LAWRENCE ENGLISH, Observation of Breath, LP

Release date - Sept 10th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2103
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) A Torso (10:01)
2) A Binding (06:05)
3) And A Twist (02:42)
4) Observation Of Breath (20:44)

Credits:
All organ recorded at The Old Museum, Brisbane July-November 2020,
except A Torso’s centre section which was recorded in 2016 on the same organ.
Performed and Produced by Lawrence English
Picture by Juan Valverde de Amusco, 1560
Design by Ruth Stofer and Greenpointless

///
Do you remember the last time you were breathing consciously? Either way, you are likely doing it now. On his new album »Observation of Breath« for the Swiss-based Hallow Ground label, Lawrence English worked exclusively with an organ for four compositions that are exercises in »maximal minimalism,« as their creator himself notes in a nod to Charlemagne Palestine, who coined this term. While it seems somewhat fitting that those four pieces based on a steady flow of air were conceived and recorded in a situation of accelerated standstill caused by a respiratory disease, the Room40 founder is not so much concerned with capturing the zeitgeist than rather incorporating the spirit of time itself. »It is a record about presence and patience,« he explains. Exploring the unique sonic affordances of a singular instrument, »Observation of Breath« is not only devoted to the durability of sound but also to its density. That it marks his debut on Hallow Ground after having shaped its sound by mastering most of the label’s releases in recent years is just as fitting then as its release following albums by Kali Malone and FUJI|||||||||||TA, whose innovative work with organ instruments have facilitated a rediscovery of their possibilities. 

English’s compositions however are neither directly indebted nor responding to these musicians. His exploration of the organ’s many facets started a decade ago when the composer was given access to an instrument built in 1889 that is presently housed at The Old Museum in Brisbane. After it had already played a crucial role on his seminal albums »Wilderness Of Mirrors« and »Cruel Optimism,« last year’s self-released »Lassitude« was the first record that English entirely composed and recorded with that instrument. »During the soft lockdowns, I spent many days playing to an empty concert hall, recording the pieces that became ›Lassitude‹ and then, this album,« says English in regards to an unfortunate situation that fortunately provided him with time and space—two major themes but also key qualities of the four new compositions. In this sense, he goes on, »Observation of Breath« resolves a number of the questions originally raised by »Lassitude.«

»The organ is an exercise in the observation of breath,« English explains the album’s title. »It is a physical breath, one that manifests both audible and inaudible waves of vibrations. The sheer scale of the instrument, its weight and the physical length of the pipes involved in producing the sounds we experience is nothing short of mind-boggling.« More importantly, the sound artist is fascinated by the organ’s ability to produce frequencies that exist at the sensory limits of human awareness—it’s at the edges of these limits that fascination can be found, he argues. »The particular organ that I work with comprises four manuals and 45 speaking stops and it has a tubular-pneumatic action,« he explains. »It’s the stops that are the focus of my interest. They are very specific and when manipulated in certain ways and in certain combinations, create a unique set of unsteady timbres that make it a remarkably intoxicating instrument to collaborate with.«

LAWRENCE ENGLISH - A Binding (HG2103)

I Remember You Like the Best Song 

Available February 18 from http://anenon.bandcamp.com and anywhere that you stream music.

All music by Brian Allen Simon
Art by Susan Cianciolo, courtesy Bridget Donahue NYC
Mastering by Yosi Horikawa

I Remember You Like the Best Song (Edit)

This clip contains 2 tracks from the upcoming soundtrack album from the film "Schächten". 1. "Slaughter" 2. "Hope Through Confusion". Released December 9th. 300xLP + Digital.


________________
Erik K Skodvin's feature-length score to Thomas Roth's thriller "Schächten" feels like the epitome of all his musical projects, conjuring a dark cinematic trip through 1960's post-WWII Vienna in a film that touches on topics such as law, justice & revenge.

Releasing a soundtrack as a stand-alone album can be challenging; and "Schächten" is by no means a typical listening experience. The record contains 24 more or less short pieces evolving through dramatic movements, underlaying menace and deep emotive scenes. One thing that stands out is the linear atmosphere throughout the story which creates a wholeness that keeps your attention to the very end. Set in wintery Austrian landscapes in dimly saturated colours, the film's dramatic events with dark political undertones feels like a perfect situation for Skodvin's atmospheric collages - perhaps sounding closer than ever to his early works as Svarte Greiner or Deaf Center. Cello, violin, piano, analogue synth and plenty of hardly recognizable instrumentation come together in a record that feels very organic in its subdued tones. The score also features percussion by Andrea Belfi as well as a Chopin piano interpretation by Kelly Wyse to the bizarrely schizophrenic piece "Judenfreund".

With the contemporary world sliding into darkness again, listening to the soundtrack feels like coming to terms with ones own anxieties - something that in the end comes through as a cleansing experience. As quoted in the film "Everyone is their own devil. And we make this world our hell".

Short synopsis : "Vienna 1960s - The young Jewish business man Victor has to witness how the prosecution of a Nazi crime against his family fails. The political and legal system is still virtually run by former Nazis with large parts of society being entangled in the past. When Victor also loses his grief ridden father and his girlfriend’s family opposes their relationship and his identity, Victor begins to loose faith in formal justice and takes matters in his own hands."

Schächten

Erik K Skodvin - Schächten (teaser)

Ethereum Soft-Play (H3 5/24 030) -- ETHEREALITY candidate

From album 'TRACED', Pattern 04, Sonic Pieces, 2017

Traced

Post Human

TOMOKO SAUVAGE 'Clepsydra' from Musique Hydromantique (SP087)

→ http://shelter-press.org/tomoko-sauvage-musique-hydromantique-sp087/

Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls - the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (released on and/OAR in 2009) was studio-recorded /composed work, «Musique Hydromantique» is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment - acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity and the human presence.

