The thing about France Jobin's music that never fails to impress is that it works on so many levels. Listen to it at the threshold of perception (the way it is mastered) or at very high volume, on headphones or through loudspeakers, and you will hear new sonic relationships, new structures, a new logic every time. Things simultaneously are and aren't as they seem; sounds you hear are and aren't really there.

Montréal sound/installation artist France Jobin has come a long way since her days as a blues keyboardist in the 1980s. In 1999, after a hiatus that lasted a decade, during which she raised two sons, she turned to experimental electronic music of the very quiet, rumbling, abstracted kind, and started performing and releasing music under the moniker i8u. Slowly but with great assurance, she built a much-lauded career and kept on refining her art, ever digging deeper into the core of sound. When the revered LINE label offered her an album (Valence) in 2012, she abandoned her alias and started using her own name.

In her own words:

«The Illusion of Infinitesimal represents another chance to refine the unique essence of each sound and composition, in an effort to better communicate intent without influencing its unfolding, a delicate balance between perfection and detachment.

A parallel could be drawn from particles of matter, which, "as far as we know, are infinitesimal points of zero size, yet they have measurable amounts of angular momentum. Does the concept of rotation even make sense for a featureless speck? Angular momentum seems to be a more foundational concept than rotation itself. The angular momentum, or spin, of a single particle is restricted in strange ways. It can have only certain values, and not all values are allowed for all particles." (1)

Perfection and uncertainty.»

(1) Collage of quotes from Jim Pivarski, "Spin", Symmetry Magazine, March 2013.

France Jobin - 0

First and foremost, Plateforme is a concept, a restrictive framework Laurent Perrier imposed on himself: to create an electroacoustic piece using solely a set of sound sources provided by a "collaborator." The first three fruits of this vast sonic transmutation project are presented on Plateforme #1, the seeds having been planted by Felix Kubin, Lawrence English, and Gianluca Becuzzi. "I gave them no specific directions. I simply asked them to send me raw stuff close to their sound style," explains Perrier. "Some sent me a lot of material, others very little."

These sources have become unrecognizable in the end, but they gave birth to widely different works that retain something of the spirit of their originator: "Felix Kubin" is fanciful and kaleidoscopic; "Lawrence English," ethereal, stretches out across the listening space; and "Gianluca Becuzzi" feels nervous, jittery, and is full of glitchy sounds sent on knotty trajectories.

Laurent Perrier ranks among the most respected members of the French electronic music scene. His name is associated to the aliases Zonk't, Pylône, Heal, Cape Fear, and LP, and with the Odd Size label, an adventure that lasted a decade. His music art ranges from minimal techno to musique concrète, by way of several other states.

Laurent Perrier - Felix Kubin

The SYNTHI AKS is a legendary machine. Manufactured by Electronic Music Studios in 1971, this portable modular synthesizer was extremely flexible. Not a keyboard synth like what Moog was doing at the time, this was a generative music machine with a matrix patch panel. Think Max/MSP in analog terms. Except that being analog, it wasn't entirely stable and, thus, had an organic quality that is still valued today.

Music from the SYNTHI is a new endeavour for Yoshio Machida, a consistently surprising sound and visual artist who, among other feats, has released an acclaimed series of sound collage albums (Hypernatural), albums of improvisations on steelpan drums, and records with the bands miimo and Ohanami. This new solo album arrives almost four years after his previous one The Spirit of Beauty (a slow-evolving piece combining instruments, field recordings and electronics), and six years after his Baskaru debut Hypernatural #3.

Music from the SYNTHI consists in 13 pieces. Most of them are quirky and playful. "SYNTHI n° 30" has a longing quality you would never expect from a synthesizer. And all of them are 100% SYNTHI. "I simply recorded the repeating patterns and mixed 3 to 5 patterns per piece, without any editing or effects," explains Machida. I wanted to record rich obscure improvisations as performed by the SYNTHI. Every modulation, reverb, effect like delay, and glitch sound is produced inside the SYNTHI."

Yoshio Machida - SYNTHI n°23

The Classics Album promises to become a classic meltpop album. What, don’t know what meltpop is? Meltpop is what Wieman and its earlier incarnation Zèbra do: complex constructions that can at time sound like pop/dance songs, made entirely out of samples drawn from a very specific and predetermined corpus. More insidious than plunderphonics, rounder around the edges than sound collage, and infinitely trickier than a DJ set!

