Single from the new album by Zelienople frontman, Matt Christensen called "Constant Green" (June 18th, Miasmah / 300xColoured vinyl). 

As Matt himself describes: " I Had A Vision That I Could Move Anywhere" is  about how much fear does, or doesn't play in our limitations or unwillingness to do things. What is chemistry, genes and fate, and what is choice (if there is any)? In other words, this is a fantasy about free will."

Constant Green

Matt Christensen - I Had A Vision That I Could Move Anywhere

From the new album by Chinese-Australian guzheng artist Mindy Meng Wang (and collaborators), 'Phoenix Rising'. Available for purchase here: https://mindymengwang.bandcamp.com/album/phoenix-rising

Mindy Meng Wang & Fia Fiell - Undercurrent 暗涌

Cat.# HITD 059

1st pressing
Limited edition of 200 copies on black vinyls
SOLD OUT

2nd pressing
Edition of 300 copies on black vinyls

www.handsinthedarkrecords.bandcamp.com/album/l-uten-der-seele

Läuten der Seele - Das Biotop Im Traum Und In Der Wirklichkeit

By now counting more than four decades of constant activity, Pierre Bastien erected such a towering and influential body of work that any blurb attempt regarding his music could easily fall into redundancy. Not that his revolving soundworld, deeply personal and unique, has ever stalled into gimmick or self mimicry, being Bastien the tireless explorer whose vision can never be complete, only continuously redefined in a process of discovery equally playful and challenging. So, completely in touch with Discrepant’s ethos.

Returning to the label after 2017 The Mecanocentric Worlds of Pierre Bastien, the french musician, composer and instrument builder, brings an array of instruments from different cartographies and legacies with the appropriately titled Sonic Folkways. Resorting to different types of horns, prepared trumpet, an army of percussion, from gongs and tambourine to castanets and maracas, violin and too many others to mention here, Bastien weaves together a highly textured and hypnotic mosaic that projects an exotica beamed from scraps of the future. ‘Aha!’ in the same interstellar wavelength as Sun Ra’s cosmic tones, ‘Moor’s Room’s almost orchestral tapestry of small percussion and insects or the non-western strings and tunings salvaged from ancient alien ceremonies on ‘Pan’s Nap’.

In an era where so much ink has been shed about world building in experimental music, Bastien can actually claim that to himself. The otherworld is right here, indeed.

Artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw
Mastered by Anne Taegert @ D&M

More info at https://www.discrepant.net/product/pierre-bastien-sonic-folkways/

Sonic Folkways

Pierre Bastien - Aha! (from Sonic Folkways)

Beta Crucis is one of the tracks from Star Atlas, released on Time Released Sound in september 2011.

Sonmi451 - Beta Crucis

Included in The Wire Tapper 44, the CD compilation included with the August 2017 edition of The Wire.

Badalisc (from The Wire Tapper 44)

First track of "A une Gorge" the debut album of Orgue Agnès (Sourdure - Clement Vercelletto and Èlg) 
Released by Three:Four Records, Standard In-Fi and A1000P
Recording and mix by Mim
Mastering by Julien Grandjean

Le Désert Est une Nonne - from "A une Gorge" LP

R. Elizabeth is the recording name of London-based artist and academic Rachael Finney. Every And All We Voyage On is her
solo recording project’s second full length and is a focused distillation of her practice in sound art and her knack for pop
minimalism. It follows a long sold out release on Where To Now? Records and a prolonged period in which she concentrated
on artist residencies exploring her interest in recorded sound and voice. Immediate and natural, Every And All We Voyage On
manages to sound joyful while tackling complex themes, handling everything with an improvisatory touch. The songs are full of
air and light; infectious, melodic and off-the-cuff.
Recorded using a single 80s Casio keyboard, reel-to-reel tape manipulation, piano and vocal, Finney’s practice with R. Elizabeth
belies a studious attention to detail. Her academic work is often focused on analysing sounds – particularly voice and language –
divorced from meaning and R. Elizabeth challenges the listener with overtly emotional tropes: sweeping portmento lap-steel
guitar keyboard tones on Back From Ten suggest a nostalgic melancholy when it intersects with the narrator closing her eyes,
realising she has nothing left to give. The lilting vocal cloaked in reverb is disarming, with an almost child-like surrender to the
undertow of the song. On Tragedy And Trade there’s a rough grace to the mixing with visceral, manipulated tape sounding like
the artists’ hands are literally in the speakers wrenching the melodies in mid-air. When it intersects with chants about the “gaps
and the silences” it has an eerie, hauntological effect. R. Elizabeth is constantly playing with sound and song: a Wonderland of
perceived emotion, the listener’s perception of what they’re hearing constantly in flux, it’s deceptively simple and deserving of
repetitive listening.
Cut Piano opens the album and introduces a documentary-feel which the album upholds through-out. It’s the sound of the artist
mangling a tape of her own piano recording, twisting it out of shape and suggesting a bend in reality. We’re listening to the artist
becoming a ghost in her own machine, a 3rd or 4th generation copy of an emotion rendered a long time ago, chilling and playful at
the same time. An Image Is Different bursts out of this with a sunny Casiotone beat, a melodic contrast that also introduces
Finney’s vocal. It flitters between a gorgeous repetitive melody ruminating about the nature of reality and a seemingly careless,
conversational tone. The effect is joyful, but you don’t really know why. The lyrics instruct someone (you? The artist?) to “go
outside and break someone’s neck, make it feel so real” before ending with R. Elizabeth nonchalantly stating “I dunno, to be
honest I don’t really care” as if on the phone to someone they’re bored with. It would be jarring if it wasn’t so catchy and uplifting.
The title track is a slow-tempo meditation with droning synths providing the background to slow, dragging tape sounds and
grounding, just-out-of-focus vocals bunkering down in the mix. The methodology suggests the work of Broadcast: there’s a
loping bassline that propels the track forward but the duet/duel between Finney’s haunted vocal and the soloing tape warble
provides aural snakes for the listener’s ear to follow.

