From the very first Empty Editions release, Eli Keszler's Last Signs of Speed. Releasing November 17nth!

Eli Keszler - Last Signs of Speed
Format: 2xLP / DIGITAL
Cat.No: EE001
Cut & Mastered by Rashad Becker
Release Date: 17 November 2016

Purchase:
Vinyl: http://bit.ly/2kvaxBM
Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2jTI75w

Empty Editions is proud to present Eli Keszler’s Last Signs of Speed as our inaugural release. This release, our first vinyl record, has represented a labor of love for both Eli and ourselves.
 
Last Signs is Eli’s first solo release since 2012’s Catching Net (PAN Records) and explores a very different side of his unique acoustic universe. One in which the macrocosmic percussive collisions of his earlier work give way to a gradual unfolding of dub-influenced rhythmic constellations. Eli has described Last Signs as his response to playing in club environments over the last few years; an attempt to negotiate a delicate balance between the materiality of his acoustic instrument and the hyper-mediated sonic ecosystem of the club sound system. Coming off like an inspired synthesis between Scientist and Xenakis, Last Signs of Speed is a truly unique work by an artist at the height of his powers.

Last Signs Of Speed

The Immense Endless Belt of Faces

Eli Keszler - Last Signs of Speed
Format: 2xLP / DIGITAL
Cat.No: EE001
Cut & Mastered by Rashad Becker
Release Date: 17 November 2016

Purchase:
Vinyl: http://bit.ly/2kvaxBM
Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2jTI75w

Fusillade of Colors

Willing to be open

Holes, parts missing

Is stage director

Is strategist

The next day, in the afternoon

Breaches breaches

No iodine, no breeze

Streaming down. Streaming down.

Corresponding probably to quanta

Sudden laughter, laughter without reason

Jean-Luc Guionnet & Daichi Yoshikawa - Intervivos
Format: LP / DIGITAL
Cat.No: EE002
Mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M
Release Date: 09 February 2018

Empty Editions is pleased to present Jean–Luc Guionnet and Daichi Yoshikawa’s collaborative debut, Intervivos, to be released February 9th, 2018. Recorded during a week-long residency at Hong Kong’s Empty Gallery, Intervivos (Latin for “between the living”), refers to the vital and unexpected acoustic synergy that developed between Guionnet’s extended alto saxophone techniques and Yoshikawa’s feedback systems during these sessions.

Although Guionnet and Yoshikawa both come from prolific backgrounds in free jazz and electroacoustic improvisation -- Guionnet plays in The Ames Room with Will Guthrie and Clayton Thomas and Yoshikawa studied with AMM’s Eddie Prevost -- Intervivos sees them developing an approach to improvising which seeks to escape the increasingly narrow stylistic confines of these musical provinces. The album is characterized by a brutal foregrounding of process and material lacking from the experimental music of so many of their contemporaries. Rather than seeking refinement or resolution through existing structures, Guionnet and Yoshikawa prioritize a sort of collaborative musical searching in which the aural entanglement, layering and folding of their scorched intonations creates an emergent musical form -- a non-linear music which sounds both ancient and futuristic. 

Corruscating alto saxophone riffs appear suddenly, before disintegrating amidst slabs of feedback and flurries of metallic percussion. Other times, Yoshikawa and Guionnet conjure shifting clouds of sustained tones from the timbral meshing of their instruments - yielding a sound somewhere between the dense textures of Iancu Dumitrescu and the floating harmonics of Gagaku. Far from improvisation as we know it, this album instead gestures towards a speculative “electronic” music created through the ritualistic misuse of acoustic instruments. 

Intervivos is a fierce, undecorated triumph in the ruinous expression of instruments -- exalted in both its turbulence, and in its extreme testing of improvisational reality. Put summarily by Seymour Wright in the album’s liner notes: “You don’t need me to tell you how it sounds, or how to listen [...] this record begins when you play it.” 

The release is mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, featuring artwork by Jean-Luc Guionnet and liner notes by saxophonist Seymour Wright. The LP is produced in an edition of 500 on 180 gram vinyl in a letterpress on Foldkraft paper sleeve.

