Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

Encrypted Voicemail w/ Lulannie & Giugno - 01/02/2023

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’  (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow. 

Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Readers may laugh, but ‘Potential’ is calmer than Kim’s previous offerings. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music. 

On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words:

“Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.”

—

Artwork by Sunik Kim
Layout and design by Jeroen Wille 
Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders
Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios

All music by Sunik Kim
Track 1 edited by John Wall

—

OTOROKU
18-22 Ashwin Street
Dalston, London
2023

OTOROKU is distributed internationally by Cargo. For any further enquiries about this release, contact abby@cafeoto.co.uk.

Potential

ROKU035 - Sunik Kim - Potential [sample]

Three Moons Later

Homeland Mothership

Taken from the album 'Paradise 94', to be released by Modern Love on March 23rd, 2018. Cover Photo by Rebecca Salvadori.

Paradise 94

Lucy Railton - Pinnevik

HRNS - Cocaine Whispers

22 summer storms, 22 celebrations of music from today. 

Posh Isolation turns 10 this year. 
We celebrated in Copenhagen for three days and three nights - Port Out, Starboard Home. Some people could not 
be there, some forms change — we honour them by celebrating again, digitally. 

Make the day come alive again. 

'Summer Storms' wades through the heat, never quite settling, yet taking in every surrounding. Gather everyone 
together, celebrate a shared motif. 

Come stream with us. 

Clear skies. A raving harbour. The best storms cancel plans. 

Make the day come alive again, 

today. 

Dedicated to Ezra 

Posh Isolation 227

MC Boli Ft. Ghost Lemurs Of Madagascar - SUPRA MENTI TUTTI

a collection of meditations on

piano engineered by Taylor Smith at Studio Toute Garnie on resilience, love, healing, family
mastered by Todd Macdonald
album artwork by Jean Cousin/Joni Void

love & family were written as a gift to my baby niece, to welcome her into this world. to my baby niece, i hope the world that you grow up in becomes a little gentler than the one you were born into

proceeds from this album will go towards organizations/non-profits that support women, black women in particular, experiencing domestic/private violence (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yqGyIBPpu8FnnkTS2wnrkeM9MMktWMHaz5q6HIf6w84/edit#gid=0)

infinite love to survivors, fighters, and to those who are healing or who need to heal <3

resilience

part of the META compilation. All profits from the sales will be used to help Metaphore Collectif's own venue to reopen.

buy/support:
https://metaphoreindustrie.bandcamp.com
bit.ly/savemeta

BL00M

Bag of Toys

Asio Otus - Delta

THIS PERFECT BALANCE OF BLISS

bloomdesertbloom@gmail.com

send me ur email, or sign up through the listserv link, and I'll send you any new music I make in the future <3 

mtl

*:･ﾟ✧ Shows ✧ﾟ･: *

~2020~
9/12 - MUTEK 21/9:00pm
5/21 - Casa del Popolo/8:00pm
4/1 - Casa del Popolo/8:00pm
1/25 - Lux Magna/La Vitrola/9:00pm

~2019~
12/05 - Ursa/9:00pm
11/28 - La Sotterenea/8:30pm
8/25 - MUTEK/9:00pm
7/21 - La Sotterenea/9:00pm
5/19 - Hyoid-03 at White Wall Studio/7:00pm
5/18 - No Exist No Fest V/9:00pm
4/24 - Club Balattou/8:30pm
2/19 - Resonance Cafe/9pm
2/23 - le piano/9pm

~2018~
11/18 - Datcha/10pm
11/8 - Diving Bell Social Club/8pm
10/29 - marche a cote/8:30pm
9/26 - Pop Montreal/Phonopolis/4pm
9/22 - n10.as fundraising bbq/3pm
9/15 - ygrade Partycubes® 6/la plante/9pm
8/15 - La Sotterenea/9pm
5/26 - la plante/8pm
5/23 - n10.as/3pm
4/30 - Everyday Ago/Casa del Popolo/9pm

~2017~
9/14 - mtl/POP Montreal/phonopolis/430pm
8/19 - mtl/poisson noir/9pm
8/10 - mtl/la plante/8pm
6/17 - mtl/Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival/Never Apart/3pm
4/12 - mtl/la plante/830pm

~2016~
12/4 - Queens/Trans-Pecos/8pm
9/1 - Brooklyn/Silent Barn/8pm

resilience

Desert Bloom

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