info + tracklist: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/pba-earthen-sea-a-disbelief
https://earthensea.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/earthzone

PBA – Earthen Sea: a disbelief

'For Wind Poetry' releases October, 2022.

Wind Poetry

VAK 62 | yolabmi - Circulation

"The disaster is the time when one can no longer - by desire, ruse or violence - risk the life which one seeks, through this risk, to prolong. It is the time when the negative falls silent and when in place of men comes the infinite calm which does not embody itself or make itself intelligible."
M. Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster

tracklist:
00:00 0120_19_kt ns [vs.] john j. niles - brother's revenge
03:05 0420_10 lisafem porn glt [vs.] perfume genius - moonbend
05:11 0919_03_ gran dr loop [vs.] perfume genius - moonbend
08:47 0621_04_re 0820_18_re 0717_26 [vs.] jeff buckley - mojo pin
11:20 1008_18_lv 2 ss1 [vs.] cat power - crossbone style
14:44 0122_16 git re 1015_25 [vs.] elliot smith - twilight
17:54 0820_19_re 0916_23_re 0916_02 lv1b [vs.] the van pelt - you are
22:02 0921_05_feedback 2_0921_13 [vs.] fiona apple at lago
26:13 0220_16_spnt 1d ostranenie parasite [vs.] 0222_windows screenreader
30:03 0621_17_vcv recsd dub 2 [vs.] bob marley - war
35:14 0921_13 lv 1 0220_28 ostr [vs.] aldous harding - horizon

all music by grischa lichtenberger, except all vocals by artists as stated above, machine-isolated.

hauntological mixtape

Hauntological Mixtape

grischa lichtenberger »hauntological mixtape«

Artist: Groupshow
Title: Greatest Hits
Cat#: faitiche 29
Release: Jan 27th 2023 (digital single: Nov 25th 2022)
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche presents Groupshow’s Greatest Hits: The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow (Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, Jan Jelinek), recorded between 2005 and 2018, document concert recordings and studio improvisations by the trio.
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In improvisation there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities. Groupshow found their first opportunity in the routines of live performance and they used this opportunity to break with these routines. The trio consisting of Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler came together in the context of Kosmischer Pitch, playing live versions of the music from Jelinek’s 2005 studio album of that name. During this project, the musical interaction between the three participants quickly emancipated itself from the original programme, departing from fixed roles and finding a distinct form in constant change.
Groupshow sessions – rehearsal, concert or recording – are always improvised. The interplay of the various sound sources, converging from the directions of “electronics”, “percussion” and “guitar”, does not follow the Krautrock wave logic of crescendo and morendo. Jelinek, Leichtmann and Pekler have established a method of transparent density in which links and breaks are not concealed but remain audible. The music works through attraction and repulsion, with a loosely organized structure that always leaves enough room for the next intervention.
The principle here, repeated even in the smallest units, is that of duration. Groupshow think of their music in terms of an installation: no starting point, no dramaturgy, and ideally no end. Concerts take place not raised up on a podium, but in the middle of the room on a level with the audience, who only enter the space with the musicians and instruments once their interaction is already underway. In 2008, Groupshow used this approach to create a live soundtrack for Andy Warhol’s film Empire, over the full length of eight hours and five minutes.
Recordings in general and the “Greatest Hits” format in particular are another key aspect of this ongoing work on a collectively modulated continuum. The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow, recorded between 2005 and 2018, document the ephemeral capturing of opportunities that were not missed. Extracts and essences of an endless movement of searching. The sprawling form of the whole, suspended in succinct, separate units.
To paraphrase Lao Tzu and Roland Barthes, one might say: Once their work is done, they are no longer attached to it. And because they’re not attached to it, it will remain. (Arno Raffeiner, 2022)

Groupshow: Music For A Plank Press

Nik Colk Void is well established with her work - using modular systems, voice and guitar - as one half of Factory Floor, one third of Carter Tutti Void (alongside Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti) and with the late Peter Rehberg as NPVR, but perhaps surprisingly, 'Bucked Up Space' is her first solo album release. 

Void explains, “When Peter Rehberg initially asked me to produce a record for Editions Mego, I didn't feel quite ready and asked if we could make a record together instead. Collaboration is so ingrained into what I do, I only felt ready to make this album after working through ideas live, using the audience in place of the collaborator.”