Intervivos

Before becoming disciple to the Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang in the novel Journey to the West, Shā Wùjìng was cast out of heaven, exiled to earth, and transformed into the river monster Wujing, one of the thirteen thousand monsters in the River of Flowing Sand, plagued by philosophical questions and doubts: “I am a fool.”  “Why am I like this?”  “I am a failed celestial being.” 

Empty Editions is pleased to present Failed Celestial Creatures, an unexpected collaboration between composer-guitarist David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, The Red Krayola) and Tokyo-based musician Taku Unami. Primarily recorded in Kyoto, the album takes inspiration from the duo’s shared musical and literary influences, emerging just as much from their improvisatory explorations as from an eclectic reading list exchanged prior to the recording sessions. The album’s narrative inclinations are rooted in both artists’ previous experiments with the complex reciprocity between sound and text, including Grubbs' work with the poet Susan Howe and Unami’s collaborations with writers such as Eugene Thacker and Evan Calder Williams. Failed Celestial Creatures draws in particular upon a group of short stories by the short-lived Japanese author Atsushi Nakajima (1909-42) - perhaps best known for inflecting Classical Chinese folktales with a modernist vein of absurdist and existential foreboding - as the imaginary backdrop for its set of guitar-based instrumental explorations.

In Nakajima’s “The Moon Over The Mountain,” a mad-poet metamorphosed into a hybrid-tiger recites poetry with an obscure defect, while “The Rebirth of Wujing” sees the titular river monster self-identifying as a “failed celestial being” [堕天使]. The cryptic collapse read in both of these episodes resonates with Unami’s research into the etymology of the chinese character “堕,” meaning “to fail” in modern usage, but historically understood as referencing “sacred meat from the altar fallen on the ground.” Such a primordial scene evokes the violation of the sacred as a tacit aspect of ritual.. This failure of ritual, always a condition (and perhaps even a technique) for musicians of Grubbs’ and Unami’s ilk, can be broadly understood as the primary point of departure for Failed Celestial Creatures. Situated within this affective terrain, the album’s title-track consists of a side-long progression of dirge-like riffs enveloped by clouds of vaporous electronics - eventually erupting into unruly squalls of feedback as Unami joins Grubbs on electric guitar. The B-side features a cluster of luminous guitar duets which are beguiling in their seeming effortlessness and simplicity. Threadbare and fallen, Grubbs and Unami invoke the failed ritual, the spilling at the altar, always suggested at the precipice of sonic emergence. 

The release was recorded by Taku Unami at Soto, Kyoto, August 7th and 9th, 2017 and mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M. All music by David Grubbs and Taku Unami, published by Gastr Virgo Music (BMI). The LP is produced in an edition of 500 on 180 gram vinyl.

Failed Celestial Creatures

Threadbare 4

Threadbare 3

The Forest Dictation

Selected Early Keyboard Works is the first in a series of planned archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It comes hot on the heels of Traversée Du Fantasme at the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Hennix’s first solo museum exhibition in over 40 years, and coincides with both Blank Forms’ publication of Poësy Matters and Other Matters, a two-volume collection of her writing, and the closing of Thresholds of Perception, a retrospective archival show of Hennix’s visual work at The Empty Gallery in Hong Kong. The record also marks the first time Hennix’s own music has been given a full-length
vinyl issue.

