Reposted on the Experimental Music network by Bivouac Recording.

Beatriz Ferreyra

Shelter Press is happy to announce the release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit’s latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by - and dedicated to - the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer.

Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s.

In the piece, Ankersmit explores different “modes” of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up loud, the material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener’s head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as “ear tones”.

The title is a reference to Amacher’s essay “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography”, and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. “Ear tone” stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener’s head reveals changes.

For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion.

The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher.

This is a digital-only release (CD and download) because the “ear tone” material can’t be adequately transferred to vinyl.

Please play loud and use speakers, not headphones. 
credits
releases March 19, 2021

Music: Thomas Ankersmit
Mastering: Kassian Troyer
Design: Bartolomé Sanson
Interview editing: Michelle Arrouas

THOMAS ANKERSMIT 'Perceptual Geography' (EXCERPT) (SP130)

extr : 8’35’’ -  1978 – CD: Cultures électroniques 14-27° concours international de musique et d’art sonore électroacoustique -
                                                  série Imeb / UNESCO / CIME 2000 - voix : Mercedes Cornu

Echos - extr : 8’35’’ - 1978

extr : 3’32’’ – 2002 – APREM – CD : Motus M 30 2004- Voix : Simone Riste et Roger Cochini

Cantos De Antes - extr : 3’32’’ – 2002

 5’10’’ - 2001 – CD Computer Music Journal,  Sound  Anthology , vol 25, 2001 – CD: Instrumentos solos 09 - CCDBA

Jazz For Miles - 5’10’’ - 2001

extr : 4’14’’- 2001– CD 1 - IMEB –Compendium International – LDC 278 11 22/23 - chien : Timothé

La baballe du chienchien à la mémère - extr : 4’14’’ - 2001

Demeures Aquatiques -  extr : 1’21’’ - 1967

Un Fil Invisible - extr : 3’17’’ – 2009

[surf033]
Ewer - Ewer

https://soundcloud.com/ewer8
https://soundcloud.com/erethia
https://soundcloud.com/zhuravkovasophia

artwork by Svyatykh (https://linktr.ee/svyatykh)

🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️
ⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶⒶ

Ewer ~ Stains Of Time (ft. Skajiraz)

‘Ange 2’ an invitation to imagine the person you love dearly and miss deeply

Clarissa Connelly - Wee Rosebud
textural bug - beaded rocks
Ned Milligan - Mailbox Walk
Laila Sakini - Milk
Velvachell - Firewood (los colores)
Valentina Magaletti - She​/​Her​/​Gone
Chantal Michelle - Excavator
Dania - Lament
Lia T - Kester
Atte Elias Kantonen - hey,
Yunzero - D12
Merope - Sakale
Atte Elias Kantonen - snail loves moth
Magic Arrows - Soma
Polly Urethane - Marble Halls (Demo)
MIZU - Aria (I Stand by the Reflecting Pool and Remember)
Euphoria Journal - Void Unfulfilled
james K - alright
E fishpool - sren
k2dj - acetate oil
Lucy Liyou - April In Paris (​봄​)
J and the woolen stars - Feeling worse about the same

image credit: Isabel Cavenecia - Nectar, 21x30cm graphite on paper 2023

Mari 'Ange 2' ⓜⓘⓧ ⓪⑤④

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands
by James Hoff

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies.

Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world.

Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream.

Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record.

Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind.

—

James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited and performed internationally. He co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books.

JAMES HOFF 'Everything You Want Less Time' (SP151)

Metamorphoses

Accident du Travail. We fell in love with their album on Trilogy Tapes and after a coincidental (or not) meeting in Brussels, our 29th release and first ever live album slowly took shape. Recorded in the mythical London Cafe OTO in 2016, the outfit of Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux explores a beautiful path of arrhythmic music, subaquatic sounds and celestial zones.

[vlek29] - Accident du Travail - live at Cafe OTO
Julie Normal_ondes Martenot + Olivier Demeaux_harmonium & machines.
Cafe OTO, Londres, 2016
enregistrement. Adam Matschulat 
mastering. Fred Alstadt 
artwork. Takahiro Kurashima
remerciements. Will Bankhead , Abby Thomas , Jean-Charles , Hugo Sanchez,  Hiro Abe
distribution. Crevette

Out September 27th.
Pre-order: https://vlekrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vlek29-accident-du-travail-live-at-cafe-oto

Accident du Travail - Ouverture All'Inglese (taken from the upcoming [vlek29]: live at Cafe OTO)

This year London has experienced several weekends of the hottest summer and that moved the Australian sound artist Kate Carr, whose practice is centred on articulating the relationship between people and place through sound, to point her microphone at the city. This volume is based on her recordings during a particularly hot long weekend in a corner of very busy intersection in London, where she resides now. In Heatwave, Carr is interested in both the serious and also the more prosaic aspects of soundscapes related to climate change. She investigated the throbbing summer music from her neighborhood, people’s efforts to keep cool, and the uneasiness which accompanies these everyday activities in this moment of environmental crisis. The way these pieces construct and compensate, with all the tangible sounds that fold into larger moods via multiple instruments, exemplifies her acumen in creating sonic stories that reflect our multi-layered experience of reality.

Humidity - from Heatwave out now via Hasana Editions

Tape loops are a closed path, a cyclic river, a ring around a far planet. They’re similar to our memory, continuously reenacting an artefact that belongs to a precise point in time, brought back in a process of recall where that artifact slightly and slowly becomes imprecise and shifted. An unrested repetition carved into an old pavement, in a city where every generation leaves a new mark, a new incision and maintains an endless process of birth and deterioration. Sonus Ruinae’s synthesizers sounds are gently laid on that closed path, put in a locked repetition and engaged into that eternal dance.
While growing up with computer music influences, ranging from glitch to the new century Roman electronic scene, Marta De Pascalis developed her musician skills under the spell of the Italian sound labs sphere, from Gruppo di Improvvisazione to Battiato and other masters that influenced the global movement of sound designers. Her earliest Live performances already showed a special character of improvisation and structure, reduced slowly to become essence, made of synthesis and magnetic tape. Her album Sonus Ruinae is a canvas of harmonics and a sublime place where things are whole, where your first listen is engraved just like that ancient city’s pavement, and Marta endlessly writes beauty on top of it, layer after layer.

All music by Marta De Pascalis
Recorded at WORM Sound Studios in Rotterdam, artist's studio and Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, between 2019 and 2020. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Lorenzo Mazon Studio.
All rights reserved to the respective owners.
doser039LP 
© + ℗ Morphine Records 2020.

Marta De Pascalis - Sonus Ruinae Part 1

Track from the upcoming DE NOR 2020 compilation LP/DL, out on January 11, 2021!

Demeures Aquatiques - extr : 1’21’’ - 1967

BEATRIZ FERREYRA

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