Great work! Love it! Perfect for my bath!!!! 👍👍👍👌👍👍👍

Biutiful piece, is this room 14 or 15? the url of this song says 15

Amazing melancholic rainy atmosphere. I love that! ♥

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

Quiet Moments of Reflection pt.IX.

Midnight Pulse

there's also the Underwolrd as a Nether Soundtrack!

nether2

Track from new album 'Eistla'. Available on cassette and digital download at rbeny.bandcamp.com

Mastered by Nathan Moody (ObsidianSound.net). Photography by Lindsay Albert (LindsayAlbert.com).

blank light

From the album Anne.  Available November 16, 2018 from Western Vinyl.

Bandcamp https://josephshabason.bandcamp.com/album/anne
iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/anne/1427808233?ls=1&app=itunes
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/19FD6RN5K3xYFThAHM4fGy?si=0hUO0rFVQAigvSPTvJL_4w
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv182

Joseph Shabason
Twitter https://twitter.com/JosephShabason
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/josephshabason/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/josephshabason

Anne, the second album By Toronto saxophonist and composer Joseph Shabason, is a tonal essay on degenerative illness. Delicately and compassionately woven with interviews of Shabason’s mother from whom the album takes its name, Anne finds its creator navigating a labyrinth of subtle and tragic emotions arising from his mother's struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Across the nine vivid postcards of jazz-laden ambience that comprise the album, Shabason unwraps these difficult themes with great care and focus revealing the unseen aspects of degenerative diseases that force us to re-examine common notions of self, identity, and mortality. 

Shabason’s uncanny ability to manoeuvre through such microscopic feelings is mirrored by his capacity to execute a similar tightrope-walk through musical genres. His music occupies a specific space that is as palpable as it is difficult to pin labels to. On Anne’s second track “Deep Dark Divide” rays of effected saxophone shine behind clouds of digital synthesizer that echoes the sound of jazz in the late 80s, but with a Jon Hassell-esque depth of sensibility that consciously subverts the stylistic inoffensiveness of that era. There is detail and idiosyncrasy beneath Shabason’s dawn-of-the-CD-era sheen that elevates the album far beyond a mere aesthetic exercise.

Still, the sounds on Anne are not so experimentally opaque as to stand in the way of the album’s through-line of sincerity and emotionality. When dissonance is employed it is punctual and meaningful, like on album-middler “Fred and Lil” where a six-minute cascade of breathy textures builds suddenly to an agitated growl, only to abruptly give way to Anne Shabason speaking intimately about her relationship to her own parents. Snippets of such conversations see her taking on something like a narrator role across Anne while the sound of her voice itself is sometimes effected to become a musical texture entwined into the fabric of the songs without always being present or audible.  The subsequent piece “Toh Koh” then drifts into playful disorientation as a lone female voice echoes the two syllables of the title, recalling the vocal techniques of composer Joan La Barbara, or even the light-hearted mantras of Lucky Dragons. From here the album veers back onto its aesthetic thoroughfare with “November” where Shabason lays muted brass textures atop a wavepool of electric chords provided by none other than the ambient cult-hero Gigi Masin, one of Anne’s many integral collaborators.

The serene tragedy of the album distils itself gracefully into the ironically titled album closer “Treat it Like a Wine Bar” wherein flutters of piano and mournfully whispered woodwinds seem to evaporate particle by delicate particle, leaving the listener with a faint emotional afterglow like a dream upon waking. There is a corollary to be drawn here with what it must be like to feel one’s own mind and body drift away slowly until nothing remains, while the collection of memories and abilities that we use to denote the “self” softens into eternity. On Anne, it is precisely this fragile exchange of tranquillity and anguish that Joseph Shabason has proven his singular ability to articulate.

Anne

Joseph Shabason - "Fred and Lil"

From the forthcoming C49 cassette. Limited to 75 copies!

Compositions & artwork by øjeRum
Layout & mastering by Sylvia Shale
Risograph j-card printed at Good Press in Glasgow

OF018 :: Obsolete Future 2019

Syv Segl

øjeRum - Syv Segl [OF018] - Første Segl

Tape Loop Orchestra 
Interiors One - The Unseen Observer

ROOM 3

"Rime" - fog coming in from the sea; also, hoar-frost formed by rapid freezing of water vapor (Galloway)

Music by Hotel Neon
Artwork by Gregory Euclide 

Place Language is an international non-profit compilation album project inspired by the themes found in Robert Macfarlane’s widely-acclaimed book ‘Landmarks’. In particular it focuses on the book’s extensive topographic glossaries, the “word-hoard” of depictive landscape terms gathered from 30 different languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain & Ireland and divided into sections by type of terrain (Flatlands, Uplands, Waterlands, Coastlands, Underlands, Northlands, Edgelands, Earthlands and Woodlands). Relying on these topograms, or “tiny place poems”, as creative prompts, Place Language seeks to both inspire a renewed interest in our surroundings and reinvigorate our appreciation for the audible textures & patterns that characterize a place in keeping with the book’s stated desire to “re-wild” our vocabulary.

The collection features the work of 28 different sound-artists, field recordists, and musicians from around the globe each of whom selected a Landmarks topogram and recorded an impression of it thus adding rich new aspects of dimensionality through the act of sonification. These selections cover all nine of the book’s glossaries along with place-words of  new coinage as prompted by the blank one which Macfarlane leaves at the end of the book for readers to fill in from their own experience. The end result is a truly global and collaborative survey of place, language, and sound.

More info: stationarytravels.wordpress.com/place-language/

ROOM 15

TAPE LOOP ORCHESTRA

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