Wieman is the project of two major names from the Netherlands experimental electronic music scene: Frans de Waard (of Kapotte Muziek, Beequeen, Freiband, Goem, etc.) and Roel Meelkop (of Happy Halloween, THU20, Mailcop, Goem, etc.). As Goem, they released a string of fabulously dark and minimal tracks on top-rate labels like Mego, Raster Noton, Staalplaat, and 12K. The duo released their first “meltpop” track in 2005 under the name Zèbra. It took them three more years to complete their full-length debut The Black and White Album, in which all samples came from songs that had the word “music” in their title. From then on, each Zèbra project focused on a very specific concept. 

In 2012, a US band called Zebra asked the duo to stop using the name Zèbra. They rechristened themselves Wieman and completed work on a string of new projects, including The Classics Album, six years in the making. The Classics Album contains only samples taken from songs that have classical music-tinged titles – words like “symphony,” “rhapsody,” “overture,” etc. These samples come from the worlds of jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, prog rock, disco, and beyond. Some of them are instantly recognizable; others are transformed beyond identification. This music – especially the 17-minute epic “Do you have EIP” – will melt your brain cells. You’ll dance a bit, you’ll swim a lot, and you’ll be questioning your perceptions all the time.

http://www.baskaru.com

Wieman - With a lat of verve

A walk through the orchestra. That’s exactly what Rutger Zuydervelt invites us to do: to take a walk through the orchestra. Stay Tuned started as an installation where each speaker plays a continuous loop of a group of instruments playing an A note, as if they were tuning up. Visitors walk freely in this environment, literally walking through the orchestra; each step they take changes the mix of what they hear. In the summer/fall of 2013, this installation was presented indoors at Sounds Like Audio Art in Saskatoon (Canada) and in an outdoor setting at Into the Great Wide Open in Vlieland (The Netherlands).

For the CD version released by Baskaru, Zuydervelt produced a 50-minute mix that slowly takes us from section to section of his 153-piece ensemble – a who’s who of the global avant-garde music scene, with names ranging from Oren Ambarchi to Richard Youngs, by way of John Butcher and Nate Wooley. There’s the expected orchestra instruments (woodwinds, strings, brass, tuned percussion), and also, electric guitars, piano, and voices. The result is a drone in A that develops impressive levels of richness, depth, and movement. It feels like this orchestra will never stop tuning up, and you won’t want it to.

Dutch electronicist and conceptual artist Rutger Zuydervelt is best known for the experimental ambient/electro-acoustic music he has been releasing since 2004 as Machinefabriek. Under that name he has garnered critical acclaim for albums released on labels such as Type, Important, 12K, Dekorder, and Experimedia, and collaborations with Steinbrüchel, Jaap Blonk, Peter Broderick, and Steve Roden, among others.

http://www.baskaru.com

Rutger Zuydervelt - Stay Tuned (excerpt)

The “field” of experimental ambient music (if there is such a thing) needs Sawako’s delicate, measured, expansive touch. We connoisseurs yearn for it. Sadly, the woman who describes herself as a “sound sculptor” and a “signal alchemist” is so busy – think of her audio-visual installation at the planetarium of the Sonar Festival or her numerous live performances, including an appearance on Ryuichi Sakamoto’s radio show – that we simply had to wait. This time, the waiting lasted six years before we could put our ears on a follow-up to her exquisite 12k release Bitter Sweet. And, of course, nu.it is well worth the wait.

nu.it; almost looks like a website URL but it isn’t. What it is, though, is the perfect embodiment of Sawako’s art: concise, quiet, yet incredibly rich in possible meanings. We have the French word “nuit,” which means night, and this is clearly music of the night, from the go-to-sleep mood of “Locus of Everyday Life” to the recurring impression of being staked out in the jungle after dark, listening to unexpected creatures. This is not reality, unless it is a new form of reality, in which case the title could be pronounced “new it.” The title can be read in other ways, in other languages, and ultimately its meaning is left to you.

Sawako has released albums on the labels 12k, and/OAR, Anticipate, and now Baskaru. Her audio and visual works have been programmed around the world at such events and venues as the Sonar Festival, MUTEK, P.S.1/MoMA, UCLA Hammer Museum, Roulette, Resonance FM, and ICA London. nu.it’s mastering was entrusted to Yu Miyashita, aka Yaporigami, who released material on Mille Plateaux, mAtter, Hz Records, and +MUS. The cover art is by kynd, whose ephemereal OpenFrameworks drawings have been featured by CreativeApplications.

http://troncolon.com/nuit
http://www.baskaru.com

Sawako - locus of everyday life

When you saw those two names – Achim Wollscheid and Bernhard Schreiner – side by side on a piece of paper, you probably thought "Of course, this collaboration makes so much sense!" Unless you went "Who?"

