womps and surprisingly svelte outcroppings of glassy, synthetic glitches. The music is surprisingly mannered, a sonic reflection of the cover, where a mouth is pixellated until only colour swatches remain. Duncombe and Wennborg trace the gradual erosion of their voices, leaning into the chaos as their various tools veer off into unique patterns of failure.

What sounds like a far-off, ghosted folk rendition (we're reminded of the Icelandic laments that Rabelais chewed up on 'Spellewauerynsherde') is offset by gnarled, bitcrushed machine faults and pneumatic lip smacks on the brilliant 'Residue', and on 'Brushed My Hair', the duo massage the voice until it sounds like a flute. Assembling stutters and barks and sighs into a celestial chorus alongside time-stretched moans, they create a levitational atmosphere on 'Smell It', freezing the energy from bizarre pitch steps to configure a zonked vocal ensemble.

'Joy, Oh I Missed You’ is an album that, like its source material, constantly morphs, testing the boundaries of its concept repeatedly without bubbling over into conceptual goo. In fact, it's remarkably euphonious, even at its most theoretically abrasive; Duncombe and Wennborg wring out uniquely angelic formations through a process of trial and error that packs a surprising, hefty emotional punch.

Phase Shifting Index is a time capsule record of Jeremy Shaw’s vast original artwork that includes audio excerpts, voiceover passages and music composed by There in Spirit and Konrad Black. Shaw’s seven-channel video, sound and light installation–that premiered at Centre Pompidou in 2020–uses science fiction, documentary, visual effects and synchronisation to induce an ecstatic experience in narrative temporality. Each video details the belief systems of one of seven fictional subcultural groups spread across time that aspire to induce parallel realities that could redirect the evolution of the human species through embodied forms of ritual, ideology and movement. The vinyl release serves as a gathering of the piece’s key audio elements, focussing on their importance to the engineering of the artwork and their stand-alone listening qualities. Side A of the record follows the dramaturgy of the artwork in full-swing, including audio segments from four of its five distinct chapters. Written by long time collaborators Konrad Black and Jeremy Shaw together as There in Spirit, “Cross-Temporal Sync” soundtracks the strobing peak of the installation at the moment when all seven disparate videos fall into a unified choreography in which every person on every screen performs the same ecstatic series of slow-motion movements. The pulsing, hypnotic dirge aligns with the locked choreography in mood and action, caught somewhere between ecstatic trance and somatic takeover. A steady sub line, clipped stabs and a swooping choral gasp harmonise with the dancers movements onscreen while restrained filters open slowly to reveal a submerged melody that builds in intensity towards the chaotic rupture of Black’s “Mosh”. Here the score breaks into digital shards as heard through analog bodies colliding and pixelating into each other. The dancers eventual dissolution into “Particles” sounds like the field recording of a disembodied neural cosmos. The B-side of the record contains a narrative outline edit of the artwork comprised of music, excerpts and pieces of narration from each video. Listeners can follow along in an accompanying thirty-six page booklet of full-bleed film stills documenting each of the seven groups as they move through the five chapter dramaturgy. Composer Konrad Black’s authentically backwards-glancing production and sound design is as disparate as the groups represented on screen. From the bespoke-16mm-tribal-techno of “The Cyclical Culture” and retro-cyber-funk of the “Zero-Ones,” to the VHS-dark-wave of “The Violet Lux” and skewed vocal/piano minimalism of the “Quantum Modern,” each group exists in its own custom-made world out-of-time. The record ends where it began, with the full sequence of “Ramping” playing out as each subcultural world begins to lose control, galvanise, sync, rupture, atomise and scatter throughout the universe, only to loop back into another inevitable beginning.

Nicolás Melmann (born in Buenos Aires and now based in Barcelona) explores sound's social and poetic dimensions through transdisciplinary projects. Drawing inspiration from Erik Satie's concept of "furniture music," Melmann's compositions transform the listening experience into havens of calm and contemplation.

Música Aperta is a fusion of acoustic and electronic sounds, rich in beautiful harmonies, where carefully soft elements interplay with delicate raspiness. Made up of three parts, the music unfolds slowly, immersing the listener in time. Música Aperta resonates with echoes of Satie, the meditative minimalism of Arvo Pärt, the roughness of Phill Niblock, and the nostalgic reflections of Richard Skelton.

