Sodalith

In My Head (Shapes Are Forming A New Horizon Mix)

Music inspired by American psychologist Leonard Zunin's Law of the First Four Minutes.

cover artwork by SETH BLACK
www.instagram.com/seth6lack

generated by Nicolie Binara
produce and mastered by Setsuya KUROTAKI

Study No. II

OP 7 Klanglandschaft 2

Why Do Birds Suddenly Appear (excerpt)

From the upcoming Album "Vegetal Negatives"
Release Date 29 March 2019
Hallowground.com
HG1901
Vinyl / Digital

”Let us unfold the animal outward: the bronchia will become a thick foliage, keeping its respiratory function, but in reverse, naturally (CO2 absorption), reversed also concerning color, from the tint of calves’ lungs to its complementary cabbage green. The digestive system will become roots, maintaining its role of drawing in nourishment from the outside environment. […] for each animal form there exists a corresponding vegetal form. The man who would find his vegetal negative and unite with it would restore the integrity of the cosmos.”

Vegetal Negatives is a game of sonic mutations, mimicry, inversions, and association inspired by a text called "On pataphotograms", by the French writer René Daumal – a quasi-metaphysical essay that toys with breaking the conceived separateness of natural forms through poetic imagination.

Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a Swedish-born artist living and working in Turku, Finland. She has been an active part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years. Now arriving at her debut LP under her own name, Ahti explores a new formal language and sonic palette that ventures far from the path of her earlier work.

The four electroacoustic compositions on the album combine and arrange field recordings, electronic feedback, Buchla and ARP synthesizers, bowl gong and harmonium, textures of detailed acoustic sound, and sustained tones with gentle microtonal beating into a precise musical narrative. She juxtaposes recordings of rooms and empty vessels, natural and artificial climates, spontaneous and staged events. Ahti draws upon Annea Lockwood's ideas about associative movements between sounds based on shared characteristics and sonic energy. Her approach to field recordings is neither diaristic, documentaristic, nor purely acousmatic, but rather it starts out from somewhere in between these notions: the sounds hover between abstraction and the deeply familiar, moving into a realm of poetic metaphor where they are set in relation to each other, fleetingly mirroring or shadow-dancing. Acoustic environments mutate into synthetically derived shadow forms.

The opening track, "Coastal Inversion”, moves from a seemingly familiar seascape into an ocean of wavelike synthetic staccato patterns, turning itself inside-out on the shore, before diving back into a sea of resonance. ”Rooftop gardens” arranges a series of largely unprocessed field recordings into a dream-logic sequence of upward movement towards the clouds. On the other side, ”Symbiogenesis” brews a slow evolution of wet, airy and earthy sounds and resonant friction. The closing track, ”Chora”, imagines a meditative space of breath: filter resonance posing as organ pipes against a backdrop of breezy industrial hoovers merges halfway with a harmonium improvisation that foregrounds the frictions of the wooden instrument itself, just before filtering out into resonant harmony.

Tracklist:
A1) Coastal Inversion (12:14)		B1) Symbiogenesis (07:22)
A2) Rooftop Gardens (05:44)		B2) Chora (10:47)

Credits:
Marja Ahti: composition, production, field recording, Buchla 200 and ARP 2600
Recorded at EMS, Stockholm, WORM, Rotterdam, and on locations in Greece, Alaska, Finland and Sweden.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Designed by Ruth Stofer

Vegetal Negatives

BUY VINYL/DL

MARJA AHTI - Symbiogenesis (HG1901)

Joe Colley "Melody Of Failure" from:

MAR053  Joe Colley "Psychic Stress Soundtracks" 2xLP 

https://misanthropicagenda.bigcartel.com/product/joe-colley-psychic-stress-soundtracks-2xlp

https://youtu.be/UyOh6d-XiAY

Psychic Stress Soundtracks

Joe Colley "Melody of Failure"

MARJA AHTI, The Current Inside, LP

Release date - May 8th 2020
Catalogue nr. - HG2004
Format - Ltd. Vinyl/digital

https://hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1.The Altitudes (20:09)
2.The Currents (04:21)
3.Lost Lake (04:25)
4.Fluctuating Streams (06:12)
5.Sundial (04:43)

Credits:
Composition, production, mixing: Marja Ahti 
Voice: Johanna Kalliokulju 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi 
Cover artwork by Niko Karlsson and design by Juri Puhakka

The Altitudes was commissioned by Ina GRM as part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union. The work was supported in part by Arts Promotion Centre Finland. Synthesizers recorded at EMS, Stockholm and Ina GRM, Paris. Voice recorded at IAC, Malmö. Field recordings from various locations in Finland, Sweden and Croatia. 

Thanks to Olli Aarni, Niko-Matti Ahti, François Bonnet, Jason Dungan, Jonna Karanka, Laura Naukkarinen and Remo Seeland.