R. Elizabeth - SPIRITUAL TO SYMPHONY (from Every And All We Voyage On)

Ben Vida
Reducing The Tempo To Zero
SHELTER PRESS / SP108

Recorded 2016-2019 New York
Mastering: Stephan Mathieu
Artwork: Xavier Antin

The theme of time is unavoidable when approaching Ben Vida’s Reducing the Tempo to Zero, his latest endeavour with Shelter Press. A singe work, pushing the bounds of Digital and Analog Synthesis, which stretches to just over 4 hours in length, its realization is the product of years of effort - the process of recording and editing extending across the period between 2015 and 2019, offering momentary conclusion to an arc of ideas and practice which which first appeared on Damaged Particulates, issued in 2016.

RTTTZ is a temporal nesting doll - a meditation, conceived by Vida as a part of a daily practice which embarked upon sustained periods of focused creation and listening. While the product of a deeply personal, inward journey, similar to iconic efforts by composers like Dennis Johnson, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, and Éliane Radigue, it strives to unravel the standards and expectations applied to musical and experiential time, taking the relation to sonic phenomena into an almost transcendental realm. Immersive in scale and endurance, through a deep and radical sensitivity to material and structural hybridity, Vida’s return to the durational drone based forms - first explored as a member of Town and Country during the mid-90s - drives the ear toward the solace found through developmental and intimate relationships with the fleeting, granular, and discrete, transmogrifying smallest detail into a monumental event.

Despite being the “complete” RTTTZ document, made concrete by the process of recording, this 4+ hour iteration carries the shifting ghosts of other beings and times. It represent only one of many possible, existing beside a free standing phonetic, text-based score, and a near infinite number of evolutionary, live variations - instrumental and vocal versions, as well as those which spring from the combination of instrumental and vocal ensembles of varying sizes, each time of different length, changing and taking on new dimensions determined by the its performers. In a sense, each version is simultaneously free-standing and finished, while capable of reconfiguration and being made anew - a mirror for its shifting passage through the ear, which triggers multiple, concurrent images of other times and existence of itself.

While the duration, structure, and relatively of RTTTZ focuses attention toward the internality of what it is, like all great art, they are simply a means to an end. The crucial themes lay with the cumulative effect of their sum - the power of phenomena and highly individualized experience. It is an organized, sonorous space which is to be occupied and within which to get lost, shifting the ownership, whether embarked upon actively or passively - both as valid and rewarding as the next - to the listener alone, sculpting a subjective expanse which denying concise location and, in so doing, undermines the presumption of the capacity to be the same thing twice.

Overwhelmingly beautiful in its oscillating harmonics and punctuation of pulsing texture and tone, each stage of its evolution moving at a glacial pace, represents a monumental achievement from Vida within the broad landscape of experimental and avant-garde sound. Reducing the Tempo to Zero was mastered by Stephan Mathieu, and is released by Shelter Press in both digital and limited USB card editions.

Reducing The Tempo To Zero

BEN VIDA 'Reducing The Tempo To Zero' (EXTRACT)

Released on Longforms Editions March 2019
The title Stereo'frogi'ic is a play on the word stereophonic – to play with the illusion of multi-directional audible perspective – in this case presenting a quasi-bioacoustic sound piece, crafted from found recordings of frogs, insects, a recording of an animal scattering in the bushes and other 'vocal' animals wavering about in a stereo field. This piece was recorded and edited in the summer of 2019.

I have used slightly modified animals sounds to create aural illusions, morphing the perception of animal and machine generated sounds or raw recordings and digitally effected sounds. I wanted to create a tempo that would mimic something similar to the meditative sense you can experience from the flow or sound of the wind and other elements, when you are sitting in an open field while recording.

Stereo'frog'ic (Longforms Editions 2019)

Pre-Order available now via imprec.com 
Cassette edition of 100 via Cassauna/Imprec

“Rupture” was inspired by the southern Italian folktale of Tarantism,
which is said to be an epidemic provoked by the bite of the tarantula.
It causes extreme spiritual possession. 
Aki Onda composed these tracks using the traditional folk music of the region as underlays, mostly in indirect ways but occasionally directly sampled. 
The tracks were recorded with musicians Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis and Clifton Hyde. The artwork features eerie and uncanny images of the Japanese
photographer Daisuke Yokota.

1. Rupture 
2. Betrayal

3. Rebirth
4. Growth 

Aki Onda : electronics, field recordings (1-4)
Tatsuya Nakatani : percussion, gongs, bells (1-4)
Gareth Davis : bass clarinet (4)
Clifton Hyde : mandolin (3)

Soundtrack for “Rupture” by Aki Onda
Recorded by Tatsuya Nakatani, Gareth Davis, and Aki Onda 
Edited and mixed by Aki Onda 
Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper



Photography by Daisuke Yokota

Läuten der Seele - Das Biotop Im Traum Und In Der Wirklichkeit

Hands In The Dark

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