True, Wollscheid and Schreiner are not what you would call household names of the experimental music scene. Although the former gained serious "street" credit on the Industrial scene in the '80s with his moniker S.B.O.T.H.I. and his collaborations with P16.D4. Wollscheid also cofounded the influential production company/label Selektion. And in the '90s and early 2000s he published a string of brilliant albums of computer music and avant-garde electronics on Selektion and Ritornell. For the past ten years, however, he has released very little music, focusing instead on sound art installations.

Schreiner is a photographer, filmmaker, installation artist, and musician. Like Wollscheid, he presents many more exhibitions than he releases records, and his work in both realms shows strong affinities with the Selektion man.

Calibrated Contingency consists in a continuous 47-minute live performance recorded in Graz in 2011. Both artists are using a computer and minimal external input devices (a boundary microphone, an induction coil, a radio). At the performance, each had a pair of stereo speakers, and all four speakers were arranged in a single line. This CD presents a stereo mix of that performance. And what a performance it is: a complex fabric of mangled frequencies, raw electricity, odd sounds, clips and glitches, woven loosely, with silent holes here and there. Dizzying and otherworldly...

...but isn't that what the sound of our world should sound like?

Achim Wollscheid & Bernhard Schreiner - Calibrated Contingency (excerpt)

"Hill towns and empty mountains pass by, but the smoothness of the train blurs the view, and it's easier than ever to fall asleep in the low morning sunlight coming in through the train's windows", writes Will Long, the artist behind the Celer moniker, in his liner notes to Sky Limits, one of his most fulfilling records to date.

First created as a duo project in 2005, Celer has been US-born musician Will Long’s solo vehicle since 2009. Through the years and thanks to an astounding rate of production, Celer has become a reference in the field of ambient electronic music. The care Long puts in his ethereal albums and his flawless musical intuition have earned him the critics’praise and invites to release material on key labels such as Spekk, Glacial Movements, Humming Conch, Experimedia, and/OAR, and now Baskaru.

Sky Limits consists in a series of daydreaming-prone, strings-laden ambient tracks interspersed with field recordings of daily life in Tokyo and Kyoto. This album is a reflection on the evanescent nature of memories, dreams, and reality.

In addition to Celer, his main project, Will Long plays in Oh, Yoko (with Miko) and Hollywood Dream Trip (with Christoph Heemann). He also runs the Two Acorns label.

Sky Limits is available on LP from Two Acorns and on CD from Baskaru.

Celer - Tangent lines

Electronic composer and musician, philosopher and conceptual artist Frank Rothkamm doesn't do anything halfway. In 2010, Frank was diagnosed with tinnitus, a brain processing disorder that greatly disturbed his sleep. So he started to research a sound treatment that would "mask" or eliminate the high frequencies he was doomed to hear for the rest of his life.

After 4 years of experimentation Frank failed to find a cure for tinnitus, but discovered what he proposes as the "scientific method of psychostochastics" and a new conception of music: Music that has no time. Statistically designed - so that listeners will not remember what was heard a few minutes ago and what they hear will be different upon each encounter - they enter into what he postulates as a "zone where there is no beginning nor end, no linear development but the laws of quantum mechanics". To gain a new understanding of our perception of sound, time and uncertainty, he calls this the Wiener Process; as a nod to the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener.

Seeded from a single algorithm, the Wiener Process unfolds in 24 distinct 1 hour "zones" or pieces. Each is nothing but a drawn-out instant of time, an ultra magnified moment of Planck time. There are 24 of these, because there are 24 hours in the day, so the Wiener Process, "once set in motion in the listener, will go on until the listener dies", as Frank claims. All the pieces of the Wiener Process are through-composed Csound scores and were coded over the course of 4 years in 3 computer languages: Forth, Coldfusion and Python. Frank specifically designed a "Studio B" which is very small, has no windows and consists of a library of historic books on computer science and vintage IBM and SUN machines running a "supermodern" command-line-only Linux Operation System. All pieces were written in this studio located at the Lodge For Utopian Science in View Park, California, with the exception of one: "Rnd9c4-2_Grand_Canyon opus 490" was composed at the Maswik Lodge in Grand Canyon Village, Arizona.

