All music by Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi 
Recorded at Standards, Milan, November 2015. Re-recorded and edited in Berlin, Kyoto and Monza, February 2018 - September 2020                                

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Artwork by Traianos Pakioufakis 
Design by Bartolomé Sanson		                                                  
 C+P 2021 l SP135 l SHELTER PRESS

ANDREW PEKLER & GUISEPPE IELASI 'Simferopol' (SP135)

Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spontaneous and confessional improvisations, despite that fact that making them was a way of “making peace with myself and the reality around me” for the Kraków-based artist. The artwork created by costume designer, sculptor and illustrator Julita Goździk and track titles also allude to an interest in rituality, repetitiveness and the cyclical nature of our existence.

Constant listening, instinct and intuition are key to Martyna Basta’s practice. Having studied classical guitar for many years as a child, Basta now focuses her energies on more abstract forms of art as a photographer, musician, member of the PROGREFONIK collective and Radio Kapitał resident. Making Eye Contact With Solitude follows a string of shorter self-releases and is her label debut, and a wonderful introduction to her back-catalogue for many. Slotting in somewhere between the vocal mantras of Cucina Povera, the emotional immediacy of Claire Rousay’s recordings and the carefully crafted sonic environs of Félicia Atkinson, Martyna Basta is carving out a unique corner of the ambient world for herself. 

Pre-order: https://martynabasta.bandcamp.com/album/making-eye-contact-with-solitude

Making Eye Contact With Solitude

Martyna Basta – Awakening

'Deena Abdelwahed and Mazen Kerbaj - Blue Malediction' is from forthcoming

Sampler / Sampled
Mazen Kerbaj Trumpet Solo Vol. 3 ft Deena

Abdelwahed, Rabih Beaini, Fari Bradley, dieb13, DJ Sniff, Gavsborg (Equiknoxx), Electric Indigo, Donzilla Lion (Nyege Nyege), Marina Rosenfeld, Microhm, Muqata’a, Bob Ostertag, Rrose

DOSER042LP -- 2xLP/2xCD/digital
Morphine Records -- February 25, 2022

A / 1. Mazen Kerbaj - Sampler Side A
B / 2. Mazen Kerbaj - Sampler Side B
C1 / 3. Deena Abdelwahed and Mazen Kerbaj - Blue Malediction
C2 / 4. Dieb 13 and Mazen Kerbaj - Norm Hollows Function
C3 / 5. Rrose and Mazen Kerbaj - Pendulum
C4 / 6. Marina Rosenfeld and Mazen Kerbaj - Untitled
C5 / 7. Rabih Beaini and Mazen Kerbaj - Chainsaw
C6 / 8. Donzilla Lion and Mazen Kerbaj - Time Traveler
D1 / 9. DJ Sniff and Mazen Kerbaj - Trumpet Zoo
D2 / 10. Electric Indigo and Mazen Kerbaj - Mazen's Trumpet
D3 / 11. Muqata'a and Mazen Kerbaj - Untitled
D4 / 12. Microhm and Mazen Kerbaj - Dreams of Dust
D5 / 13. Fari Bradley and Mazen Kerbaj - The sign to Return is in the Earth's Spin
D6 / 14. Gavsborg and Mazen Kerbaj - Now Serving #8190
D7 / 15. Bob Ostertag and Mazen Kerbaj - Untitled

Deena Abdelwahed and Mazen Kerbaj – Blue Malediction

Extract from 'Image Langage' (SP140)
Out June, 24th 2022 on 2xLPs, CD, digital download.

Order: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/image-langage

—
Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast.

Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life.

At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound.

Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments.

Image Language is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity.

— Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Image Language

Becoming a stone

FELICIA ATKINSON 'Becoming a Stone' (SP140)

ROKU031 - Ecka Mordecai "Promise and Illusion" [Study Of A Flame]

Ecstatic is thrilled to announce Foreign Body, the latest release from Barcelona-based Dania Shihab, who crafts dreamlike transmissions into the evocative concept of the 'foreign body' in the context of forced migration and cultural loss. 

A tapestry of sounds and emotions, this work is a product of Dania's exploration of her experiences as an Iraqi-born individual who grew up in Tasmania, Australia, an island where her native culture was completely absent. The profound sense of longing for a homeland that has never truly been experienced reverberates throughout, with each track poignantly capturing the complexities of feeling like a stranger in one's own body and society. 

Inspired by her work as an emergency doctor, the artist delves into the idea of removing foreign bodies, and sees forced migrants as 'foreign bodies' within their adopted societies. This release serves as a window into the emotional displacement of forced migrants and the struggle for cultural identity. 

Foreign Body was written and recorded at home in Barcelona, using a 4-track tape recorder, vocal looping techniques, modular synthesis, and collaged samples of Iraqi musicians and poets from the post-Gulf War era into an amorphous cloud of magnetic drones and soft hypnogogic vocal textures to entrance the listener. 

An emotive and evocative release, Foreign Body weaves together sounds and stories to explore a universal human experience. It is a testament to the sublime power of music to communicate emotion.

Dania - Foreign Body

Music for Serge Modular, inspired by Maryanne Amacher's music and research. 

PLEASE USE SPEAKERS, NOT HEADPHONES.

Perceptual Geography (excerpt)

Neon Forest

Just before 2020 comes to an end, Berlin-based artist @leozylberberg graces this crazy (!) year  with an oddball of a track: “Sheshells” is a total earworm and at the same time a bit off, maybe. It’s chill, it’s haunted, and it might be the most appropriate end to 2020 one can imagine. “Despite its imperfections, it feels like some sort of antidote to something,” as the Australian artist puts it herself.

Sheshells is published as a digital single. It features an artwork from Paris-based graphic designer and art director Olga Prader’s Ftantasy series. The track is Präsens Editionen’s fourth audio release in 2020, following music by Remo Helfenstein, @samuelreinhard , and @damexlove , that is ranging from gospel and dark ambient-informed lullabies to proper sad-boy-reggaeton-heat.

Zylberberg is a mainstay at @sameheads , Berlin’s most infamous pub / fashion store / club / art space / what not. In 2017, she came to attention with a split tape realized with the wonderful Belia Winnewisser. Earlier this year, the Australian artist published Greatestings on @noisekoelln , a label that came back to life just for this highly limited 10” after a four-year period of inactivity. Zylberberg is part of Balance Crew alongside partner in crime @dane-close .

Sheshells

Buy the Track

L.Zylberberg - Sheshells (PE-022)

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

Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt : The Monster Of Yesa

As you can imagine we are under huge pressure at the moment and are working flat out to ensure Cafe OTO survives this. The impact of this situation is extremely acute for small venues like ours and we need all the support we can get to pull through. Please donate what you can, if you can. Thank you. 

Cafe OTO opened in April 2008 with the aim of providing a home for creative new music that exists outside of the mainstream. It comprises one large cafe/performance space open during the day serving food and drink with an evening programme of live music almost seven nights a week. 

OTOROKU is part of OTOProjects - a not-for-profit Community Interest Company (CIC) that has been set up to manage the programme at Café Oto. Any profits from OTOROKU are put back into supporting what we do and will help us to continue programming the best musicians and performers from all over the world.

www.cafeoto.co.uk

ROKU031 - Ecka Mordecai "Promise and Illusion" [Study Of A Flame]

cafeOTO

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