still loving this versatile panel. here's another try at generating pseudo random natural rhythms by using the crosspatched feedback of the two 258 through the added tws. bird sounds with the lowest vcm in feedbackloop and hiss/noise by feedback patching the middle section of the vcm. slight delay by c0 and occasional octave shifts by the g0.

258 rustling

VAK46 | J. Campbell - Visage

Taken from the album 's/t' released as 2LP and Download

Jaap Vink 'En Dehors' (excerpt) (REGRM 018EXT)

Sfär "Ur sprickorna / Ett halvt liv" (Excerpt)

Larvba & Tube Tentacles & Garazi Gorostiaga - Klub Le Larraskitu, 20/04/2019

Come Along

Loïse Bulot's original octophonic piece, Zenith, has been commissioned by INA-GRM for Akousma Festival 2019 edition in Paris. Here mixed in stereo, this electro-acoustic composition made of piano strings recordings, exponential speed variations, circular movements and attraction phenomenons depicts surprisingly well the complex sun’s gravitational force on the planets.

ITW & Preview: youtu.be/tOgbSpi9gE0


Written & produced by Loïse Bulot.
Commissioned by INA-GRM.

Mastered by Anders Peterson at GS Mastering & Post.
Artwork & design by Benoît Lefeuvre.

Zenith / Serrinha Do Alambari Soundwalk

Loïse Bulot - Zenith

Track from:
Simon Whetham "Forced to Repeat Myself" CD

“When performing with a limited set of resources, through choices in materials to work with and the constraints of being nomadic, there can be a tendency to repeat actions and scenes that 'work', even when improvising and having to respond to each new situation in a unique way.”

One characteristic aspect of the touring experience that is not discussed often enough is the dilemma of repetition. Not repetition as a mechanism of the work itself, but as a tedious consequence of being obligated to perform night after night in quick succession. Generating a completely unique performance for each stop, even with the assistance of improvisation,  is a laborious undertaking that consumes too much time and sanity, while adhering to a rigid set of rules leaves one open to both burnout and diminishing returns. Is there a way to split the difference so that both performer and audience are always engaged to the highest standard?

“I set these constraints on myself. The need to produce something (at least a little) different in each event of a tour was fierce, especially when traveling with other musicians.”

Explicitly within the title itself of his latest CD, Forced To Repeat Myself, UK sound artist and composer Simon Whetham tackles these questions with both a sly wit and sincere inquisitiveness. The tracks, all collected from recordings documenting a 2018 tour, utilize analogous source material and means of execution.  Whetham paid particular attention to the contour and character of each venue when deciding how to best put the pieces together, offering a customization that subverts pure deja vu for a sharp observance of the unfamiliar.

“In each situation objects and materials unique to the space were incorporated into the performance setup and structure, generating sounds or resonating with them. And yet I could hear similar scenes, movements, even spaces. This repetition determined the dynamic of the composition, working with it and against it.”

By the very nature of their disseminating sparseness, the tracks of Forced To Repeat Myself demand from the listener an attentiveness fixed on nuance and variation. The amplified cracks and static of ethereal currents and anonymous electronics infer the works of others who’ve made it their mission to attune our attention toward sounds outside our natural perception, including Christina Kubisch’s electrical walks, Toshimaru Nakamura’s no-input mixer excursions, and Jason Zeh’s experiments with blank tapes and the mechanizations of his cassette players. Whetham’s shaping of the album’s source material to highlight certain exclusivities of each live performance emphasizes how the inherent dynamics of time and chance guide his self-imposed constraints into pathbreaking spectrums. 

“The title references a phrase many of us will have heard in our formative years, ’Why do you force me to repeat myself?’ I have no answer to this question. I never forced anyone to do anything. But with this work, I did.”

One inherent paradox of Forced To Repeat Myself is that each listen naturally manifests a distinct, individual experience. The way sounds are received and processed in one instance to the next each forget their own entryway into transcribing meaning from this abstraction. And Whetham is keenly aware of this as the sounds of Forced To Repeat Myself find consistent, unique ways to perpetuate themselves, ensuring any repetition to be delicately understated.

Forced to Repeat Myself

Forced to repeat Myself

Simon Whetham "08-11"

UVL is proud to release two new side-long compositions from Max Eilbacher. Edition of 150 three color risograph print.

Digital Sketch For Strings
One morning I had an idea for a string composition. The tonal colors of the strings would be constantly morphing between shifting intonations. A rising and falling spectrum of many different sonorities would construct a throbbing, living whole. The gestural and perceptive qualities of the stringed accumulation would exist somewhere between glacial and in constant motion. I ended up using saw waves instead of string samples or acoustic instruments, as I found the harmonics of a saw wave helped achieve what I was hearing in my head that morning.

Spectral Masking Room Construction
A work exploring onset partials on audio perception and spectral masking. I started with a woodblock sample. For me, the woodblock's harsh yet beautiful striking sound is complex. The short burst acts as an extremely salient and trepidatious sonic cue. After listening for hours to a single strike and performing in-depth spectral analysis, I began to hear and comprehend the strike’s intricate material composite as extending beyond its short temporal life. The burst started to exist as an impulse response. With each strike, information about the space in which the woodblock’s material existed for the recording was communicated. The room in which the wood was struck was just as much a part of the sonic material being heard as the wooden material colliding with one another. Synthesizing the woodblock sound from scratch turned into a minute study of individual partial’s attack and decay times. I used the results of spectral analysis and composed around the initial short strike. The pitches comprising the fundamentals and overtones in the sample were extracted in various clusters and used to create a few different digital synths. The timing structure of the sampled and synthesized strikes are controlled by a simple counting transform. By doing so I set conceptual throughlines for the variants of struck sounds. The many variations of partials being highlighted or sent to the audio background serve to imitate “fake” spaces in which these sounds exist and convey subtle architectural information to the listener.

- Max Elibacher, 2020

Max Eilbacher (excerpt)

TR118 - Rie Nakajima & Akira Sakata - 'Umihiko Yamahiko' [excerpt]

A foretaste of the upcoming Album, winter 2021 (-OUS Records).
_______
Mastering by VFBM (Feldermelder)
_______
Immersed in an amniotic atmosphere, we are invited to bathe in the atemporality of the world before birth.

Against a liquid sound background, horizontal sounds intervene that cross space at full speed, stretching time in their course. The speed with which they intervene has the effect of an arrow shot in the direction of a distant future, which brings us back to a linear, horizontal, narrative, historical time, that is to say, to the ordinary world perceived as a successive sequence of events.

The transparency and weightlessness of crystalline sounds act like seraphically elements that connect the fantastic and earthly worlds. At the same time, anecdotal sounds that remind us of specific moments in our lives cross our mind -- liquid, metallic, soft, subtle sounds -- and dense drones mingle to create an experience of their own, each one embedding itself in the personal experience of the listener.

From the beginning we were immersed in this atemporal amniotic atmosphere and then there was the birth, the irruption into the world, history began. We plunged into time to look for the origin, to deepen the story, to understand.

Buy Digital Track

Ne parle pas de secrets

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

TR118 - Rie Nakajima & Akira Sakata - 'Umihiko Yamahiko' [excerpt]

cafeOTO

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