In 1976 Catherine Christer Hennix’s just intonation live-electronic ensemble The Deontic Miracle performed Hennix’s original compositions, alongside works by La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Terry Jennings, as part of Brouwer’s Lattice at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Culled from rehearsal tapes recorded during the 10-day Dream Music Festival, Selected Early Keyboard Works features three pieces of minimal music, performed by Hennix on tunable electric keyboards. “Nouvelle mode des modalités,” for well-tuned just intonation Fender Rhodes and sine wave drone, is a consummate expression of Hennix’s formative years, a probing meditation giving the mercurial quality of early electronic music an instrumental life replete with the dexterity of Cecil Taylor and shades of Paul Bley’s synthesized reveries. “Equal Temperament Fender Mix,” performed on the same Rhodes but in twelve-tone equal temperament tuning, employs a tape delay system not unlike that used famously by Terry Riley, here towards more sombre, hallucinatory means. Hennix is joined by Hans Isgren for the collection’s centerpiece, “The Well-Tuned Marimba,” for well-tuned Yamaha, sheng, sine wave, and live electronics. Using the same approach and just intonation keyboard featured on Hennix’s The Electric Harpsichord, but with marimba in place of harpsichord stops, the piece is an undulating marvel of lysergic drone, equally deserving of its companion’s status as “THE obscure masterpiece of the days of the early American minimalism”. Now accessible for the first time, these recordings only begin to fill gaps of silence from a figure whose work has until recently remained flickering at the margins of some of the most enduring cultural developments of the 20th century.

Selected Early Keyboard Works

Equal Temperament Fender Mix

The Well-Tuned Marimba

Mode nouvelle des modalités II

Mode nouvelle des modalités

EMPTY EDITIONS presents Palina’tufa, the newest work from saxophonist SEYMOUR WRIGHT and percussionist PAUL ABBOTT’S long-running duo XT. Wright and Abbott’s respective practices have been marked by a simultaneous engagement (with) and desire to challenge the limitations (of) the British tradition of improvised music – represented by groups such as AMM and JOHN STEVENS’ SPONTANEOUS MUSIC ENSEMBLE. This album charts a new trajectory for Wright and Abbott, as they draw on recent live collaborations with RP BOO and CONTAINER in developing a sound which hybridizes the spontaneous interplay and timbral experimentation of free improvisation with the recursive formal structures of dance music.

Palina'tufa

4 (D)

3 (C)

2 (B)

1 (A)

EMPTY EDITIONS presents Mein Corona, a new single from legendary Hong Kong-based provocateur and pioneer of Cantonese industrial noise music XPER.XR. His first official release since 2006, Mein Corona is an ecstatic, darkly humorous, and ultimately hopeful document of life amidst the ongoing global Coronavirus pandemic. A singularly twisted interpretation of The Knack’s 1979 hit single “My Sharona,” Mein Corona embeds lyrics that allude to Chinese bat-eating and state conspiracy within a densely layered aural brigade of whip-cracks, sirens, shattering glass, and stock TIE Fighter screams. All, of course, set to the instantly recognizable and perversely infectious guitar riff of the original song. The single follows in a tradition of unexpected reimaginings and wayward covers—think Merzbow covering Christmas classic “Silent Night,” or Tori Amos’s version of Slayer’s “Raining Blood”—situations where the original is subverted entirely to great effect. Although Xper.Xr’s own discography is already studded with a number of bizarre renditions of existing tunes—from Prince’s “When 2 R in Love,” to interpretations of children’s nursery rhymes—Mein Corona might just be the strangest and most timely one of all. Developed spontaneously, and certainly not originally intended for proper release, this single was recorded in a series of feverish, ad hoc studio sessions between Xper.Xr and Alok Leung, and features saxophone provided remotely by the great Parisian improviser Jean-Luc Guionnet. 

Mein Corona unfolds as an absurd and truly unorthodox version of the 1970s radio hit. Xper.Xr carries the song’s original melody in karaoke fashion—a buzzed delivery that vies for presence amidst an overwhelming backing track and general anarchic confusion. Guionnet’s laser-sharp, siren-like saxophone playing functions as a kind of back-up vocal contributing to the atmosphere of sustained mania and malfunction. Within this carnivalesque universe of sound, Xper comes across as an unhinged bandleader directing a chorus of short-circuiting televisions—an aural metaphor for the affective space of our own quarantine-addled, compulsively media consuming, remote moralizing, and online shopping selves. Xper’s musical response to the pandemic is inflected by a perspective and sense of humor which is characteristically Hong Kong: a kind of self-lacerating relative of 無厘頭 (mo lei tau). An absurdist type of grassroots humour which delights in grotesque exaggeration, verbal nonsense, and illogical performances, 無厘頭 originated (at least in part) as a cathartic outlet for Hong Kongers widespread sense of existential futility as colonial subjects. This irreverent spirit is found throughout Xper’s work, especially as he has challenged conventions of deference and “good taste” within the realm of avant-garde music. With this tact on full display, Mein Corona is a brazen and confounding attempt to find a kind of optimism (even if that optimism is simply the ability to still create) amidst the confusion, adversity, and paranoia of the global pandemic: a much needed antidote to an atmosphere of official dread and grey seriousness which has suffused our everyday lives. 

