With his new work, Heights in Depths, Svirsky examines psychoacoustics through way of glistening reeds. Architectural in its scope, these sine wave esq sounds are pinned to each corner of the listeners space, radiating like Dan Flavin sculptures in the room. Executed in two side long compositions, the laser like focus of these sounds bend and swirl, slowly drifting in and out of phase of one another, while all along making a grandiose evolution in the ultimate composition. Recorded on Easter Sunday at Gallery W139 in Amsterdam, Heights in Depths draws a map for the listener that has the arrows pointed in all directions. Accompanied by Norman Cohn’s text “The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages” - Svirsky’s musical end game is down an infinite hallway lined with infinite mirrors - “To descend from the oneness or Eternity, into the multiplicity, is to lose ourselves in an endlesse Labyrinth.”

Leo Svirsky - Heights In Depths (Excerpt)

Dominique Lawalrée (b. 1954) is a composer born and based in Brussels. First Meeting is Lawalrée's first archival release to date. Culled from four different albums originally self-published on his private label Editions Walrus, circa 1978-1982, this compilation highlights the composer's unique sense of ambient and minimal composition. Originally considered for release on Brian Eno's Obscure Records, Lawalrée's music is now no longer hidden. 

In this collection, the listener finds the sounds of piano, synthesizers, percussion, wurlitzer, organ, and voice, all performed by Lawalrée. Using these tools Dominique creates miniature themes that gallop across the speakers in slow motion, stretching our normal sense of dynamics and color, effortlessly widening the stereo plane. On “Musique Satieerique,” Dominique pays homage to the influence of Satie with simple repeated piano figures and a lush field of organs and flutes. And on other selections, like “Le Maison Des 5 Elements,” he takes a more wistful, ambient approach, layering keyboard lines, and invoking found/tape sounds to create a hypnogogic world of his own. Childlike in its playfulness and surreal to the bone, the music spins like a carrousel placed inside the Rothko Chapel. Lawalrée’s sense of timbre, tone, and overarching composition is like an impression of a home movie whose charm lies in its knowledge of intimacy, shared by few. An incantation of innocence.

First Meeting

Dominique Lawalree - La Maison Des 5 Éléments

Like a blast of wind, lost in some forgotten place, Headflush is filled to the brim with emptiness. Recorded in a single afternoon in Brooklyn, New York Leila Bordreuil’s debut album, a collection of unprocessed amplified cello works, explore the limits of tonal perception. The hushed stereophonics of the album could leave the listener wondering if they were perhaps listening to amplified smoke; twisting, turning, and dancing in some strange light. Adrift and strikingly original, Headflush is the sound of the artist hidden in sound, absent in a bleak bliss.  

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer, and sound-artist from France. She accesses concepts as diverse as jazz, contemporary classical, noise, and experimental traditions but adheres to her own vision of sound. The New York Times has described her work as “steadily scathing music, favoring long and corrosive atonalities”. Driven by a fierce interest in pure sound and inherent texture, Bordreuil challenges conventional cello practice through extreme extended techniques and amplification methods. Her composed works frequently incorporate sound-spatialization by way of site-specific pieces and multichannel installations.

Available on LP - 6/28/19 - Limited Edition Vinyl of 250

Leila Bordreuil - Headflush

Britton Powell is an American composer based in Brooklyn, New York. Through means of electronics, video, and percussion his work explores psycho-acoustic phenomena, minimalism, and traditions of non-western music. The composer's new work “If Anything Is” explores themes of hyper-reality and capitalism through a mixed-media environment designed for sound and multichannel video. Filmed and recorded over the course of 2019 the work explores an ecstatic exchange of experience in the face of a much-accelerated media and commercial world. A meditation on the intersection of technology, ritual, and urban landscape, the work draws a map through scenes filmed in New York City and points the audience towards the collision at this crossing. 

Powell’s music has appeared at venues around the world including Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Barbican Center (London), Today’s Art Festival (Den Haag), Ultima Festival (Oslo), Unsound Festival (Krakow), The Kitchen (NYC), and The Guggenheim House (Japan). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Washington Post, Bomb Magazine, and Wire Magazine among others. He has worked on recordings for Warp Records, Mexican Summer Records, Unseen Worlds, and Catch Wave Ltd. Powell has worked and collaborated with Jon Hassell, Matmos, Lucy Railton, Jon Gibson, Huerco S, and many others.

Catch Wave Ltd.

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