Another way of listening to Música Aperta is through its digital encore – an extension of the album experience that brings the concept of open music to life – "a work that remains unfinished and open to transformation." The website features a reactive audiovisual interface where images dynamically respond to the music's behavior, translating electroacoustic frequencies into real-time cinematic landscapes. The album blends instrumental and electronic textures while allowing listeners to interact with different layers through a virtual mixer, enabling them to create unique sound combinations and personal sonic experiences.

Haswell laces up his n0!ze techno boots for a proper stomping and thistly set of modular bangers in his 6th outing with Diagonal, gnashing the heels of a ruder 10” for Skam, andan E-Mego issue of a UPIC session in duo with Florian Hecker.

‘Deep Time’ coughs up Russell’s typical mix of direct and obtusely playful tackle, serving dual purpose as his nervy response to the minute-by-minute fuckeries of geopolitics, and the inspiration of geologic revelations in his now-native Scotland. It all bristles with a livewire moxie that belies his decades in the game, bunkered in the fissures of art, music and technology, pulling and snapping threads that bind / divide body musics and radical experimental improvisational practices.

Eight severely rude bits deploy an arsenal of kit that warrants listing: “Used = Acid Rain Technology, ADDAC System, ALM/Busy Circuits, Apple, Audiofile Engineering, Beautiful Pieces of Outdated Technology, Cwejman, Epoch Modular, FANCYYYYY Synthesis, Future Sound Systems, MOTU, Neutrik, SnazzyFX, Super Synthesis, Tip-Top Audio, Waldorf …”

Cut to cut he navigates the gear with a personalised balance of upfront purpose and screwball mentality. Pronged by his extra musical cues he variously mirrors the turmoil of fiscal markets and crypto currency in the spiky waves of ‘International Globalisation’ and models ground-to-space warfare in ‘Satellite Killer’, whilst ‘Infinite Space’ scrambles proprioception in its warped space-time textures.

But most vital to the work is his fascination with, and perception of, scales of time, which guides the buckshot techn0!ze of ’Unconformity’, which takes its name from geologist James Hutton’s discovery of folds of rock that allow man to assert the age of Earth, and neatly contradict the in-the-moment fizz and crack of the set’s bangers, ‘Deep Time’ and bezzerker ‘Atropine.’

Artist: Flower Travellin' Band, 50 motorcycles and others
Album title: Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles

=Special Edition=
Format: 10-inch LP & CD + CD-R
Catalog #: EMC-023SP/OP-0018SP

Expo 70, held in Osaka, was a pivotal event for the Japanese people and their relationship with the rest of the world, demonstrating both the nation’s ongoing economic recovery from World War Two and the creative spirit of Japanese society and its artists. The event gained international acclaim for its adventurous architectural design, visual art and electronic music. Some of Japan’s most renowned composers were involved, but also present were the now-legendary rockers, the Flower Travellin' Band. A series of performances, billed as “Night Events” were held at the Expo; the most radical of these was "Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles”, but its anti-establishment feel and general madness took the Expo organizers by surprise and it was cancelled after only one night, despite being scheduled for a longer run. An air of myth developed around the event, but a recording of the event has been discovered and this release is the result. And what an event it was: a night-time sound-bomb with a fabled band, electronic sound and 50 motorcycles with horns blaring, spotlights, electronic billboards and a robot ― all flashing, roaring and howling at the night sky. This release comprises a CD, a 10-inch record with fold-out sleeve and large obi, plus fascinating notes in Japanese and English by Kenichi Yasuda, an expert on Japanese rock music, and Koji Kawasaki, a renowned researcher of Japanese electronic music, as well as rare photos. No download code/ticket available.

Special Edition includes a CD-R of a interview program with the producers of "Beam Penetration" in 1970. At the end of the program, the Flower Travellin' Band appeared with motorcycles and performed in the studio. Also includes insert with English translation of the interview.

TRACKS:
CD “Beam Penetration” (full-length) [45:49]

10-inch (excerpts)
Side A “Beam Penetration” [14:52]
Side B “Beam Penetration” [15:15]

CD-R (Special Editon only extra disc)
"Beam Penetration" Interview & Performance on TV shop on July 13, 1970 

Artist: Flower Travellin' Band, 50 motorcycles and others
Album title: Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles

=Regular Edition=
Format: 10-inch LP & CD
Catalog #: EMC-023/OP-0018

Expo 70, held in Osaka, was a pivotal event for the Japanese people and their relationship with the rest of the world, demonstrating both the nation’s ongoing economic recovery from World War Two and the creative spirit of Japanese society and its artists. The event gained international acclaim for its adventurous architectural design, visual art and electronic music. Some of Japan’s most renowned composers were involved, but also present were the now-legendary rockers, the Flower Travellin' Band. A series of performances, billed as “Night Events” were held at the Expo; the most radical of these was "Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles”, but its anti-establishment feel and general madness took the Expo organizers by surprise and it was cancelled after only one night, despite being scheduled for a longer run. An air of myth developed around the event, but a recording of the event has been discovered and this release is the result. And what an event it was: a night-time sound-bomb with a fabled band, electronic sound and 50 motorcycles with horns blaring, spotlights, electronic billboards and a robot ― all flashing, roaring and howling at the night sky. This release comprises a CD, a 10-inch record with fold-out sleeve and large obi, plus fascinating notes in Japanese and English by Kenichi Yasuda, an expert on Japanese rock music, and Koji Kawasaki, a renowned researcher of Japanese electronic music, as well as rare photos. No download code/ticket available.

TRACKS:
CD “Beam Penetration” (full-length) [45:49]

10-inch (excerpts)
Side A “Beam Penetration” [14:52]
Side B “Beam Penetration” [15:15] 

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.



This compilation introduces the sound pieces created by the Latin American experimental filmmakers and

is curated by the film artist Tetsuya Maruyama.

Tetsuya Maruyama

Born in 1983 in Yokohama, Japan and currently based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated from the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture in 2007 and from the Visual Language Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's School of Fine Arts in 2024. His work spans film, text, performance, sound, ideas, and installation, without prioritizing any particular medium.

Maruyama’s practice is rooted in re-contextualizing ordinary elements and textures, presenting them as ephemeral records of everyday observations. As an independent programmer and researcher, he has curated screenings of Brazilian experimental cinema across the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and Canada. He is also the founder of Megalab, an artist-run film lab based in Rio de Janeiro. His works are distributed by Light Cone, a nonprofit organization dedicated to experimental cinema in Paris.

Artist bio:

Ж

Ж (São Paulo, 198-) film-designer, programmer, educator & editor

Has a non-specialised and situated practice that explores the energetic, material,economic, political, and emotional cycles of (semio)capitalism. His work uses various strategies, materials, and media to reveal how these forces shape perception,memory, and subjectivity, especially in the context of our current ecological crisis.

His artistic propositions have taken the form of films, video installations, counter-spaces, writings, performances, and public space interventions, all aimed at reintegrating artistic practice into specific social and political contexts.

John Melo:

Visual artist, designer, and teacher of audiovisual arts. Graduated from the MAE (Master's in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts) at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), Argentina. Interested in the relationship between arts, technology, ancestry, and transdisciplinary and experimental work. Studies non-linearity in artistic creation processes, poetic thinking, magical thinking, spirituality, and political and social actions, with a deep interest in pedagogy. Their work combines creative languages such as installation, sculpture, illustration, writing, sound, and video primarily. Previously a tutor in the training program for self-taught artists at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (MAMBO PFA)

In 2022, founded SEPAE (Seminar of Editing and Experimental Audiovisual Thinking). Also involved in"Colectivo Tal Cosa," a transdisciplinary project combining biology, sound

exploration, intuition, and non-linear thinking in creative processes. A member of "2 horas de diferencia coletivo," a space connecting Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia for projects that conceptually link the three territories. Part of the art collective "Blanco Conejo" in Bogotá, aiming to share, promote, and experiment with contemporary

modes of creation.

Rodrigo Faustini:

Rodrigo Faustini is a Brazilian artist and researcher, based in São Paulo/ Campinas. His practice focuses on mediation, materiality and noise in audiovisual forms. His work has been exhibited at Centro Cultural Kirchner, Images Festival, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Annecy international animation festival, Vienna Shorts, Festival de Cine de la Habana, and others.

Francisco Álvarez Ríos:

Francisco Álvarez Ríos (1991 - Ecuador) is a filmmaker, curator, archivist, and visual and sound artist. He currently serves as the director and curator of the Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida

As a filmmaker, he explores reality and its escapes, focusing on the demystification of the image beyond the literal recording of the real. His current practice delves into moving images, sound interpretation, film installation, and performance film—practices that coexist and interact within the less-defined territory of the contemporary expanded cinema.

