Terry Benn "cover The House"

STEVE FORS, it's nothing, but still, LP
Hallow Ground
Vinyl / digital, catalogue nr. HG2201
Getefold cover, obi strip, limited clear vinyl

// Single release "ground glass" 21. June 2022
// Album release "it's nothing, but still" 19. Aug. 2022

Steve Fors offers deeply physical music on his Hallow Ground debut »it's nothing, but still.« Having already established himself as a composer of visceral drone and noise pieces in various Chicago- and New York-based underground projects, Fors’s first release under his given name is even more dense and evocative than his earlier work. A concept album on the subject of breath, the Siavash Amini-produced record sees the now Swiss-based composer blend field recordings with electronic and acoustic sounds—most notably towering cello drones—to almost overwhelming effect. 

Initially taking inspiration from living with a chronic lung condition, Fors meticulously crafts pieces that transcend his personal experience and reach for something universal. »The album is a study in melancholy and transience,« he explains. »And my intention is that the sounds trigger a memory, an image, a feeling in each of us. While our specific circumstances are momentary and discrete; joy, rage, and despair remain existential to our common experience.«

At first listen, Fors describes moments in time by building on a foundation of simple field recordings—an afternoon in a cathedral, the idling of COVID-19 morgue trucks outside Brooklyn Hospital, or the fleeting sound of wind in the trees—and then progressively overlays electronic and acoustic textures. On repeated plays however, the songs unfold, revealing a complexity, depth, and presence uncommon in current ambient music.

What makes »it's nothing, but still« such a memorable album is that it doesn’t impose anything on the listener, but rather offers them something to get lost in. From the first lush drones on the opener »(good enough) for now,« to the solemn piano chords on the title track, to the glistening cello feedback on »the way to heaven,« Fors’s sentiment about the record rings true. »If we surrender ourselves, these sounds can move us out of our present condition into a distinctly different existence, if only for a moment. If we choose to listen closely, we can experience the superpositioning of both memory and imagination in real time.«
Tracklist:
1.) (good enough) for now (07:28)
2.) ground glass (05:32)
3.) it's nothing, but still (05:02)
4.) unsound structures  (06:26)
5.) lead into aether (05:58)
6.) the way to heaven (05:48)		 
		
Credits:
All songs composed, recorded, performed and mixed by Steve Fors in Zurich 
Produced by Siavash Amini in Tehran, Iran
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irissari at Black Knoll Studio, New York
Cover photography by Jens Knigge
Cover design by Steve Fors
Released by Hallow Ground in 2022

STEVE FORS - ground glass

Multicolor

RASHAD BECKER - Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol II

Format: LP / Digital
Label: PAN
Cat.No: PAN 74
Release Date: 02 December 2016

p-a-n.org/

purchase:
site: http://bit.ly/2gTtKLE
bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2gTt1dJ

Rashad Becker's new full length album, 'Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol II', due for release next month on PAN is a newly developed continuation and exploration of work since his highly-acclaimed first 
volume.

Incorporating more instrumental-sounding components, the record moves through both fluid and dissonant sounds which take on different structural and sculptural challenges through carefully-layered compositions. 

Following 'Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol I', the new album expands in various elements, distorted and warped, focusing in on the tension and energy of synthesized sounds that appear to exist hauntingly physically.

Known for his unrivalled attention to sonic detail across his work, Becker's unique techniques and expressive manipulations of sound are laid bare in an exhilarating new form, stylistically distinctive and uncompromising. 

The album is mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Bill Kouligas.

traditional music of notional species vol.II

Rashad Becker - Dances VII (PAN 74)

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie
from the album "Quellgeister#3-Bussd" expected October 2019.

Composed, performed and produced by Stefan Fraunberger. 
Recorded in September 2016 except B3 and B4 in September 2018 in the fortified church of Bussd. Bellows pumped / interpreted by Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger except on track B3 and B4 by Nicolai Guta.
Mastered by Neel at Enisslab Studio, Rome
Cover Artwork by George Sowden - Designed by M-L-XL
Supported by SKE / Austro Mechana

doser034LP - Morphine Records 2019
All rights reserved to the respective owners.