With all these constraints in place Frank created a singular, sprawling work that transcends its preconditions. This is music without roots, although it shares affinities with the works of certain computer music and generative music pioneers.

"The Wiener Process draws heavily on the uniform random distribution and borrows notions from quantum mechanics and psychoacoustics", Frank acknowledges "I simply used the Scottish philosopher David Hume's skepticism on causality as a starting point and ended up with the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ludwig Boltzmann's hypothesized self aware entity."

Yes, simple as that, each piece is a slice of infinity, without beginning, development, or end. However, the 24-hour sequence follows a clearly-drawn listening curve that starts with silence (honestly, "Pink0 (Urgestalt) opus 76" will amount to literally nothing for some listeners as its frequency content is all above 10,000Hz), goes through stages of white noise and pink noise, then crosses a tonal zone of increasingly-active stochastic melodies. By then, we are halfway through the set. Then, melodic activity loses momentum, and the music gradually enters denser harmonic planes - "rnd9e_Million opus 499" passes by at the average rate of 277 events per second(!) - goes back to undifferentiated sounds, until the 24th hour, which consists of a delicate field recording piece entitled "Hyperacusis Man opus 82".

This unique project is designed for low-volume headphone listening, can co-exist with any other music or sound environment or simply function as an auditory 24 hour clock. "The effect of psychostochastics is synaesthetic and not dependent on the volume for the listeners nor their attention" Frank promises.

Frank Rothkamm - Wiener Process (excerpt)

Wieman - Chain DLK Interview

Slowly but o-so-surely, Emmanuel Mieville is building an impressive body of work, where each new album seems to make the previous one pale in comparison. And the music press would be wise to catch on to him. The man is discreet and unassertive, so is his music, but he – like it – cannot be dismissed as just another proponent of the field recording. For Mieville, music is some of the most spellbinding art for the ear out there in the aether.

"Ethers" is Mieville's second album for Baskaru, and though the previous one certainly stands the test of time, this new opus pushes the bar higher, much higher. In the composer's own words, "Ethers is an attempt to give an earthy quality, a dense texture to drone music, to lower it from the 'skies'."

Mieville first trained as a sound engineer, and then studied musique concrète at GRM. He grew up listening to creative radio programs and embraced field recording as a form of art. His latest works fully realized a synthesis of all these elements: the attentive ear to one's surroundings, the abstract approach to sound, the sense of drama that makes a field recording composition take life.

Mieville has worked with Buto dancers, video artists, and like-minded musicians like Eric Cordier, Guido Huebner, and Benjamin Thigpen. After appearances on compilations albums, he released two CDs in Malaysia (on Herbal Records and XingWu), followed by his Western full-length debut "Four Wanderings in Tropical Lands" on Baskaru in 2011. Since then he released two thematic albums: "Buddha – Anima – Asia" (Obs*, 2012) on Buddhism, and "Concret-Sens" (Crónica, 2014), a homage to early musique concrète.

Emmanuel Mieville - Watt Station

Dreamy, melancholic, peaceful, or just plain gorgeous? As long as your ears are open, the sound world of Yui Onodera will take you where YOU want to go. From simple means (piano, guitar, computer), Onodera draws complex materials, and then mixes them back into deceptively simple results. The work draws inspiration (and its title) from an abstract structure thought up by architect Christopher Alexander. What you get is quiet background music if you leave it at that or, if you are willing to take the time to listen, a deep immersive journey.

Hailing from Tokyo, Japan, Yui Onodera is a musician, a composer, and the founder of Critical Path. He studied both music and architecture, which explains his uncanny grasp of spatiality in music. His method consists in blending delicate instrumental lines with field recordings and computer treatments to create quiet, ambient electroacoustic pieces. This approach is akin to artists like Machinefabriek, Stephen Vitiello, and Chihei Hatakeyama.

"Semi Lattice" is Onodera's second solo album to be released in 2015 (the first one was "sinkai" on Japanese label Arctic Tone), after eight years of solo silence. In the interval, Onodera pursued several fruitful collaborations with musicians and groups like The Beautiful Schizophonic, Pjusk, Vadim Bondarenko, Mizkami Ryuta, and Baskaru recording artist Celer. All these projects seem to have informed "Semi Lattice" in some way, Onodera's solo works having grown lusher, fuller, and more fully-formed.

