TR151 - Katz Mulk - Muscle Memory

Motion Sickness of Time Travel - New Moon

Sfär "Ur sprickorna / Ett halvt liv" (Excerpt)

INFO => self-titledmag.com/2018/05/11/ne247-meyers-negative-artist-mix/

NE247: Meyers - 'Negative Artist' Mix

A contemplative aural journey across the stillness and massive scale of the landscapes of northern Iceland, as captured in Peter Hutton’s painterly film ‘Skagafjörður’. 

Numbered edition of 90 copies with download coupon. 
Inlay offset printed in silver.

Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk – Skagafjörður

Call Back Carousel: Voyages en Grèce
 
An audio time-travelogue… A found sound road trip… A vicarious vacation…

The basis of this piece is a found reel-to-reel tape labeled ‘Voyage Grèce en 1972’ bought from a flea market in Brussels 15 years ago. As might be expected it is a document of a Belgian family camping holiday to Greece. One side of the tape is an audio diary of sorts documenting the trip moment by moment, much of the time recorded in the car in between destinations it seems. This side runs to an epic 3 hours on long play. The other side is a recorded slide show commentary over a backdrop of traditional Greek music at a more modest 2 hours. Although it becomes apparent that there is a wife (referred to only as ‘bobonne’) and child in tow we only ever hear the voice of the father. They don’t even appear in the background. Maybe they were mic shy or maybe they were just never given a look-in. Either way their absence on the tape is perplexing.

I had been invited to Brussels this summer to make a new radio piece for Radio Picnic’s ‘Musica per la radio’ series. I was also supposed to be going on a family holiday to Greece but because of obvious circumstances neither trip has happened. Out of necessity the production of this radiophonic excursion has been my way of taking a holiday without travelling anywhere – a sonic souvenir from a vicarious vacation.

In the composition of the piece excerpts from the tape have been combined with my own field recordings from holidays in Greece decades later in 2005 and 2015. Holiday memories of Greece from different times have been transposed on top of one another, intermingle and become confused. In addition, improvisations with a collection of objects selected for their sound making properties that were bought from the flea market at the same time as the tape have also been incorporated.

Special thanks to everyone who helped me with translations: Elina Bry, Selene Mauvis, Jonathan Frigeri, DinahBird, Anne-Louise Kieran, Sonia Dermience, Inès Guffroy and Meryll Hardt.

Extra thanks to Elina Bry for additional Athens field recordings.

A project by Radio Picnic with the kind support of the Swiss Foundation for Radio and Culture and Pro Helvetia. 

First broadcast on Freie Radio Berlin, 18th August, 2020.

Call Back Carousel - Voyages en Grèce

Loop 34 (Bucles)

Ned Lagin's Seastones is a pioneering electronic composition interweaving metaphors from nature, science, art and music and the origins of music. Reflecting the technology, science, modern art, new ecological awareness and optimism of the times and culture, Seastones embodies the history of electronic music by taking full advantage of tape music, analog synthesizers and computer technology to create pieces that are dynamic, rich and deep.

Originally released by the Grateful Dead's Round Records in 1975, Seastones' reputation as a gem of electronic music was further enhanced by the celebrity of the musicians who contributed to the source material. Seastones musicians include Ned Lagin (processed piano, clavichord, organ, prepared piano, electric piano, synthesizers), Jerry Garcia (processed electric guitar, pedal steel guitar, voice), Phil Lesh (processed electric bass), David Crosby processed electric guitar and vocals), Grace Slick and David Freiberg (processed vocals), and Mickey Hart and Spencer Dryden (percussion).

This new LP presents two crafted Seastones sets (Sets 4 and 5, 18 tracks) drawn from the entire Seastones composition and contains gorgeous extended processed vocals by Garcia, Crosby, Slick and Freiberg, and beautiful abstract instrumental passages by Lagin and all.

Ned Lagin - Seastones - Seastones 03 - LP available Nov. 3, 2020

Track from:
Simon Whetham "Forced to Repeat Myself" CD

“When performing with a limited set of resources, through choices in materials to work with and the constraints of being nomadic, there can be a tendency to repeat actions and scenes that 'work', even when improvising and having to respond to each new situation in a unique way.”