The release was inspired by The Knack’s “My Sharona” written by Berton Averre & Doug Fieger (1979), produced by Empty Gallery and Xper. Xr., with Saxophone by Jean-Luc Guionnet and additional arrangement from Alok Leung. Midi-sequencing, recording, mixing, and mastering is by Alok Leung at Lona Records Studio, Hong Kong, April 2020. Artwork is by Xper.Xr and Michael Yu. Special Thanks to FeastOn. 

All proceeds of “Mein Corona” will be doubled through a matching grant from Empty Editions and donated to the Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at the University of Hong Kong.

Mein Corona

XPER.XR - Mein Corona

Unbegrenzt is the third in an ongoing series of archival records of the unheard music of Swedish composer Catherine Christer Hennix, co-released by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions. It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (named the #1 archival release of 2019 by The Wire), in addition to a two-volume collection of Hennix’s writing titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters.

Recorded in February of 1974 and featuring Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion, and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong), Hennix’s realization of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Unbegrenzt” (German for “unlimited”) from Aus den Sieben Tagen is an elaboration both rigorous and radically different from the canonical 1969 recording issued by Shandar. The collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris during May of 1968, Aus den Sieben Tagen, denies its performers notated direction and instead provides poetic cues that hinge upon Stockhausen’s conception of “intuitive music,” a Eurocentric perspective on improvisation antithetical to the vernacular forms Hennix had engaged with as a young drummer performing in Stockholm jazz clubs with musicians like Bill Barron, Cam Brown, Hans Isgren, Lalle Svenson, Allan Vajda, Bo Wärmell, and many others. While both Hennix and Isgren saw the formal prospect of Aus den Sieben Tagen as a productive development of and beyond La Monte Young’s event scores, she here steadfastly counters his rationalization of intuition with the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (Cf. Brouwer’s Lattice.) Eschewing the busy, conservatory-addled lapses into idiomatic citation of Stockhausen’s 1969 recording, Hennix’s alternative realization of the “Unbegrenzt” score’s instructions to “play a sound with the certainty that you have an infinite amount of time and space” is based on her concept of Infinitary Compositions, the trademark of her ensemble The Deontic Miracle which, at one time, considered adding Stockhausen, La Monte Young and Terry Jennings scores to its repertoire. Taking a mature, minimal iteration of Stockhausen’s compositional method of “moment-forming” to heart, her version’s dark, controlled feedback and amplified bowed gong subtly shift through an immanent sequence of formative moments, step by step. Its bubbling computer noise, percussion, and repeated ominous transient sounds of temple blocks over the bowed gong terminate with the integrated recitation of exotic text fragments from Hevajra Tantra which faithfully take Stockhausen’s score into deeper vistas of the unconscious and a more devastating opening to the unlimited time and space of a dreaming mind.

Audio restoration and mastering by Stephan Mathieu, with an essay by Bill Dietz.

