This is impeccable. Refined, restrained simplicity, superbly controlled. Ranging from delicate to potent. Something looms in the end, still evolving... 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

mate can't stop listening to this, fluid, well layered and smooth transition, beautiful 

intriguing and slightly unsettling soundscape – yet with a very solemn air

Coming April 16th! Master craftsman James Welburn’s new LP, "Sleeper in the Void", marks the 50th Miasmah release. The six years after his monumental debut have bred six tracks Welburn brings to fruition with the help of past co-conspirators from the Norwegian underground scene - Tomas Järmyr (Motorpsycho, Zu, Barchan), Hilde Marie Holsen (Hubro Records), and vocal artist Juliana Venter (W/V, Phil Winter)..

300xLP

“In and out of blue” features Tomas Järmyr (drums) and Juliana Venter (voices)

Sleeper in the void

James Welburn - In and out of blue

From "Microphone Permission" LP, Editions Mego, 2020
https://jasmineguffond.bandcamp.com/album/microphone-permission

An Utterly Dark Spot

body subscriber

"Flower Studies", the enchanting third album by Australia’s Blue Chemise, consists of eight intimate, delicate and touching ‘études’, reflecting Mark Gomes’ introspective musings on a series of floral studies by 19th-century French photographer Adolphe Braun (1812-1877).
More info: https://linktr.ee/BAADM

Blue Chemise – Chrysanthemum No 1

from Ombrophilia, released in 2009 on either/OAR and re-issued on vinyl by Aposiopèse. Also available in digital format at bandcamp http://tomokosauvage.bandcamp.com/

Making of a Rainbow

We are happy to present two pieces of ambient music, and two artists already seen on our page.

two songs to transport us to all sides of the mountain, day and night, to feel in the place we like.

Artists:
Inner / Yenaldooshi

NAIND AR-31 A2 Yeenaldooshi - Spiritsgrief

Folklore of Plants Vol.II - Venefic Garden

Ben Vida
Reducing The Tempo To Zero
SHELTER PRESS / SP108

Recorded 2016-2019 New York
Mastering: Stephan Mathieu
Artwork: Xavier Antin

The theme of time is unavoidable when approaching Ben Vida’s Reducing the Tempo to Zero, his latest endeavour with Shelter Press. A singe work, pushing the bounds of Digital and Analog Synthesis, which stretches to just over 4 hours in length, its realization is the product of years of effort - the process of recording and editing extending across the period between 2015 and 2019, offering momentary conclusion to an arc of ideas and practice which which first appeared on Damaged Particulates, issued in 2016.

RTTTZ is a temporal nesting doll - a meditation, conceived by Vida as a part of a daily practice which embarked upon sustained periods of focused creation and listening. While the product of a deeply personal, inward journey, similar to iconic efforts by composers like Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Éliane Radigue, it strives to unravel the standards and expectations applied to musical and experiential time, taking the relation to sonic phenomena into an almost transcendental realm. Immersive in scale and endurance, through a deep and radical sensitivity to material and structural hybridity, Vida’s return to the durational drone based forms - first explored as a member of Town and Country during the mid-90s - drives the ear toward the solace found through developmental and intimate relationships with the fleeting, granular, and discrete, transmogrifying smallest detail into a monumental event.

Despite being the “complete” RTTTZ document, made concrete by the process of recording, this 4+ hour iteration carries the shifting ghosts of other beings and times. It represent only one of many possible, existing beside a free standing phonetic, text-based score, and a near infinite number of evolutionary, live variations - instrumental and vocal versions, as well as those which spring from the combination of instrumental and vocal ensembles of varying sizes, each time of different length, changing and taking on new dimensions determined by the its performers. In a sense, each version is simultaneously free-standing and finished, while capable of reconfiguration and being made anew - a mirror for its shifting passage through the ear, which triggers multiple, concurrent images of other times and existence of itself.

While the duration, structure, and relatively of RTTTZ focuses attention toward the internality of what it is, like all great art, they are simply a means to an end. The crucial themes lay with the cumulative effect of their sum - the power of phenomena and highly individualized experience. It is an organized, sonorous space which is to be occupied and within which to get lost, shifting the ownership, whether embarked upon actively or passively - both as valid and rewarding as the next - to the listener alone, sculpting a subjective expanse which denying concise location and, in so doing, undermines the presumption of the capacity to be the same thing twice.

Overwhelmingly beautiful in its oscillating harmonics and punctuation of pulsing texture and tone, each stage of its evolution moving at a glacial pace, represents a monumental achievement from Vida within the broad landscape of experimental and avant-garde sound. Reducing the Tempo to Zero was mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and is released by Shelter Press in both digital and limited USB card editions.