Martín Baus:

Multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, researcher and teacher. My artistic practice investigates the relationships between history, materialism and perception, converging my interest in the political dimensions of listening, the reappropriation of archives, and the procedures of translation between materialities such as celluloid,sound and text. I’m a member of CEIS8, a collective for experimentation with film formats and photochemical processes based in Santiago de Chile, and co-director along with Andrés Baus, of the independent record label Radio Fome, which releases improvisation-based music and sound pieces. I’m interested in aurality as a tool for a radical pedagogy from Latin America, as well as methodology for artistic and practice-based research.

I enjoy engaging with the sonic realm from non-audible or non-sonorous approaches, therefore, I’ve done poetry books related to listening and wording, text installations that engage with opaque language translation procedures, publications around the links between salsa rhythms, migration and working-class struggles, and fictional writings that speculate on the future of sound archives and digital archeology.

Lucía Malandro:

Lucía Malandro is a renowned Uruguayan filmmaker dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cinematic and photographic heritage.

A graduate of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, with a specialization in Documentary Directing, she continued her studies with a master’s degree at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. As the founder of the Archivistas Salvajes collective, Malandro has taken initiative to rescue a little-known legacy: Cuba’s underground cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, a clandestine movement that emerged on Havana’s rooftops in response to official restrictions.

Since 2019, she has directed several short films focused on the reuse and revaluation of cinematic and photographic archives, earning recognition at prestigious international festivals. Additionally, she has contributed as a film critic to various publications, including the official newspaper of the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2023.

Malandro has worked on the restoration of archives at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and has contributed to research and archival projects such as Piezas Cinéticas and Vanguardia Scópica, collaborating with institutions like Gordailua, the Basque Film

Ivonne Sheen Mogollón:

My projects are developed as experimental audiovisual, photographic and sound works, publications, texts, curatorial work and organization of cultural initiatives. From a personal and critical voice, I explore questions and reinterpretations about my surroundings, structures, archive images, my family history and the hegemonic learning that we assimilate. I am interested in self-management and the collective creation of spaces and experiences. I currently live in between Cologne, Germany, and Lima, Peru. My film Animal Within co-directed with Rebeca Alvan has been showcased in different platforms and festivals in Latin America, Europe and the USA. I am co founder of Taller Helios and associate collaborator of Isole_islas.

Javier Plano:

Javier Plano is an artist and university professor that works and lives in Buenos Aires. He has a college degree in Electronic Arts from UNTREF, where since 2014 he has been teaching courses about time based media and audiovisual performance arts. He’s currently doing a master’s degree in Sound Art at UNTREF. In 2007, he begins to produce video works and installations, participating in various festivals and exhibitions organized by institutions locally and abroad. He has received numerous distinctions for his works, among others an honorable mention in the MAMbA / Fundación Telefónica Award for Arts and New Technologies, the 3rd prize in the UNTREF award to the Electronics Arts, and three different honorable mentions at the National Salon of Visual Arts. On 2016, he has his first solo exhibition, titled "Test Patterns", in the MACLA (La Plata, Argentina). That same year he attends an artistic residence program on Signal Culture (NY, USA), with a scholarship granted by the Department of Cultural Affairs of Argentina. In 2019, he does his first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and wins a Scholarship of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to develop a new project.

Pablo Mazzolo:

Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) is a filmmaker and educator born in Buenos Aires in 1976. He works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. His work has tackled themes such as indigenous sovereignty, the spectre of military dictatorship, extinction and environmental catastrophe.

He received an MFA from the University of Buenos Aires (2001). His films, including Diego La Silla (2000), Oaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo sueña cataratas (2012), Fotooxidación (2013), and Ceniza Verde (2019), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Melbourne International Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Block Museum of Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Wavelength, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Festival, Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Festival, Museo Tamayo, Valdivia International Film Festival, FAMU International, The Latin American Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, and Cinemateca Madrid, among many others.

His film Conjectures (2013) won Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival (2013); Fish Point (2015) was awarded the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016); and Cineza Verda (2019) was awarded Grand Prize, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (2019). Mazzolo is Professor at the National University of Quilmes, works as a freelance documentary film editor, and teaches workshops on visual perception and image creation to young people living with autism. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rosana Cacciotore:

Experimental filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and

audiovisual researcher. Graduated in social communication with a master's and a PhD degree (thesis defense) in literary theory from UFSC/BR. She has taught film and visual poetics courses, had films screened in national and international festivals, and participated as a debater, curator, judge, and reviewer in festivals, shows, and film notices. She has a book and articles published.