Stefan Fraunberger's Quellgeister#3 Bussd is Recorded entirely on an abandoned church's organ in the village of Bussd, Romania, the album is the third installment of the series by Austrian artist and composer Stefan Fraunberger. His research on the influence of nature on culture touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience as evidenced in his Quellgeister research. The album is an archeological sonic research on the deteriorating Organ discovered in the saxon church in Transylvania.

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie (doser034LP preview)

Ben Vida
Reducing The Tempo To Zero
SHELTER PRESS / SP108

Recorded 2016-2019 New York
Mastering: Stephan Mathieu
Artwork: Xavier Antin

The theme of time is unavoidable when approaching Ben Vida’s Reducing the Tempo to Zero, his latest endeavour with Shelter Press. A singe work, pushing the bounds of Digital and Analog Synthesis, which stretches to just over 4 hours in length, its realization is the product of years of effort - the process of recording and editing extending across the period between 2015 and 2019, offering momentary conclusion to an arc of ideas and practice which which first appeared on Damaged Particulates, issued in 2016.

RTTTZ is a temporal nesting doll - a meditation, conceived by Vida as a part of a daily practice which embarked upon sustained periods of focused creation and listening. While the product of a deeply personal, inward journey, similar to iconic efforts by composers like Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Éliane Radigue, it strives to unravel the standards and expectations applied to musical and experiential time, taking the relation to sonic phenomena into an almost transcendental realm. Immersive in scale and endurance, through a deep and radical sensitivity to material and structural hybridity, Vida’s return to the durational drone based forms - first explored as a member of Town and Country during the mid-90s - drives the ear toward the solace found through developmental and intimate relationships with the fleeting, granular, and discrete, transmogrifying smallest detail into a monumental event.

Despite being the “complete” RTTTZ document, made concrete by the process of recording, this 4+ hour iteration carries the shifting ghosts of other beings and times. It represent only one of many possible, existing beside a free standing phonetic, text-based score, and a near infinite number of evolutionary, live variations - instrumental and vocal versions, as well as those which spring from the combination of instrumental and vocal ensembles of varying sizes, each time of different length, changing and taking on new dimensions determined by the its performers. In a sense, each version is simultaneously free-standing and finished, while capable of reconfiguration and being made anew - a mirror for its shifting passage through the ear, which triggers multiple, concurrent images of other times and existence of itself.

While the duration, structure, and relatively of RTTTZ focuses attention toward the internality of what it is, like all great art, they are simply a means to an end. The crucial themes lay with the cumulative effect of their sum - the power of phenomena and highly individualized experience. It is an organized, sonorous space which is to be occupied and within which to get lost, shifting the ownership, whether embarked upon actively or passively - both as valid and rewarding as the next - to the listener alone, sculpting a subjective expanse which denying concise location and, in so doing, undermines the presumption of the capacity to be the same thing twice.

Overwhelmingly beautiful in its oscillating harmonics and punctuation of pulsing texture and tone, each stage of its evolution moving at a glacial pace, represents a monumental achievement from Vida within the broad landscape of experimental and avant-garde sound. Reducing the Tempo to Zero was mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and is released by Shelter Press in both digital and limited USB card editions.

Reducing The Tempo To Zero

BEN VIDA 'Reducing The Tempo To Zero' (EXTRACT)

Plafond 6 — Cucina Povera & Haron (LP)

Vinyl/digital: bakk.bandcamp.com/album/plafond-6
Vinyl/distribution (Clone): https://clone.nl/item59834.html

A	Cucina Povera & Haron — Riffittelyä (21:43)
B1	Haron — Maandag, Spiegeldag (6:47)
B2	Cucina Povera — Ajatus (9:26)

Plafond enters its second decade with Cucina Povera and Haron fusing the folkloric and futurist. Maria Rossi and Haron Aumaj (real names) honour musical cinematism on ‘Riffittelyä’, which slowly unfolds during a twenty-two minute trail of exploration, angst and redemption. Meddling voices pinch through an aural mist, Kubrickesque strings impend and cathedral organs relevate. Most striking is the compatibility of Rossi’s tangibility and Aumaj’s computerisation, seamlessly forming a renewed dynamic, as granular as it is loose in texture.