Bucked Up Space combines Void’s love of improvisation with the driving force of beat-driven music absorbed from performing in galleries, residencies and clubs across the UK and Europe. She goes on to say, “You find out more about yourself when you explain your ideas to others, and that’s how I felt the live performance worked for me.”

The process steadily teased out a language and Void employed a variety of tactics in the recording process including a methodical approach of collecting data at her home studio in a manner not dissimilar to keeping a diary. Her microscopic focus on raw instrumental noise, layered and reformulated, resulted in a sound catalogue that Void divided into groups for their tone, density and texture. 

These initial pieces were taken to a studio in Margate to put them into a more cohesive compositional context. Something that pragmatically started as cold and detached was given warmth, unity and emotion in the studio. Via improvised repetition co-existing alongside organised production, Void conjures new sonic muscle with tracks such as ‘Interruption Is Good’ and ‘FlatTime’. Initial recordings are rendered into sequences initiating the organic rhythms, triggering awkward jerks of high hats and percussion, or used to activate the margins of post effects detectable in the tracks like ‘Demna’, ‘Big Breather’ and ‘Oversized’.

Void explains: “It was important to me that the simplicity in the work disguised a lot of complexity, I want this work to be absorbed instinctively.” 

The sleeve image, a still from We Are City by Brazilian artist Maria de Lima, was chosen to illustrate Bucked Up Space, which Void describes as “a distorted reality,  the space that lives at start of an idea, then floats in public view, before returning to inform my understanding of the idea. Once the idea is out in the world, it moves and morphs into something else entirely.”

Written, performed and produced by Nik Void, the album was engineered by James Greenwood, mastered by Rashad Becker and tracks 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9 were mixed by Marta Salogni.

Bucked up Space is the result of the ideas and resulting sounds of free exploration morphing into a personal structured album that fearlessly moulds patience, listening and restraint. It’s a sharp focussed work embracing collective action through the lens of the self. All this, and also one of the best abstract dance records you will hear in some time!

Bucked Up Space

Interruption Is Good

Nik Colk Void 'Interruption Is Good' (EMEGO 295)

Klara Lewis returns to Editions Mego with a surprising live set recorded in 2018. Expanding her exploratory vision into haunted realms of unheimlich sound, Live in Montreal consists of a single piece with three distinct discernible sections. 

The set opens with a crude rhythm churning away under a choral loop from which a diverse array of rhythm and noise appear and disappear. Despite it's foreboding tone this sequence still retains a foot in the club, as damaged as that may be.

A state of permanent collapse is a thread throughout. In this opening sequence an array of strange sonic elements introduce themselves, rise to the fore, threaten the fundamental discourse only to recede on the brink of destroying the work itself.  

It’s this fascinating construct, this perpetual threat to the music itself that makes the listening experience so captivating. Midway the storm subsides laying bare a more static emotional framework rendered unrecognisable prior. Electronic phantoms swirl in a more gentle fashion as ghostly voices come to the fold looping into an uneasy landscape shifting into a blurry utopian finale. 

Finding itself between decay and hope, Live in Montreal 2018 is another stunning addition to the consistently solid output from Klara Lewis.

Live in Montreal 2018

Klara Lewis 'Live In Montreal 2018' [excerpt] (EMEGO306)

Editions Mego presents The Psychologist, the sophomore album by the Istanbul born and raised, Berlin based electronic music composer and sound artist Hüma Utku.

As the title suggests, The Psychologist, is a series of sonic essays based around themes of psychological phenomena and can be read as a musical enquiry into the human condition. With Utku’s background as a graduate of Psychology and her current practice as a conceptual music composer we see the two main threads in her professional career intertwine on this unique and ambitious release.

Including recordings of Buchla 200 from Utku’s Elektronmusikstudion residency in October 2020,The Psychologist is a genre aversive work that embodies elements of synthesiser music, electroacoustic, experimental techno, industrial, modern composition and spoken word. Piano, string compositions and vocals hold weight throughout a number of pieces providing a dramatic acoustic edge to the psychological explorations contained within.

The foreboding mood of much of this release is the product of investigation that lends the unsettling theme of anticipatory grief to the mood of the tracks Light of All Lights and Continuing Bonds. Islands of Consciousness refers to Jungian metaphor for consciousness whilst the unnerving Rüya twists around dream analysis in Gestalt psychology. Fuel For The Flames proceeds as a buzzing and swirling representation of alchemy and psychological symbolism. Dissolution of I is haunted by a strange sensation of dissociation whilst defense mechanisms support the sublime Sublimation. The bright shapes of Chironian Wound represent archetypes and analytical psychology whilst the fried soundscapes and rhythms of Ataxia encapture neurological states.