In experimental work, I usually make the sound myself; I think it is part of the creation process. About sound in these works, I assume sound is an image that produces meaning (or sensation) as a sign independent of the image.

Another foggy day in Yorkshire. A steel grey sky. Raindrops tracing one another down the windowpane. Kirk Barley sits in his studio and assembles compositions from scraps of found sound and live instrumentation. Melodies swell, withdraw and repeat like waves. Time slows. Accelerates. Slows again. The light bends, tweaked at the edges. Twisted by rhythms that never quite resolve.

Written, recorded and produced by Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes.

And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognisable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley’s skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilising a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks ‘Vita’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Descendent’, these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

This is the second collaboration on Offen by the French post-industrial experimental artist Thierry Mérigout of Geins't Naït, composer and multi-instrumentalist Laurent Petitgand, and the UK composer and sound designer Robin Rimbaud AKA Scanner, whose prolific catalogue includes scores for dance works by the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham, and who has performed and installed his music in venues ranging from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and a hospital morgue in Garches.
Vitio is a repository of memory: Coastal plateaus and city streets evoked and cracked open by glowering basslines and jumbled rhythms made for ragged walking. Thierry and Laurent have been collaborating together since 1987, the year after Thierry co-founded Geins’t Naït while at the Architecture School of Nancy. Their work together is dense and textural, influenced by Situationists and Surrealists; the raw loops of Geins’t Naït meeting the musicality of Petitgand, a soundtrack composer for film, dance and theatre who has worked closely with director Wim Wenders. Thierry and Laurent first collaborated with Scanner on OFFEN015, a set of otherworldly collaged slow-mo soundscapes. Here, on tracks like Vitio and Austral, threads of sampled dialogue interweave with melodic fragments or repeating piano lines, like the sun breaking through above a tangle of golden wrack and rockweed. On Acid and 63, divine industrial shoegaze sweeps across the windscreen like water washed from trees. Elsewhere, on SIO, submerged clicks surface amid foghorn-like electrostatic charges, an introspective aeromancy. On J’Appartiens, stabs of samples dart back and forth over the ominous time keeping of a sparse beat and pulsing bass. On Sunday and NNSS, we, the invisible listeners, rise to the surface, where there is rain. Both the sounds of NNSS and the rainfall were installed in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as captured in a lovely video made by Thierry’s daughter. Beneath the rain, in a building designed by SANAA architects, paving stones can be seen. Beneath the stones - we can only guess - a cloud.

Recent years have seen the release and reissue of dozens of hours of Roland Kayn’s music, on several labels and in both physical and digital formats. Our interconnected yet chaotically imbued age seems to be the setting in which Kayn has truly found his audience. The scene is now set for one of the most momentous works in his oeuvre to return to the shelves. ‘Infra'. One of the titanic cybernetic works Kayn originally released on the Colosseum label in early 80s, ‘Infra’ (1978-79) has come to occupy a very special place in the hearts of fans lucky enough to have copies of the original vinyl box sets. Now lovingly remastered from the original archive masters by Kayn devotee Jim O’Rourke, ‘Infra’ has finally found its way to CD for a new generation of admirers to discover.

“I have worked together with sheep before” – says Henning Christiansen – introducing the performance he did in front of the Brucknerhaus in Linz in July 1988. But this time he went beyond, building a “Concert-Castle” with hay blocks where thirty sheep could perform music. Another time the animals – Christiansen’s obsession and passion – become the musical instruments used for his compositions: “Originally most of instrumental sounds derived from animal voices or other sounds of natural phenomena. The violins, for instance: someone found out that stretched intestines, dried bowels, could produce a sound. This has simply been civilized, refined”. Schafe statt Geigen (Sheep Instead of Violins, 1988) and “Verena” Vogelzymphon (Bird Symphony, 1990) first appeared as a small CD edition issued by Galerie Bernd Klüser in 1991. Both works, each one occupying a full side of this LP edition, extend from one of Christiansen’s long standing conceptual strategies – deploying recordings of animals as stand-ins for musical instruments, sheep and birds respectively. While each work allows these source to take the natural lead, at times masquerading as field recordings, both feature subtle tonal and electronic interventions by the composer, creating strange and brilliant compositions which shift the terms and subjects of music as they were long understood. Accompanied by a twenty page booklet featuring drawings and texts by Henning Christiansen, as well as pictures of the performance by René Block. “The background, the space where music happens is what I want to put into the foreground.” 500 copies on black vinyl. Includes 20 page photographic book.

Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower. Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained. These texts become a slowly developing story of care and too much care in living. They are spoken by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert and set amidst masses of instruments. The outer and middle movements explore the interactions between slowly shifting sine tone frequencies and massed, slightly detuned instruments—vibraphones, brass, pianos—to affect a warmly wobbling harmonic pad that undulates and revolves under Maneri’s performance of the text. The remaining movements move quickly, combining field recordings with hard cuts of Schubert’s singing voice constructed into a massive, tape-affected choir interspersed with her readings.

"Yesterday it started to rain… The smell of damp tarmac rising up through open windows, a smell which is uniquely evocative for us all depending on our individual histories: a suburban pavement, a school playground, a basketball court. The rain cut through a band of low pressure that had been lying over the city for days, pinging rhythmically off metal, causing rolling tyres to hiss and spit. The music that soundtracked this meteorological shift was the debut full length from Rain Text (Giuseppe Ielasi & Giovanni Civitenga), simply titled III. Scattered throughout the nameless eight tracks there are moments of low-end pressure relieved by the fizz and clatter of metallic rhythms; there is static, there is discord, there is release. The individuals comprising Rain Text have a long history of manipulating sounds for evocative ends, Giuseppe Ielasi has been making music as one half of Bellows for many years, each album stretching and destroying their sound in beautiful increments. He has also released reliably inspirational music either solo or in collaboration for the likes of Editions Mego, Shelter Press and Faitiche. His sensitive ears are also in high demand as a mastering engineer. It is worth perusing the 800+ releases he has technical credits for on Discogs: from classics of the avant-garde to the freshest faces of the Swedish underground, the chances are some of your favourite albums are included. Giovanni Civitenga helms the SKYAPNEA long-running NTS show. Joining him, you can enjoy the fruits of a lifetime of deep listening through shows that flit between the industrial and the devotional, a space that is fully explored on III. The album was recorded quickly over three fertile days in Ielasi’s studio in Monza, but of course results like this can only be achieved at such a pace by spending a lifetime obsessing over the mechanics and possibilities of sound. Those who are enamoured by the rain—who are returned by it to the surfaces, smells and sounds of a lost and idealised youth; who feel themselves restored—are known as ‘pluviophiles’. Their response to rain may well have a biological explanation: when rain hits tarmac negative ions are released into the air, which are thought to result in feelings of wellbeing and positivity. All the more reason, then, to return to the vivid ecosystem that Rain Text has so carefully cultivated for III." Words by The Dengie Hundred – August 2024

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.

A site-specific sound piece created by Akio Suzuki, a master of sound art, with a transcendent echo space.

Since the 1960s, Akio Suzuki, a pioneer of sound art, has focused on "listening" and has visited numerous echo spaces such as caves, tunnels, palaces, and oil tanks in search of places of resonance, calling himself an "echo man." This work is a record of the master's being led to a 40-second otherworldly world of reverberation inside the embankment of Uchinokura Dam, located deep in the mountains of Shibata City, Niigata, and recording without an audience. Stones, bamboo, sponges, hand mirrors, combs, cardboard, glass bottles, and his own voice. Everyday objects and bodies are instantly transformed into "sound instruments," and performances are performed in various ways, such as hitting, rolling, rubbing, spinning, blowing, and pulling, and an acoustic sound piece is created with the unique reverb effect of natural reflections in a huge concrete space without any electrical amplification. The scene transforms into both micro and macro scenes, evoking us, the audience, the infinite universe. 

On this new LP Harry Bertoia shows why he may have been the first industrial musician. Bertoia often referred to his sound sculptures as a "collaboration with industry" and on this new LP Bertoia is intentionally creating heavy, rhythmic music he described as "mechanized," "mechanical" and "factory like." This first edition is packaged in a full color sleeve with metallic inks. Mastered by Tom Eaton at Sounds & Substance. Recorded in 1971, percussion and repetition emulate the pounding rhythms of machinery on this unique pair of conceptual Bertoia compositions. Bertoia utilizes innovative performance techniques to create new sounds unheard in his ouevre. Even in the busy factory of Bertoia's mind, distant stillness rises up as Bertoia exhibits the massive amount of control he possesses over his many looming sculptures. "Mechanization" is just one of the many sonic directions Bertoia took while composing and recording between the late 1950's and his death in 1978. He documented all of his ideas and directions in notes accompanying the hundreds of tapes discovered in his barn.