Name: PANFestIssue June 2013 by Ben Vida
Duration: 30 min 6 s
Description: Live set from the NYC PAN Records Festival. June 21st, 2013.

DAVID GRANSTRÖM, Empty Room - LP

Release date - April 2th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2102
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) Obsidian 09:22
2) Aeon 10:56
3) Sapphire Visions 04:50
4) Occultations 10:08
5) Transience 04:45

Credits:
All tracks composed, recorded, performed and mixed by David Granström 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Photography by Aron Mattsson
Cover design by Greenpointless

///
On »Empty Room,« David Granström works with slow transformations, cyclical and isometric patterns as well as just intonation as a way to create harmonic stability, allowing his long-form pieces to develop their own unique temporal and spatial qualities. A prolific figure in Stockholm’s experimental drone scene and a collaborator of Hallow Ground label mates Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson, the Swedish composer navigates through moments of quietude and crushing volume on these five tracks. Sonically and atmospherically, the pieces on »Empty Room« simultaneously call to mind Fennesz’s most meditative work or the physical experience of seeing Sunn O))) live, blending guitar recordings and synthesised sounds with forceful effects similar to those of Mario Díaz de Leon’s Oneirogen project while still being as moving and delicate as Alessandro Cortini’s solo work. The album is marked by melodies and harmonies that are the product of a peculiar working process that turned the composer into an intent listener collaborating with, rather than simply using technology. 

Having been invited by the self-organising artist group The Non Existent Center for a residency to Ställbergs Gruva, a defunct iron ore mine in Sweden’s Bergslagen region, Granström took his guitar as a starting point for his compositional work that heavily relies on real-time sound synthesis. »I seldomly use the instrument as a sound source in the final compositions and rather transcribe and orchestrate the harmonic structures using sound synthesis,« he explains. »On this album however, I chose to include the actual recordings of the guitar in order to extend the spectra between non-referential synthetic sounds and embodied referential sounds.« Working with precise tunings in order to blend the timbre of the synthesis with the harmonic structures of the composition, he created composite sound objects in which the harmonic elements blend into each other. 

Through the re-amplification of synthetic musical materials from the inside of the abandoned mine, his original compositions were enriched with site-specific sound qualities before he further refined them in a singular working process. Granström works with algorithmic and generative processes, using the SuperCollider programming environment and thus blurring the lines between generative and creative forms of composition. »One of the things that I like about this way of working is that it creates a distance between myself as a composer and myself as a listener of the music that is produced entirely by the system,« he says. Granström’s technologically aided eschewing of the conventions of composing doesn’t make the end result any less personal, however. By listening again and again to the newly generated output, Granström simply took on a different role in the process of finalising the music, with the technology and the sounds becoming his co-authors. 

By creating systems that generate music, he gains a new perspective on (musical) time, says Granström. »There doesn't have to be a fixed length to the music at all,« he explains. »And by writing music with this in mind, my focus tends to shift towards writing cyclical structures that gradually change and transform over time.« Simple parts, in other words, that emerge as the five complex wholes that form »Empty Room,« a record that itself seems to take on different forms with every new listen.

DAVID GRANSTRÖM - Occultations (HG2102)

Taken from the album 'Suisse Redux' released as LP and Digital

François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298)

Narration: Kali Malone
Music: Kassel Jaeger
Additional Hidden « Uminari Voice »: Eiko Ishibashi
Audio Essay commissioned by V/A - Pro Helvetia

François J. Bonnet - Skyquakes

Seven artists reckon with isolation and subsistence in Dragon’s Eye Recordings’ latest release, titled 'Touch'. Organized by Tomoko Hojo, the album collects six sound pieces by various artists who grapple with the restriction of physical contact through sound. Our ability to touch is a means of survival, an essential and intimate way of living and communing with others. So when it is taken away for the same reason we possess it—for the sake of staying safe—how can it be replaced? What can stand in? 