Unbegrenzt (excerpt)

EMPTY EDITIONS is pleased to present the debut 12” from mysterious electronic outfit TAIBACH. Conceptualized by ABCs, Taibach has emerged from the shadows as a blunted East-Asian historical consciousness failing to return home after becoming a stranger to itself. With a nom de guerre which references both the infamous Slovenian proto-industrial group Laibach and their mythologized homeland of Taiwan, Taibach restages the classic thematics and aesthetic strategies of industrial music for a contemporary moment in which shifting balances of power between east and west herald new hegemonies and exhume old grievances. Their martial approach to electronics follows in a brood of decidedly cryptic underground music: drawing on the sound of classic industrial bands, early 90s techno, and more recent developments at the intersection of noise and rhythmic music. Conditions of escalating ethno-nationalism, imperialist ambition and decay, and historical revisionism within the Sinosphere provide the backdrop for the band’s grimly expansive theatrics, which hint at the possibility of ideological resistance through tactical sign play and subversive affirmation. Acting as a necessary corrective to a commercially bloated and self-satisfied Asian cultural sphere, Taibach embraces futile Taiwan-based nationalism by celebrating the seldom-criticized reactionary tendencies of the region as a document of its history and its current political impasses.

Taibach’s debut LP contains a rawness and intensity that excels in club contexts, spilling over into more varied strands of experimental and underground music. While the music itself is primed for big room sound systems, the omnivorous use of guitar, effects pedals, and sampling techniques alongside stalwart drum programming also allow for more intimate listening—soundtracking both club depravity and solitary walks in equal measure. The kosmische proto-electro bite of Side A opener “Spicy Test” furnishes a terse blueprint for Taibach’s aural vocabulary: skeletal drums brought deliberately into the red provide a burnt, metallic underpinning to the record’s five tracks. Across the LP, rhythm is complemented by asymmetric washes of tape hiss, feedback, and filtered voices which ride alongside the drum patterns. Tracks “You Are Shit!” and “Enemy Inside” carve out wide expanses for filtered chords and sequenced synths to reflect against uncoiling rhythms. Astute listeners will discern a long engagement with UK, European, and US dance music from the 1990s up to the present in their inspired ability to set the drum machine against a distinctly East Asian industrial backdrop—channeling the sound of a dystopic future of armed conflicts and ground invasions where the hastily built edifices of Confucian capitalism resurface as detention centers and fallout shelters. The LP culminates in “Rocket (Live),” an opus of live sound system music that carries with it the hot heat of a subterranean, neon-lit industrial catacomb filled with vampiric club-goers. As guitar noise billows out over a militant rhythm that recalls everything from darkwave to Container (or Alan Vega & Martin Rev’s early Suicide records) the track builds into an assailing polyrhythm that showcases a dancefloor severity at the height of their transportive powers.

Inside the sleeve is a photocopied insert of a watercolor painting depicting an anonymous man hanging from a streetlamp. A sign with the Chinese characters 漢奸 (“traitor”) hangs around his neck. Taipei 101 Tower looms in the distance, once the tallest building in the world—a conspicuous symbol of Taiwan’s American-style capitalist power—now shrouded in the fog of war. Absorbing the anxiety of these times, Taibach’s debut provides an anxious soundtrack looking for the old military bunkers underneath spreading skyscrapers and machines chorusing the rising tides of global unrest.

Taibach

Taibach - SPICY TEST (幹)

ENEMY INSIDE

PERPETRATOR1

ROCKET (LIVE)

YOU ARE SHIT

Made exclusively in conjunction with the opening of Sean Raspet's solo exhibition "New Molecules & Stem Cell Retinoid Screen" at Empty Gallery in 2019, Hong Kong born-and-raised producer Scott Young (@youngmuzak) delivers a 55-minute blend of ambient, minimal house, IDM, and other broken and decayed electronic beats.

Artwork: Sean Raspet, Fructaplex© (2-(3,3-dvimethylcyclohexyl)-2,5,5-trimethyl-1,3-dioxane), 2018 - 2019

Scott Young - Exhibition Mix "New Molecules & Stem Cell Retinoid Screen"

Empty Editions is a Berlin-based publishing platform initiated by the Empty Gallery, Hong Kong. Empty Editions releases vinyl records, artist books, multiples, and other ephemera with a special focus on the intersection between visual and sonic arts. We are restless explorers of the fertile territory where the vernacular meets the avant-garde. Forthcoming releases from Empty Editions include music by Jean-Luc Guionnet, Daichi Yoshikawa and a documentary on Karou Abe by Modern Music's founder, Hideo Ikeezumi.

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