Reducing The Tempo To Zero

BEN VIDA 'Reducing The Tempo To Zero' (EXTRACT)

Excerpt from a release with Longform Editions. Listen/purchase the full track here https://longformeditions.bandcamp.com/track/immaterial

// 
Earlier this year I spent a two-month period on residency in Hong Kong. I was instantly drawn to the colour and vibrancy of the city, as well as to certain materials and objects that kept reappearing on my explorations.

Billowy, gauzy construction cloth that covered spiny bamboo scaffolding, the devastatingly-inviting colourful-sheen of single-use plastics, discarded durian husks, the deep blue night-time sky made hazy/dreamy/luminous from neon lighting, lush and vibrant green foliage…

I was thinking about the small variations in the repetition of these materials, as well as the repetition of certain images and sounds.

The phasing on/off flash of orange construction lights lining long stretches of road; the rhythmic phasing of multiple pedestrian crossing beeps heard simultaneously. the overhead circling of the kites (seabirds) in the sky; the below-water circling of plastic bags in the harbour.

For a little while now I’ve been cultivating an obsession with the relationships between sound, material/object and texture. How feeling can inform listening, how listening is feeling, and how this felt-listening can alter our perception of things as we are taught to ‘know’ them. For me listening is acknowledging the intrinsic connections between our surroundings and ourselves.

If we acknowledge the vibrancy and resonance of everyday objects how might this change our actions and thinking around them.

"My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies." Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter

It occurred to me, whilst writing this and listening back, that not only are materials amplified in Immaterial but certain sounds appear almost material in themselves, such as the squeak of shoes on basketball courts, and the droplets of rain on foliage. These sounds seem not to belong to shoe or court, rain or leaf, but are formed in the entwining to become a thing in themselves. It is this connectedness through sound that I am fascinated with. Through sound unequal forms can be connected: mic distortion disguises itself as crinkling plastic bags that blends into the crackling sound of shrimp underwater.

Sound waves traverse through our bodies and our surroundings, forming knots and vibrations and connections and confusions. In sound material blends with the immaterial and new imaginaries can be made, for me this is a way out.

Immaterial was composed in parallel to these thoughts.
Like silky-soft milky tea tasted alongside a crispy-sweet pineapple bun.
//

All sounds heard on Immaterial (excepting one recording of clarinet) were recorded in Hong Kong between April and June 2019.
Composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Alexandra Spence
Additional percussion by Karen Yu
Mastered by A.F. Jones at Laminal Audio

Immaterial excerpt

Pre-Order available now via imprec.com 
Cassette edition of 100 via Cassauna/Imprec

“Rupture” was inspired by the southern Italian folktale of Tarantism,
which is said to be an epidemic provoked by the bite of the tarantula.
It causes extreme spiritual possession. 
Aki Onda composed these tracks using the traditional folk music of the region as underlays, mostly in indirect ways but occasionally directly sampled. 
The tracks were recorded with musicians Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis and Clifton Hyde. The artwork features eerie and uncanny images of the Japanese
photographer Daisuke Yokota.

1. Rupture 
2. Betrayal

3. Rebirth
4. Growth 

Aki Onda : electronics, field recordings (1-4)
Tatsuya Nakatani : percussion, gongs, bells (1-4)
Gareth Davis : bass clarinet (4)
Clifton Hyde : mandolin (3)

Soundtrack for “Rupture” by Aki Onda
Recorded by Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis, and Aki Onda 
Edited and mixed by Aki Onda 
Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper



Photography by Daisuke Yokota

Aki Onda - Rupture - Cassette - August 3, 2020

"Let's say it's a narrative drift, the last whisper of an Ophelia lost in the shore, some sounds escaping from a broken window, a "vague a l'ame " caught in the syphon, some breads unknotted by mistake.

You know, a one side vinyl is a kind of second-handed moon, shining in the dust of thrift store, belonging to a suburban galaxy: you might need to hitch hike and lose you left shoe to travel in time.

18 mns or so, it's a walk from home until the bridge, 9 subways stations, 25 kisses, an apple crumble baking in the oven, a summer nap, 3 extra minutes before being tired of waiting.

It's a gem, a glass eye, a melting ice cube, a lost tooth, a traveling secret, a kind of chanting ring." 
Félicia Atkinson, august 2013

With Her Own Hands is a limited edition vinyl published for the exhibition L'attraction Minérale, Toulouse, may 2013. Edition of 100 copies.

http://shelter-press.com/main/category/024/

Félicia Atkinson "With her own hands" (SP024)

living on unceded Wangal Country ⌇ making sounds

Immaterial excerpt

Alexandra Spence

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