The pandemic claimed so much; and for a time, touch fell victim. In the album 'Touch', Alexandra Spense, KMRU, Viv Corringham, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto, Tomoko Hojo, and Melissa Pons prod at means of non-tactile touching. They explore spaces where touch is only a memory, a recording, something missing to find replacements. In assembling this six-piece collection, artist Tomoko Hojo recalls Yoko Ono’s 1964 event which invited attendees to “watch the sky and touch”. Over the course of 'Touch,' the listener is an attendee, witnessing sonic reconstructions of haptic happenings. In each of the album’s pieces, sound grazes unseen surfaces and traces invisible shapes with an absent finger.  

In “Communion”, Alexandra Spense recalls a space where tactility transformed into something more, an instance that dissolved the borders of the physical body to blend spirit with its surroundings. KMRU’s “its not a tangency” relies on repetition to feel the boundaries of its container. Almost like echolocation, the listener relies on distant children’s voices and the monotony of soft drones to situate oneself in an imagined space.  

“Imagine myself walking with you” engages with the physical intimacy created not through touch, but rather physical presence—the nearness of two bodies, the potentiality of tactility, the imprint conversations can leave long after they end. Viv Corringham digitally recreates her process of walking and talking with strangers, instead connecting with a friend online. In “Human Measures”, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto create an instrument which mimics what touch might sound like by simultaneously breathing into a circulatory system of tubes, wrapped into something like the symbol for infinity.   

In “fall asleep”, Tomoko Hojo conjures whispers, chants, and rings bells to touch the air.  From these sound waves of voice and instrument and element, intentional and drawn out, their dispersal can be felt. It’s when the waves enter the ear that we can hear them. But Hojo asks what happens to other waves that run into other parts of the body, unalive or unhearing.  

The absence of other bodies, the ultimate vehicles of touch, brought Melissa Pons inward with her piece “Three”. Through airy field recordings, scattered static, and gently howling drones, it’s as if Pons watches her emotions float off of her body like the minuscule flakes of skin that comprise dust.  

Each of these six pieces ask to expand outside of sound, to take physical shape, make gestures and wander. In their own unique ways, the artists of 'Touch' attempt to transmute sound into tactility, and they come as close as they can. Collectively, the sound pieces exist within the container of the compilation—an abstract notion that places collections of noise alongside one another. And so what is a compilation if not individual tracks rubbing up against one another, meshing, touching?

Touch

KMRU - Its not a tangency

from KR103:  an moku I stefan schmidt:: zwischenraum
imited edition tape / download out on may 13th 2022

zwischenraum

AN MOKU I STEFAN SCHMIDT:: yama

Archaic Vaults is pleased to present the first vinyl album for the label, cataloguing ten tracks from ten artists spanning the globe. This curation brings together a multiplicity of genres within the label’s ongoing thematic output - durational ambience, field recordings, oversaturated improvisations and spatialised synthetic loops among them. A diverse cohort of familiar and new collaborators alike.

Edition of 300. Design by Severin Black.

https://archaicvaults.bandcamp.com/album/continuing-a-worn-out-tradition-iii

Continuing A Worn Out Tradition III

A4. Chantal Michelle 'Borghese Gardens September' [AV011]

American avant-electronic musician and essayist Bret Schneider holds no institutional allegiance to one artistic medium. His background encompasses a wide range of work experiences and reveals a man who is connected to the world around him in complex, alienated ways. His thoughts on music and philosophy are intertwined into a billowing exposition. But when exploring the dark recesses of his more aural works, there is an inherent flexibility. Phasing percussive elements and frayed droning lines all lead to a perpetually shifting feeling for an aural uncanny. As fractured as his music can be, there is a dim spark of rumination that threads through his synthetic machinations.