The results unravel with both the clockwork rhythms of the human body and the unpredictable nature of the psyche, the pieces follow arrhythmic patterns in a harmonious way. It tells the raw and intimate story of the human experience with a new work whereby the predictable operates in parallel with the unexpected and like human experience itself, is dark and complex.

Composed, Written & Produced by Hüma Utku  
Piano by Hüma Utku  
Vocals by Hüma Utku  
Double Bass performed by Adam Pultz Melbye  
Cello performed by Florina Speth (aka Schloss Mirabell)  
Violin performed by Marta Forsberg  
Cover photography & art by Gözde Güngör  
Design by Eloise Leigh

The Psychologist

Dissolution of I

Hüma Utku 'Dissolution Of I' (EMEGO 302)

On her third album, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, asks what guiding forces might be driving, enticing, and affecting us. “All Above” is rooted in her deeply personal philosophy as an artist, blurring the boundaries between electronic music and acoustic music and sculpting familiar ambient forms into personal themes painted with rich emotional colours. Written painstakingly over the last two years, the album is the most ambitious and divergent set of music Portioli has assembled so far, with a wide variety of instrumentation (including voices, strings, organs, guitars, and synthesisers) focused around the piano. She‘s keen to assure listeners that while that instrument isn‘t always heard, it‘s constantly at the forefront of the album, shepherding its emotions and anchoring its mood. It makes sense then that on the opening track ‘Quasicristallo’, the acoustic piano is the first element we hear, recorded closely, so its characteristic rattle and creak can speak as loudly as the familiar tones themselves. When the music blooms into abstraction and processed electronics, it‘s almost imperceptible: reverb mutates into ghostly vapour trails, and distortion forms the keys into another instrument entirely.

“All Above“ follows 2020‘s acclaimed “Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes“ and 2018‘s “Pineapple” released on Donato Dozzy and Neel‘s Spazio Disponibile imprint. Having garnered praise from outlets like Resident Advisor, XLR8R, The Quietus, Inverted Audio, and The Verge, Portioli operates in a unique space within the electronic music scene, straddling the art world and the wider electronic music scene. She‘s developed sound art installations for Rome‘s La Galleria Nazionale and the Terraforma Festival-related Il Pianeta, and has appeared at Barbican, MUTEK, Le Guess Who?, Kraftwerk, and other internationally renowned venues and festivals, often collaborating with Marco Ciceri on A/V presentations. Ciceri also maintains the visual identity of Portioli‘s label One Instrument, a concept imprint that asks artists to create music only using a single device. All this experience is poured into “All Above”, a richly visual album that‘s far more than just an imaginary film score. While on ‘Human’, her piano punctuates a rhythmic synthesised bassline and smudged choirs that can‘t help but trace out the silver screen. The composer is keen to clarify that she doesn‘t think of her music (or sound in general) in visual terms.

Portioli studied as a linguist and used her art to develop an emotional language that‘s not bound by expected cultural constraints. When she adds a different instrument or process, it‘s not to reference a visual cue but to mark a journey through different states of being. Each element embodies a different emotion or mood: the electric guitar represents strength or violence, synthesisers shuttle us into the dream world, and the acoustic instruments highlight intimacy and warmth – even heart. Read like this, the tracks are like meditative poems rather than cinematic vignettes.

Dedicated to Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, who died suddenly last year, “All Above” demands engagement and refuses to evaporate into the background. The album asks listeners not just to absorb the album as a whole but notice the cracks in the structure and discern the tension they cause. That‘s never more evident than on the closing track ‘Cost What It May’, a piece of music almost jarring when Portioli chops into noisy waves of electric guitar. In the wrong hands, this might sound like a power move – some rock posturing to act as a finale. But Portioli‘s expression is different. She‘s forcing a level of engagement that perceives the negative space as just as necessary as the saturated positive, and what could be more haunting and emotionally resonant than that?

All Above

Human

Grand River 'Human' (EMEGO308)

From the forthcoming album SG - For Lovers Only / Rain Suite (Faitiche 33)

SG - Western Affect

from KR104: SCHNEIDER TM - Ereignishorizont
2x LP / 2x CD / DL out on may 26th

Ereignishorizont

SchneiderTM - Ereignishorizont (edit)

Chill, Come On!

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

Grand River 'Human' (EMEGO308)

Editions Mego

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