One characteristic aspect of the touring experience that is not discussed often enough is the dilemma of repetition. Not repetition as a mechanism of the work itself, but as a tedious consequence of being obligated to perform night after night in quick succession. Generating a completely unique performance for each stop, even with the assistance of improvisation,  is a laborious undertaking that consumes too much time and sanity, while adhering to a rigid set of rules leaves one open to both burnout and diminishing returns. Is there a way to split the difference so that both performer and audience are always engaged to the highest standard?

“I set these constraints on myself. The need to produce something (at least a little) different in each event of a tour was fierce, especially when traveling with other musicians.”

Explicitly within the title itself of his latest CD, Forced To Repeat Myself, UK sound artist and composer Simon Whetham tackles these questions with both a sly wit and sincere inquisitiveness. The tracks, all collected from recordings documenting a 2018 tour, utilize analogous source material and means of execution.  Whetham paid particular attention to the contour and character of each venue when deciding how to best put the pieces together, offering a customization that subverts pure deja vu for a sharp observance of the unfamiliar.

“In each situation objects and materials unique to the space were incorporated into the performance setup and structure, generating sounds or resonating with them. And yet I could hear similar scenes, movements, even spaces. This repetition determined the dynamic of the composition, working with it and against it.”

By the very nature of their disseminating sparseness, the tracks of Forced To Repeat Myself demand from the listener an attentiveness fixed on nuance and variation. The amplified cracks and static of ethereal currents and anonymous electronics infer the works of others who’ve made it their mission to attune our attention toward sounds outside our natural perception, including Christina Kubisch’s electrical walks, Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixer excursions, and Jason Zeh’s experiments with blank tapes and the mechanizations of his cassette players. Whetham’s shaping of the album’s source material to highlight certain exclusivities of each live performance emphasizes how the inherent dynamics of time and chance guide his self-imposed constraints into pathbreaking spectrums. 

“The title references a phrase many of us will have heard in our formative years, ’Why do you force me to repeat myself?’ I have no answer to this question. I never forced anyone to do anything. But with this work, I did.”

One inherent paradox of Forced To Repeat Myself is that each listen naturally manifests a distinct, individual experience. The way sounds are received and processed in one instance to the next each forget their own entryway into transcribing meaning from this abstraction. And Whetham is keenly aware of this as the sounds of Forced To Repeat Myself find consistent, unique ways to perpetuate themselves, ensuring any repetition to be delicately understated.

Forced to Repeat Myself

Forced to repeat Myself

Simon Whetham "08-11"

Raft of Trash is a generative music project exploring the sounds of systems using the natural rhythms of environmental dialogue in the world-building game SimCity 3000. It is a collaboration between sound artists/musicians Andrew PM Hunt (aka Dialect) and JC Leisure, and designer Thom Isom.  

Like the group’s early EPs, their debut album Likeness on the Edge of Town showcases the breadth of possibilities emerging from their unique process. Whilst playing SimCity 3000, the in-built sound effects of the game are converted and repurposed into MIDI data which is then fed to Hunt and Leisure's synths and samplers in real time. The resulting soundscape, imprinted with the dynamics of a simulated environment, is then augmented with live guitar, spoken word and field recordings to create an uncanny collage of wild synthesis, experimental narrative and bending, viscous guitar.  

Inspired by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, the spoken word passages sprinkled across the record act as part travel journal, part system theory field guide as “someone guiding you through the simulated desert landscape, and through some kind of inner journey”. Exploring for instance the connections between the irregularities we discover in our functioning bodies and the impact of environmental influences or describing the fullness of the reality of stopping at a truck stop, these passages are an illuminating exploration of the complexity of living systems and real-life situations. Subtle musical references to Americana and sounds sourced from the desert around Joshua Tree contribute to a journey-like mood throughout the record. 

Musically, the record remains in largely abstract territory. Synths sprawl, crawl and fly above a sonic bed of creaks, ripples and bleeps; nothing is at it seems. This ambiguous relationship between the organic and the synthetic further highlights the themes explored by the group.  

Releasing in full on November 20 2020, as a limited edition poster and as digital files. 

Purchase on Bandcamp: https://raftoftrash.bandcamp.com/album/likeness-on-the-edge-of-town

Raft of Trash - Sans Sherif at the Painted Oasis

https://colorsquadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/c-o-l-o-r-s-q-u-a-d-0-0-9

Motion Sickness of Time Travel - New Moon

Adversary