On his latest release, “Xilinx,” Schneider taps into a primordial electronic noise—the kind that rests just on your periphery, unwinding itself to reveal myriad sordid circuits and disjointed projections. These tracks maintain a wired mania, expressing an unsettling undercurrent of ragged repetition and warbling drones. There’s an unexpected elasticity to Schneider’s cabled rhythms, and they often shift across several temporal lines before turning inward, struggling to illuminate an intimate dissonance or imagine a multi-chambered core. Displaying a raw and unusually concise knowledge of how these sounds might fit together, “Xilinx” is part zoetrope, part post-industrial dreamscape. It is an inquiry into the idea of internal movement, a contorted experiment in musical patterning, and an experiment in self-replication.

Xilinx

Bret Schneider - VaVE1

Order OHER PEPLE'S CRIMES: www.anaott.bandcamp.com/album/other-peoples-crimes

After ‘Cobraxine’, ‘Boogie Throb’, and the Ana Ott – released ‘Molochville’, Brecht Ameel (Razen/Ameel Brecht) gives us his new album under the Br’lâaB moniker ‘Other People’s Crimes’; a high-on-paranoia, pre-crime-surveillance narrative, constructed after hours in the studio from a combination of Ameel’s own recordings on a widely varied set of instruments, library music, flea-market broken vinyls and old cassettes. Part blind-overdub palimpsest-collage, part straightforward composition, the 10” contains both Br’lâaB’s loop constructions and tracks performed by the found audio phantom band called the Acid Boogie Quartet. Bearing more gritty layers of both sound and subtext than ever, the “Other People’s Crimes” EP stands as an artefact of wild paranoia and spy-thriller sonics, weaving vignettes of surveillance gone wrong, doublethink and confessional echolalia.

Police and thieves are in the streets, running wild with nosebleeds and ill will ids. Dial v for victim as the night horizon broods a neon luminol glow. Howling at the vortex, buried under blindfolds, vigilantes take to crime with fear and ketamines.

Other People's Crimes

Br'lâaB - Dial V for Victim

Charles Curtis: Performances & Recordings 1998-2018 3xCD (SLT-005)

Saltern presents its fifth release, Charles Curtis: Performances & Recordings 1998-2018, the first comprehensive collection of recordings surveying the career of renowned, American cellist Charles Curtis. Selected by Curtis and Tashi Wada from recordings spanning the past two decades, the collection offers a broad, inclusive view of Curtis's activities across the diverse worlds of music he inhabits, containing rare, unreleased recordings, and never-before-released music by Terry Jennings, Richard Maxfield, Éliane Radigue, Alison Knowles, and Curtis. The wide-ranging scope of this release speaks not to a musical restlessness, but to a genuine spirit of inquiry, as these areas of activity for Curtis have existed concurrently in dialogue, not simply in succession, for decades. Over two hours of music by composers and artists with whom Curtis is closely associated including Éliane Radigue, Guillaume de Machaut, Tobias Hume, Silvestro di Ganassi, Terry Jennings, Morton Feldman, Anton Webern, Olivier Messiaen, Alison Knowles, Richard Maxfield, and Curtis himself. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with liner notes by La Monte Young, Spencer Gerhardt, and Tashi Wada. Custom packaging and screen printing by Alan Sherry; edition of 500.

Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

Charles Curtis – Unfinished Song (1998)

Ultra Eczema rarely reissues records: firstly, because we believe it’s hard to improve on a good original (and we would never want to republish anything that isn’t); and secondly, it’s called the Internet and you can find everything on it. Nonetheless, in 2015 we reissued Kraus’ ‘I could Destroy You With A Single Thought’, a CDR from 2004, because it was camping in our all-time favourite records list for a decade and the data on this erratic medium tends to erase itself, much like a troubled past.

‘A Golden Brain’ was published in the first wave of the Covid pandemic via Kraus’ bandcamp as a digital release. And once again we couldn’t help ourselves. This is Kraus at his best: if a bedroom could be a stadium, he would play the main stage!

Limited edition of 300 copies. Includes an insert, download code and a UE sticker.

Kraus - A Golden Brain - 04 A Golden Brain

Live set from the NYC PAN Records Festival. June 21st, 2013.

PANFestIssue June 2013

Ben Vida

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