🖤💙🖤 Absolutely beautiful🖤💙🖤

First single from Vanessa Amara "Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback" Out May 28th as Posh Isolation 249

The beguiling yet inviting music of Vanessa Amara has long presented studies and invocations of ambient music and experimental sound practices with a graceful relief. Their  latest album, 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback,' is a collection of unedited live recordings from 2016-2020. It charts a formal path for creation, and in doing so manufactures their most dazzlingly beautiful album to date.

Vanessa Amara is a duo from Copenhagen. More recently they've forged links to Coomkeen, Ireland. Together, Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana have released a small plenty of recordings, with their 2016 album 'You're Welcome Here' bringing them into a critical orbit with contemporary experimental music and earning them much-deserved recognition. A cluster of releases followed that took their intricately rendered worlds into new constellations and alignments with the suite of instruments that they recurrently call upon. Last year's 'Leopards' and 'Poses' introduced a daring alacrity to the dreamy forms one may associate with Vanessa Amara, suggesting a wealth of silhouettes and wicked suns.

'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' hints at a similar mischief through its inventive formal strategy, accompanying ideas, and charged theatre, yet it pursues the melancholic kernel at the heart of the project more intently than any previous release.

The album's title is descriptive of the album's process. Utilising an arrangement of microphones, speakers, and tape machines, Vanessa Amara created a system that allowed them to work with acoustic feedback. In the group's own words, "We don’t have a studio or a piano, so instead we work briefly in other peoples' homes or in any room made available to us. Each of these rooms, what is within them and how the instruments resonate there, is what generates the sound." With piano, accordion, pipe organ, carillon, and bells, this system generates an exquisite space of delicately placed harmonics and sweet ricochets.

The track 'Accordion' captures a passing all-terrain vehicle from inside a church—it's these kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that are found at the edges of the album, refracting the heart-aching meditations and formal constraints with a novel spontaneity. However, at the core of the album's making is feedback. As Vanessa Amara explain, "The autonomy of the feedback is critical as it demands an improvisational relationship to the shaping of sound. We wish to trigger a capacity for refusal of perfection forcing awareness. Our hope is that the transparency that we believe improvisation holds a capacity for can at once connect and nourish solidarity, provoking movement as well as continuity in and between our, as well as our audience's, collective and individual labour in life."

The resulting shapes and figments rustle a new wonderous bearing, making 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' an elegant transformation in the project's evolution.

Posh Isolation 249 
Mastered by John Hannon

Tracklist
1. Bells 01:11 
2. Piano & Accordion I 07:35 
3. Accordion 06:52 
4. Piano & Two Tape Loops 05:47 
5. Pipe Organ 07:22 
6. Piano & Accordion II 02:19 
7. Cembalo & Carillon 05:27 
8. Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops 05:32

Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback

Vanessa Amara - Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops

Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

Viridescens

Francesco Cavaliere and Tomoko Sauvage embody a tactile audio visual display, radiating the color green into sounds and painting meditative music. By transforming collected objects into invented instruments and scenography, each motif becomes a dedication to a specific situation, an anecdote or a symbol, sometimes real and other times absurd, that the artists have encountered through their travels and conversations: the Chinese myth about a man wearing a green hat, naming convention of Japanese traffic lights, or even the imaginary chants of frolicking twin dolphins. This inspired the duo’s personal research on experimenting with raw and synthesized idiophones, stage landscape design, spontaneous field recording and organized improvisation.

B 1 Cavaliere - Sauvage - Twin Emerald Dolphins

First digi single on the label by New Zealand sweethearts Hysterical Love Project <3 

"set your spirit free"

https://motionward.bandcamp.com/track/hysterical-love-project-2bc1
https://soundcloud.com/hystericalloveproject

MWD001: Hysterical Love Project, "2BC1"

light memory

a1ko - god says

Speaking is a track from  Florian T M Zeisig's — ‘ZZZZZzzzzzz’, his second album until the date. Coming Out September 2019.

‘ZZZZZzzzzzz’ aims to translate spoken word and percussion-based ASMR recordings and performative videos into music. Using these binaural raw audio materials the project utilizes algorithmic synthesis, filtering, and vocoders to transform the material into immersive harmonic structures.

ZZZZZzzzzzz

ANM046 Florian T M Zeisig — Speaking

ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ, 'High School Blues
Format: Cassette / Digital
Release Date: May 1, 2020
Artwork: Jesse Sappell

Buy: https://motionward.bandcamp.com/album/high-school-blues

High School Blues is the debut tape by 17 year old Russian producer Nikolay Kozlov aka ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ. Throughout the songs on the release there is a thread of generative and freeform characteristics, but the emphasis on abstraction is balanced by grounding and at times uneasy swells of emotion that shift and sink in slowly throughout the tracks. Suitable listening for a variety of headspaces and atmospheric conditions.

https://soundcloud.com/nikolaykozlov

MWT003: ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ, 'High School Blues'

@pontiacstreator

pajeon dj tapes vol 1 available on bandcamp https://benbondy.bandcamp.com/album/pajeon-dj-tapes-vol-1

B 1 Cavaliere - Sauvage - Twin Emerald Dolphins

Francesco Cavaliere !

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