Yui Onodera - Semi Lattice 2

Simon Whetham is an acute listener, a field recorder, a thinker, a globetrotter, and a mobilizer. However, he is also a sonic cook. Wherever he goes, he picks up sounds and atmospheres as if they were exotic ingredients. And for "What Matters Is That It Matters", he made us a stew, slowly simmered until all the flavours come through.

"What Matters Is That It Matters", Whetham's first album for Baskaru, is slow music. And slow music deserves to be taken in slowly – you don't wolf comfort food down, you savour it, relishing its complexity, absorbing its warmth. Unlike most of Whetham's previous works, this album is not focused on a specific geographical location. As if the artist had given himself free reign. The resulting music has a career-encompassing feel, as Whetham touches base with pure field recordings, elongated instrumental textures, and treated snippets of melodies (piano, banjo). "What Matters Is That It Matters" provides an incredibly rich listening experience, pairing relevant esthetical concerns and listening enjoyment.

Englishman Simon Whetham has been exploring the art of composing with field recordings and found sounds for a decade, a period during which he released music on labels such as Crónica, Entr'acte, Helen Scarsdale Agency, and Line. He is perhaps best known for "Active Crossover," a workshop/collaboration/installation project with which he is travelling the world.

Simon Whetham - You Can't Escape The Past

As promised two years ago, Laurent Perrier delivers the second instalment in his Plateforme series, and "Plateforme #2" makes it clear that the French audio wizard did NOT put all the best material from this project on the first disc.

In an audio production world where possibilities have become endless, Perrier designed for himself a very restrictive framework: he asked artists for raw audio materials that are representative of their usual soundworld, and decided to produce one piece of sound art per artist using that material – and only that material, no matter what and how much of it he would receive. He calls it a "one-way collaboration".

The results are a testament to Perrier's creativity and sense of balance. Each piece irradiates its namesake's musical personality while maintaining a pace, facture, and intent that are all Perrier's. In that regard, this volume displays a stronger sense of cohesion than #1. "Francisco López" is probably the most immediately identifiable piece of the whole project, thanks to the Spanish composer's unmistakable field recordings. That was to be expected; what was not is how "Tom Recchion" and "Christian Zanési" seem to build on the foundations laid down in that first piece – same kind of sharp back-and-forth cutting between sounds, same type of non-linear narrative – despite the fact that raw materials are obviously more varied. The results are incredibly absorbing and warrant multiple listens.

Laurent Perrier ranks among the most respected members of the French electronic music scene. His name is associated to the aliases Zonk't, Pylône, Heal, Cape Fear, and LP, with the Odd Size label, an adventure that lasted a decade, and the urban tribal industrial rock band Nox. His music art ranges from minimal techno to musique concrète, by way of several other states, with incursions in video installation and contemporary art, plus collaborations with choreographers and playwrights.

Laurent Perrier - Francisco López

"Relational listening provides a systemic framework through which artists and other concerned practitioners can explore the conditions of their listening, specifically in the context of the desire to transmit those listenings", writes Lawrence English in an essay entitled Relational Listening: The Politics of Perception. He describes relational listening as a creative process intended to make one's listening audible to an audience.

In the case of "Approaching Nothing", English's concept of relational listening also puts the listener in relation with a founding work in the field of phonography (or field recording): Luc Ferrari's "Presque Rien n° 1" [Almost Nothing #1]. Ferrari recorded the material for this piece in 1967 in Vela Luka, Yugoslavia (now in Croatia), in the middle of summer. English takes us back to that town in 2013 just as fall creeps in, picking up (to an extent) where Ferrari had left us and, like Ferrari, English limits his post-recording interventions to editing and juxtapositions.

And thus "Approaching Nothing" both approaches Ferrari's idea and serves as a stellar relational listening case study. The 30-minute piece delivers many audio puzzles, twists, and surprises, with a pacing that makes it easy to relate to.

Lawrence English is a world-famous composer, electronician, sound installation artist, record producer, and record label manager living in Australia. His works often explore the nature of perception. He has released solo albums on highly valued imprints like Crónica, Important, Line, Sirr, Touch, 12k, and his own label ROOM40. "Approaching Nothing" is his third album on Baskaru.

Lawrence English - Approaching Nothing (excerpt)

Baskaru is a French record label dealing with experimental electronic music and sound art.

Baskaru

Popular tracks