It sounds like different automobiles that were around during the early 1900's.  Possible race cars involved and it also sounds like the possible horns that the cars had.

almost could be hand-crank sounds pitched down? or motorcycles, or saws...

this is the first part that sounds to me like an instrument is being used

This part sounds like a string instrument. The impression of this music is unstable because I cannot feel the rhythm through the music.

I hear a lot of industrial sounds and get sense of the increasingly mechanically advanced world at the beginning of the 19th century that Russolo perhaps is trying to capture/explore

Luigi Russolo - Risveglio Di Una Città (1913)

"Flower Studies", the enchanting third album by Australia’s Blue Chemise, consists of eight intimate, delicate and touching ‘études’, reflecting Mark Gomes’ introspective musings on a series of floral studies by 19th-century French photographer Adolphe Braun (1812-1877).
More info: https://linktr.ee/BAADM

Blue Chemise – Chrysanthemum No 1

Arturas Bumšteinas
So-called Space
Sloow Tapes- CS 30

Continuum-collage piece by Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas created in 2015 from incidental music sampled from various Lithuanian radio drama's from the 1950's to 2000's. A strange heady brew which juxtaposes music, sound effects, rudiments of vocal expression and various acoustic instruments among others in a compelling cut-up, reminding at times of People Like Us or Dirk Schaeffer's recent work for Peter Tscherkassky's movies. Edition of 70 copies.

Arturas Bumšteinas

Gestures

"Black Truffle is pleased to announce Tender Membranes, the label’s first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti. Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, Ahti favours neither disjunctive collage nor monolithic consistency; rather, her work is composed of organically unfolding sequences of details and textures, which, as she says, ‘can stretch out or cut fast as long as they have a sense of inner stillness’, a sense that she connects to moments of heightened attention in everyday life.

Tender Membranes consists of four lengthy pieces, partly inspired by the image of the senses and mind as membranes allowing for the passage between inner and outer spaces, sensation and its causes, creating a world. Ahti’s unhurried pacing encourages this sense of listening as an opening or surrender to sound, which can often create the impression that the listener is moving through a space zooming in on details. The opening Shrine (Aether) exemplifies this aspect of Ahti’s approach: a bell clears the air with a single long tone, followed by the ambience of outdoor spaces, crackling electronics, an archival recording of a horsefly on a windowpane. Dozens of these moments, varying in length, density, and intensity, move past the listener’s attention, momentarily brought into focus then slipping away. Like those of the masters of the French musique concrète tradition, Ahti’s sounds are not often recognisable, though they might suggest proximity or distance, open environments or closed spaces, the urban or rural, day or night. In Ahti’s work, we do not encounter spectacular metamorphoses à la Parmegiani but rather a state of ambiguity where the listener is often unsure what is organic and what is inorganic, where the careful productions of the synthesizer might end and sounds discovered in the environment begin.

What Ahti calls her ‘poetic way of experiencing and organising the familiar and the unfamiliar’ is sustained throughout Tender Membranes, but each piece has its own character. On Dust / Light, human presence is more overt, as what appear to be whispers, singing, and distant speech thread between high frequencies, untraceable drips and pops, and metallic shimmers. In all this there is a melody that you can sing and to which you may dance makes more prominent use of musical instruments, gaining a sombre beauty from half-buried piano chords and organ tones. On the closing Oh Fragrant Witness, a delicate cloud of subtly bending pitches is repeatedly disrupted by a resounding, almost ominous mass of low tones, at once a strange detour from much of what has gone before and an almost classical finale. Arriving in a sleeve reproducing contemporary Finnish photographer Sini Pelkki’s fragmented visions of the everyday, Tender Membranes is a balm to reawaken tired ears."

Released September 29, 2023

Tender Membranes

Shrine (Aether)

Destiny is a piece made from electronic audio materials created on an analog modular synthesizer following simple processes on signal treatment and the choice of a restrict palette as an aesthetic constraint, while keeping both an overall organic expressivity and a slightly des-articulated quality at the edge of compositional agency.

Variations and antecedents of this piece have been performed live in various electronic music festivals and events. The definitive version is a part of Sisbiosis, a collaborative album put together with the artist and musician Ryoko Akama, released in 2022 on Erstwhile records (US).

https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/sisbiosis

Destiny (Excerpt)

Five String Sculpture is a composition/sound sculpture exploring the disposition of two different acoustic formations - one long, straight and slightly angled and another smaller one in a convex shape. Each structure is built from the combination of electronic and acoustic sound that spreads between loudspeaker at one end, and acoustic sound of the instrument at another end. To explore the idea of an electro-acoustic piece in which sound can propagate into various directions and can be localised in a couple of fixed
configurations, I have defined 5 “strings” of sound each between one instrument and one loudspeaker, and I have used this to delineate the acoustic space of the work. “String" is therefore the main structural unit of the piece and their activation and
musical treatment, shape the overall form of the work.

Premiered by the Vortex ensemble, Geneva, May 2024

5 String Sculpture

CD+Digital available to preorder now at radcult.bandcamp.com
Vinyl edition coming soon.

SeeFu Lilac

Black Moth Super Rainbow "The Chew"

The Current Inside”, Marja Ahti's sophomore album for Hallow Ground, plays with the theme of currents - connecting and animating movements in the form of air, water and electricity. It approaches sound as a poetic medium, focusing both on the experience of sound as form and energy and on a loosely narrative arc, suggesting a riddle on the relations between the sounds. It implements alternative as well as intuitive tunings, analog and digital synthesis, recordings of sonorous spaces and vessels, electromagnetic fields transduced into audio, acoustic close-ups of elements in motion and other field recordings. Fluently connecting quite diverse sound sources, Ahti's music lingers in a zone between abstract sonorities and vaguely familiar acoustic environments.

The first half of the album consists of ”The Altitudes”, a piece commissioned by Ina GRM for Présences Électronique and Sonic Acts. It was inspired by descriptions of the layers of Earth's atmosphere. Imagining a movement through layers of air, the piece unfolds with a slow intensity, interweaving concrete sounds and closely tuned electronic sonorities. Traversing the altitudes, a landscape of entangled elements, masses and currents emerges. The air around us has weight and it presses against everything it touches. As gravity pulls it to Earth, it is sensed as pressure. The rotation of the planet, the angle of the sun at any new moment sets the elements in motion in a chain reaction.

The other side consists of four shorter pieces. ”The Currents” opens with a dance of trembling charged movements. ”Lost Lake” extracts resonant tones from a trail of close-up recordings of winter environments, while ”Fluctuating Streams” channels streaming air in different forms. The closing track, ”Sundial”, could be construed as the steady turning of the planetary angle towards the sun, unfolding through fragments of everyday activity against the backdrop of piercing, slowly twisting, suspended tone.

Out on Hallow Ground May 8, 2020

Composition, production, mixing: Marja Ahti
Voice: Johanna Kalliokulju
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Cover artwork by Niko Karlsson and design by Juri Puhakka

The Altitudes was commissioned by Ina GRM as part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The work was supported in part by Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Synthesizers recorded at EMS, Stockholm and Ina GRM, Paris. Voice recorded at IAC, Malmö. Field recordings from various locations in Finland, Sweden and Croatia.

Thanks to Olli Aarni, Niko-Matti Ahti, François Bonnet, Jason Dungan, Jonna Karanka, Laura Naukkarinen and Remo Seeland.

Luigi Russolo - Risveglio Di Una Città (1913)

CEM 350

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