To All Trains
A Soundscape Created by Celia Hollander
For Union Station 2021
Part of An Environmental Music series from Metro Art and Leaving Records

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"To All Trains" takes its inspiration from Union Station as the largest railroad terminal hub in the western part of the U.S. with approximately 110,000 people passing through every day.  The piece begins by exploring the perspectives of being an individual navigating a crowd while simultaneously viewing the organized chaos of a swarm from a distance, such as observing a beehive.  As Union Station connects travelers to local and international destinations, the soundscape expands in frequency range and instrumentation to explore the harmonies of being a part of a complex system with many moving parts. 
Resisting the binary of ‘natural’ and ‘artificial,’ Hollander merges digital and acoustic sound sources and processes. "To All Trains" is an expression of striving to fathom the full scope of the interdependent networks that our species inhabits, creates and embodies, as a foundation for sustainability.

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Written, performed and produced by Celia Hollander
Mastered by Matthew "Matthewdavid" McQueen

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August-September
Part of An Environmental Music series from Metro Art and Leaving Records
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About An Environmental Music series from Metro Art and Leaving Records:

Metro Art teamed up with Leaving Records to ask four LA based musicians who draw inspiration from the landscape to create original music soundscapes evoking experiences of nature and transportation in Los Angeles with historic Union Station at its center.

To All Trains

To All Trains A Soundscape by Celia Hollander  // Metro Art x Leaving Records

Seven artists reckon with isolation and subsistence in Dragon’s Eye Recordings’ latest release, titled 'Touch'. Organized by Tomoko Hojo, the album collects six sound pieces by various artists who grapple with the restriction of physical contact through sound. Our ability to touch is a means of survival, an essential and intimate way of living and communing with others. So when it is taken away for the same reason we possess it—for the sake of staying safe—how can it be replaced? What can stand in? 

The pandemic claimed so much; and for a time, touch fell victim. In the album 'Touch', Alexandra Spense, KMRU, Viv Corringham, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto, Tomoko Hojo, and Melissa Pons prod at means of non-tactile touching. They explore spaces where touch is only a memory, a recording, something missing to find replacements. In assembling this six-piece collection, artist Tomoko Hojo recalls Yoko Ono’s 1964 event which invited attendees to “watch the sky and touch”. Over the course of 'Touch,' the listener is an attendee, witnessing sonic reconstructions of haptic happenings. In each of the album’s pieces, sound grazes unseen surfaces and traces invisible shapes with an absent finger.  

In “Communion”, Alexandra Spense recalls a space where tactility transformed into something more, an instance that dissolved the borders of the physical body to blend spirit with its surroundings. KMRU’s “its not a tangency” relies on repetition to feel the boundaries of its container. Almost like echolocation, the listener relies on distant children’s voices and the monotony of soft drones to situate oneself in an imagined space.  

“Imagine myself walking with you” engages with the physical intimacy created not through touch, but rather physical presence—the nearness of two bodies, the potentiality of tactility, the imprint conversations can leave long after they end. Viv Corringham digitally recreates her process of walking and talking with strangers, instead connecting with a friend online. In “Human Measures”, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto create an instrument which mimics what touch might sound like by simultaneously breathing into a circulatory system of tubes, wrapped into something like the symbol for infinity.   

In “fall asleep”, Tomoko Hojo conjures whispers, chants, and rings bells to touch the air.  From these sound waves of voice and instrument and element, intentional and drawn out, their dispersal can be felt. It’s when the waves enter the ear that we can hear them. But Hojo asks what happens to other waves that run into other parts of the body, unalive or unhearing.  

The absence of other bodies, the ultimate vehicles of touch, brought Melissa Pons inward with her piece “Three”. Through airy field recordings, scattered static, and gently howling drones, it’s as if Pons watches her emotions float off of her body like the minuscule flakes of skin that comprise dust.  

Each of these six pieces ask to expand outside of sound, to take physical shape, make gestures and wander. In their own unique ways, the artists of 'Touch' attempt to transmute sound into tactility, and they come as close as they can. Collectively, the sound pieces exist within the container of the compilation—an abstract notion that places collections of noise alongside one another. And so what is a compilation if not individual tracks rubbing up against one another, meshing, touching?

Touch

KMRU - Its not a tangency

KRAAK and Radio Hito are proud to present a new release full of introspective promise: Voce Lillà is her latest cassette, co-released with KRAAK following the KRAAK Ullakolla online fest which closed the strange year of 2020. The tracks on Voce Lillà, extracted from her set, are revised versions of her compositions which stripped down to the bare elements of keyboard and voice, deeply reaching and fully affecting all who take the time to listen. Order at https://kraak.bandcamp.com/album/voce-lillSpecial handmade edition available via https://radiohito.bandcamp.com/album/voce-lill

KRAAK w/ Radio Hito (Live) @ Kiosk Radio 27.11.2021

Field Recordings - Sound of Black Sea Odesa

Cold Reading

Konna

Dismantling the acoustic to feed the electronic, Editions Mego presents Telepath, the new album by Material Object. Born out of a single improvised recording session with a lone Violinist, Telepath is a startling album of future electronic music, resulting in an LP of unique and timeless tracks that reimagine a classic sound for an endless future.

Boldly departing from his previous canon of largely 'ambient' work, Material Object's Telepath renders itself out as something much stranger, something more spacious, more subtle and gradual. Moments of bouncing minimalism meet moirés of delayed pure tones phasing in and out of resolution, giving way to a series of strobing foreground gestures arranged and offset in disorienting landscapes which scatter themselves asymmetrically amongst crystal pools of reverb.

Revelling in the creative dismemberment of the original source material, Material Object slowly and patiently induces the violin to undergo every category of torsion, pressure and rupture. Its vivid acoustic qualities pass over and across the event horizon of the digital domain. Shattering then crystallising into points and coordinates, intersections, disjunctions, planes and reverberant figures. An uncanny geometry perceived only between the ears, at once dissolving and reconstructing itself.

Not to be missed here is the essential, but bonus only, add-on (available with all Bandcamp purchases) "Auxiliary Apparition", a hallucinatory expanse that traverses the same liminal geography as the LP proper but as some refracted, ghostly counterpoint. More nocturnal, overpowering phantasms looming out of a droning noise floor before fading away. A hypnotic and time-dilated recapitulation of what's gone before as if looking back from beyond a mirror. When it finally resolves in the closing moments and returns you home, you realise you haven't really moved at all.

Equally abstract, haunting and daring, Material Object’s Telepath is a singular work that abandons all notions of genre. Erupting with a tension of opposites that unfolds as a truly unique story, told in four dimensions and draped in deafening colour.

Telepath

Enter

Material + Object 'Enter' (EMEGO299)

A5 Hotspring - Don't Hum Without Me

Harbour of Whispers

Seditious Sedation

11. Lune

From AEST-048: Undveld “Figures Of Past” CS

Signal transmitted through hollow spaces converting into new messages of isolated structure. “Figures Of Past” include very diverse material from Undveld, which remains as mix of soundscapes and occasional rhythmic noise

Figures Of Past

Undveld - The Chase Just Floats Around

Dragon’s Eye Recordings is a digital imprint based in Los Angeles and curated by artist and composer Yann Novak. Emphasizing the elevation of marginalized voices in experimental music, our catalog represents a range of sounds, processes, identities, and practices. Since 2005, we’ve published over 100 works of sound art and experimental music with a focus on ambient, field recording, drone, electroacoustic, and acousmatic music. As an independent label, we work to build community for our artists and listeners searching for somewhere to belong.

KMRU - Its not a tangency

Dragons Eye Recordings