Name: François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298) by Editions Mego
Duration: 5 min
Description: Taken from the album 'Suisse Redux' released as LP and Digital

Taken from the album 'Suisse Redux' released as LP and Digital

François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298)

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)

Forest Kelley's debut album, 𝑆𝑖𝑙𝑡, is the culmination of a decade-long sonic realization of a singular vision: nematoda, annelida, and other abyssal worms inhabiting the aphotic depths, sensing each other without light. Living and cavorting amongst a carpet of compressed dust and organic matter, as unaware of our existence as we are of theirs. To create this 'soundscape ecology', Kelley began developing custom software in 2018. It allows for sounds to function as organisms: to be born, express themselves, change through friction with their world, and then dissipate, transcend, or die. 𝑆𝑖𝑙𝑡 represents a snapshot of this world; the raw material for this particular instance includes guitar-based recordings dating from 2004 in collaboration with Jacob Uretsky. Through Kelley's exacting and intuitive selection of the results, we are presented with an ever-evolving selection of sounds. On their surface perhaps intersecting with ambient dub techno tropes, but 𝑆𝑖𝑙𝑡 draws the listener ever deeper into the zone with its organically shifting textures and events.

---

Forest Kelley is an artist, electronic musician, and experimental composer based in Lexington, Kentucky. In 2018, he contributed music to the score for the Academy Award-nominated and Criterion Collection-selected documentary 'Hale County This Morning, This Evening ' along with composers Alex Somers and Scott Alario.

composed, recorded, and mastered by Forest Kelley in 2021.
source guitar by Jacob Uretsky.
audio finalized for cassette tape by Glyn Maier.
design by RJM Vanderheyden.

Silt

Forest Kelley - Silt, No. 001 [Excerpt] (ENXPL13)

Ghost Ship

Dark ambient soundscapes for your pleasure, relax, chillout and enjoy.

DARK AMBIENT - XLOREN'DEL

Greta

[LLM004]

A1 ... Exo | official video: http://bit.ly/llm004_yt
A2 .. Plus
A3 .. Errors
A4 .. Klint
A5 .. Torn
B1 ... Neoneon
B2 .. Airless / Portals
B3 .. Snake
B4 .. Sensor

Produced by Phil Struck. Mastered by Manes at SALZ. Artwork by Phil Struck. Design by Alex Ketzer. Video by Irwin Barbé and Louise Ernandez. Distributed by Noorden.

© 2017 LL.M. | noorden.org/llm

Klint

[LLM004] Phil Struck - Klint

remixes and interpretations for ooo & MA'AM - /0/

@s_olbricht @ooo_no1 @anna-makay

mastered by Roland Nagy
artwork by Zoltán Márton Nagy

original album: exiles-electronics.bandcamp.com/album/ooo-maam-0

Buy Album

ooo & MA'AM - Gamma Candies (S Olbricht interpretation)

Taken from album 'Forma' released as LP and Digital

Lucy Railton 'Forma' (excerpt) (SPGRM 002)

Artist: Frank Bretschneider
Album: abtasten_halten
Label#: faitiche21
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 18th 2020

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

"One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization." Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.
abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.
The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.
The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Frank Bretschneider: abtasten_halten C

It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, or hidden away where nobody is supposed to find them. When things fall together—when the wooden creaks and radio hisses gather for a minute alongside bass lines and melancholy voice—there is a beauty that sounds like it was made by nobody and for nobody.

The city of Mankato, Minnesota has been the steady gathering point for the band since its beginnings. Mankato had always provided an ominous backdrop: built on stolen Dakota land, the city was the site of the largest mass execution in US history, when 38 Dakota prisoners were hanged on in 1862 in a straightforward act of genocide. But in their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture—only as ghosts or unliving effigies.

A Year Closer tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn’t working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in “Dark Skies.” We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in “We Had Time” or the romantic lament of “When I Drink.” In “Work Last Monday,” all of life passes with cold automatism in an “office apartment,” as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of “Over the Hill” isn’t apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a “man,” but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. “Angel of Mercy” tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world. 

But these are just the moments when A Year Closer speaks in words clear and audible enough to be understood. The giddy, agitated voice of “The Price” speaks only to itself in a private language, hidden away in a tin can somewhere. Musically, A Year Closer is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide. These are the moments that the listener of Maths Balance Volumes always knows are coming, waits for, and settles in temporarily for a moment of repose. Maybe this is the meaning of A Year Closer: while waiting for the worst, things come together, a “we” with no name but with a rhythm, a tenuous but definite harmony to share as the clock ticks. Even if, when the lights are turned on, it turns out nobody was there. - Paul Buchholz

Taken from PP48 A Year Closer LP coming soon

A Year Closer

Purchase

Maths Balance Volumes - Dark Sky

Independent record company based in Vienna.
For Spectrum Spools go here: https://soundcloud.com/spectrumspools

François J. Bonnet & Stephen F. O'Malley 'assembled by Jim O'Rourke (excerpt)' (EMEGO 298)

Editions Mego

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