///
The Current Inside”, Marja Ahti's sophomore album for Hallow Ground, plays with the theme of currents - connecting and animating movements in the form of air, water and electricity. It approaches sound as a poetic medium, focusing both on the experience of sound as form and energy and on a loosely narrative arc, suggesting a riddle on the relations between the sounds. It implements alternative as well as intuitive tunings, analog and digital synthesis, recordings of sonorous spaces and vessels, electromagnetic fields transduced into audio, acoustic close-ups of elements in motion and other field recordings. Fluently connecting quite diverse sound sources, Ahti's music lingers in a zone between abstract sonorities and vaguely familiar acoustic environments.
The first half of the album consists of ”The Altitudes”, a piece commissioned by Ina GRM for Présences Électronique and Sonic Acts. It was inspired by descriptions of the layers of Earth's atmosphere. Imagining a movement through layers of air, the piece unfolds with a slow intensity, interweaving concrete sounds and closely tuned electronic sonorities. Traversing the altitudes, a landscape of entangled elements, masses and currents emerges. The air around us has weight and it presses against everything it touches. As gravity pulls it to Earth, it is sensed as pressure. The rotation of the planet, the angle of the sun at any new moment sets the elements in motion in a chain reaction. 
The other side consists of four shorter pieces. ”The Currents” opens with a dance of trembling charged movements. ”Lost Lake” extracts resonant tones from a trail of close-up recordings of winter environments, while ”Fluctuating Streams” channels streaming air in different forms. The closing track, ”Sundial”, could be construed as the steady turning of the planetary angle towards the sun, unfolding through fragments of everyday activity against the backdrop of piercing, slowly twisting, suspended tone.
Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective. Her critically acclaimed 2019 solo debut, Vegetal Negatives, explored a new formal language and sonic palette inspired by a short text by René Daumal.

MARJA AHTI - Fluctuating Streams (HG2004)

Taken from the album 'Death is perfection, everything else is relative' released as LP and Digital.

France Jobin 'p (excerpt)' (EMEGO 276)

An all new collaborative release by two exciting Belgian artists:

"The first time we collaborated as a duo was for our interpretation of The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars at les Ateliers Claus. At that time, there was an audience surrounding us. Now secluded and on our own, we went back to the same venue and locked ourself for 2 days arranging and recording the music Ben Bertrand wrote while he was in confinement.

We designed a dense and mineral triptych. Digging into this music, we experienced the current and pressure of the passing time. At some point we saw light coming in. The transformation has already been done, reversion to fundamentals is now our single option." - Ben Bertrand & Otto Lindholm

Ben Bertrand
Ben Bertrand is a Belgian Bass Clarinetist and composer. With his instrument and countless machines, Ben creates his live with a hypnotic web of sounds. Listening to his music is like sitting at the sea, watching a slow motion of our crazy life sailing by. With his former works (Era/Area, Off-Record 2017 and NGC 1999, les albums Claus 2018), Ben toured in Belgium, France and Netherlands (Meakusma Festival, Ancienne Belgique, Le Lieu Unique, Schiev Festival, Le Guess Who?, World Minimal Music Festival). His last album, Manes, has been released in March 2020 in collaboration with Stroom and les albums claus.

Otto Lindholm
Brussels-based composer evolving in drone music and modern classical, Otto Lindholm employs an array of loop pedals and electronic effects in partnership with his double bass to produce a range of rich and voluptuous tones, emotions, and elongated melodies. He released music on Icarus Records, Gizeh Records, Houndstooth, Blackest Ever Black, Aurora Borealis Recordings, Bedouin Records.

TR066 - Ben Bertrand & Otto Lindholm  - Acerilla

A series of bleak, blustery scenes make up Nazanin Noori’s Farce. Noori, who also works as a theater director, conjures glacial storms and buzzing subterranean server farms on this album; but such scenes were far from the artist’s guiding narrative as it was being produced. The two tracks, clocking in at 80 minutes total, were envisioned as an enraged argument (or a "modular heartbreak") unfolding between two groups of people about a pothole in the road, told from the perspective of the road, and then the pothole.

This surreal, mundane plot device is nowhere to be found on Farce in any concrete way. And this is intentional. Noori, inspired by Artaud's concept of the theatre of cruelty, wants listeners to develop their own sensorial world separate from the musician's. When not darkly ambient, the tracks are full of drama and whimsy, as if a spotlight is following a character along a wayward path, into the hands of fate. The emotional hooks in the sound include a sense of desperate desolation, optimistic reprieve, and of course, the sense that ritual repetition is both a curse and a blessing—but they resist obvious imagery. Exactly what kinds of characters or settings get hung on the album's scaffolding is up to the audience. Listening with a hi-fi sound-system is highly recommended.

---

Nazanin Noori is an Iranian artist living and working in Berlin, Germany. Her work includes theater and radio play direction, music, and text. She focuses on atmospheric narratives in sound, and works to overcome cultural reliance on sentiment by making dramatic adaptations of non-dramatic texts. She studied theater, film and media sciences at Goethe University in Frankfurt and worked at Deutsches Theater and Schauspiel Hannover. She currently selects Acid Folk for POMP, a sound scenario series on Retreat Radio, and is an artist-in-residence at the Young Academy of the Arts in Berlin.

released August 25, 2020

mastering :: Martijn Comes

all proceeds to Afrorack (Chicago, IL, USA) - www.afrorack.org

FARCE

Nazanin Noori - IMAGINE ALL THAT FALL IN A POTHOLE ON A BEAUTIFUL DAY (ENMX09)

HALLOW GROUND 
is a platform for Music and Art that leads to Visions.

It was established in Lucerne/Switzerland by a group of individualists, idealists and first of all artists. We act as publishers, hosts and performers.

www.hallowground.com