During this unique first collaboration it can be quickly forgotten both artists have highly distinctive styles. We are reminded of these singularities on the other half of the record, featuring two solo works, both rich yet contrasting in their colour and emotion. On ‘Maandag, Spiegeldag’, Aumaj sketches in orange chromatics, a featherweight composition that feels far away from the greyscale fragility that Rossi portrays on ‘Ajatus’. Showcasing two minimalist artists catapulted by their stunning debut albums, this sixth Plafond keeps the listener in constant awe, pointing us to the endless potential of spontaneity.

Comes in Pantone printed outer sleeve with deep red and yellow topped with a silk screened black and a soft pink inner sleeve, wrapped in a dreamy blue Obi-strip printed with white and black, by the BAKK Fuzz Factory.

Music: Maria Rossi @cucinapovera / Haron Aumaj @wivah
Mastering: Wouter Brandenburg
Design: Mike Kokken and Ruben Verkuylen
Words: Luke Cohlen @lukecohlen

BAKKPlafond6 | Cucina Povera & Haron (LP)

Taken from the album 'Ingrid' released as one sided LP and digital

Klara Lewis 'Ingrid (excerpt)' (EMEGO 270)

The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concrete threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date.

Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to “elevate the everyday,” transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition.

Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone.

But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, “Champagne Smoke.” A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house.

14 Gestures associated with this album will be performed in experimental film and online viewing room of graphic notation at 14gestures.com from 29th July to 29th October, 2020.

Collagen releases on Shelter Press in LP / DL format on August 21, 2020. LP mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at D+M, designed by Bartolomé Sanson with art by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, housed in reverse-board inner and outersleeve, including a 16 pages limited edition score book.

LISA LERKENFELDT 'The Weight Of History'

Available now via Imprec.com

Akhira Sano's  Penetrating, For Filtration was manufactured on C60 Super Ferro tape for a low noise floor, high output, and an incredible warm sound. Packaged in a purple tinted case with silver shimmer printing. 

Japan's Akhira Sano is a young master of slow, ambient, electro new age music. His compositions are highly organic, growing and flowing with great patience and care. But, like in nature, imperfections and incidentals are allowed to evolve producing sublimely primal and imperfect music. In a world where everything can be made perfect, Sano's work is deliciate, shimmering and electric; abolishing and preserving time simultaneously. 

Sano creates painterly music (he is also a painter) based on the themes of error and constraint. He is a visionary sonic architect who sees his musical structures as incomplete; always unfinished. His debut on Sun Ark Records in 2019 was very well received and his demo for Imprec was immediate and compelling. Lose yourself in these two long tape sides on the second official release from Akhira Sano.

Akhira Sano - Missing Cell - from Penetrating, For Filtration - C60 - Available now

Enshrouded in high-pitched static and elusive fumelike oscillators come "Sundowning", a new mini-album signed by Preston Weippert's most prolific alias, aka Volunteer Coroner. Co-founder of the Colorado-based Trust Collective label, Weippert's music vectors a collection of desolate murals often painted with industrial-grade fuel. A low-resolution picture of oil fields burning from your window seat. Closed eyelids against the sun, into the red.

“Loss as gain- forever in blood”

EN17

Recorded during the Summer of 2020
Volunteer Coroner is P.W.

Sundowning

Volunteer Coroner - A Token Saved From A Previous Life

www.eastern-nurseries.net
https://eastern-nurseries.bandcamp.com/
www.facebook.com/easternnurseries2019/

Volunteer Coroner - A Token Saved From A Previous Life

Eastern Nurseries