For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession for the musician - an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control and interaction with the acoustic space.

Calligraphy was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about 10 second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. Fortune Biscuit is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of ‘biscuit’ (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound : insect and animal voices in a forest, motors, crying babies changing pitches and rhythms while absorbing the water… Clepsydra (meaning water clock) features Sauvage’s classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. She tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities.

Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument, leading to a path to experiencing timelessness.

Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. Through primordial materials and ritualistic yet playful gestures, Musique Hydromantique questions contemporary divination.

All the tracks are live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. They were recorded during the night or very early in the morning and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day.

—
LP edition of 500 copies with reverse board-printed inner and outer sleeve. Digipack CD edition of 1000 copies. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.

Musique Hydromantique

Clepsydra

TOMOKO SAUVAGE 'Clepsydra' (SP087)

MIKA VAINIO + RYOJI IKEDA + ALVA NOTO - LIVE 2002 [N-043]

In September 2002 Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) were invited by the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art for a residency. As a result of this project three live performances followed this research period.

All the tracks on this record were recorded live on September 23, 2002 at the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art in Newcastle, UK.

All sounds by Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai.

LIVE 20O2

MOVEMENT 4

MIKA VAINIO + RYOJI IKEDA + ALVA NOTO - MOVEMENT 4

Mircosite: http://iddk.houndstoothlabel.com/
Pre-Order: http://bit.ly/2CNyA8V
Buy individual tracks each day as they are premiered on Bandcamp: http://bit.ly/2Djl6CU

The release represents a complete rethink about what it means to compile and commission music in the streaming era – and the tracks and seductively dark atmospheres conjured as a result are exploring all kinds of new sonic territory, too. In short, the cream of leftfield electronic talent have been given a brief: to take the phrase “in Death's dream kingdom”, or the whole of T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men from which it comes, as inspiration.

The resulting 25 tracks will be released, day by day, together with further artist information, to build into the full work. Not an album in the traditional sense, certainly more than just a playlist, it brings together a seriously diverse array of talents into a coherent whole with a vivid aesthetic reverberating through it. It occupies a similar space to the great home listening electronica acts of the 90s – Future Sound Of London, Global Communication, the Artificial Intelligence axis – but there are no throwbacks here: this is radical in sound and thought. Dark music for dark times.

"This poem made me want to go upward and to a brighter side of the world :)" ~ Tomoko Sauvage

01 - Otto Lindholm - Cain
02 - Pan Daijing - The Island Within
03 - Lanark Artefax - Styx
04 - Petit Singe - Komm Wieder Mit
05 - Peder Mannerfelt - Post Sense Perspective
06 - Tomoko Sauvage - In Some Brighter Sphere
07 - Pye Corner Audio - Box In A Box
08 - Sophia Loizou - Shadows of Futurity
09 - Abul Mogard - Trembling With Tenderness
10 - Pär Grindvik - Speaking Their Minds
11 - Koenraad Ecker - Rat's Coat
12 - Roly Porter - Without Form
13 - Hodge - Sunlight On A Broken Column 
14 - Gazelle Twin - The Dream Ends 
15 - Shapednoise - Ghostly Metafiction
16 - ASC - Tessellate
17 - Batu - Zoo Hypothesis
18 - We Will Fail - Carbon Trail
19 - Peter Van Hoesen - 98 Lines
20 - Spatial - Haunted Dance Hall
21 - Yves De Mey - Solemn But Fading
22 - Mindspan - Accept Things As They Are
23 - Kangding Ray - Glacier
24 - ZOV ZOV - Post Six
25 - Ian William Craig - An End Of Rooms

In Death's Dream Kingdom

To The Brightest

Pre-Order

Tomoko Sauvage - In Some Brighter Sphere (Clip)

This is an excerpt of the first of two improvised concerts given at Aqtushetii in the village of Omalo in the northern Tusheti region of Georgia, deep in the Caucasus mountains. It's played on a Prophet synthesizer in a tuning I got from Kraig Grady, which is called Sisiutl. A 12 tone 11-limit self mirroring scale in just intonation. A Centaur-like scale with 11s instead of 5s. The other sounds are grass hoppers I had recorded in the field below us during the day, as well as some looped contact mic'd instruments also made that day. A metal barrel suspended from a ceiling beam and metal spring strung between two nails on a board (built with the help of some enthusiastic locals and played with mallets). Thanks go out to Robert McDougall for inviting me and Scott McCulloch for hosting me on this residency.

Moon Wheel — Sisiutl (Live in Tusheti, Georgia)

Arts and culture practitioners and organisations Declare a Climate and Ecological Emergency. See @CultureDeclares 

download to your phone, for participants in the Culture Declares in London ceremony, 3rd April 

'Sonum Vocis Magnum Parvo

This score comprises of both an amplified through composed piece of music and accompanying acoustic bells to be performed as a promenade. Shifting, phasing, moving like a sonic cloud.  Bells are traditionally used to call communities together, to mark the passing of time, to raise the alarm, we wanted to use these modest handbells, intrinsically a small sound, but when multiplied, the gathering of a small sound makes a big sound. Compassionate, compelling - we will be heard!  Sonum Vocis Magnum is a play on words the literal translation to Latin of Small Sound, Big Sound, but therein lies the voice - voices of the people, culture declares…  'Mira Calix 


written and produced by Mira Calix and Ed Handley

Sonum Vocis Magnum Parvo

"Reiterations" by First Tone from "Reactions" 2xLP/Digital due out October 2019.

"Reiterations" by First Tone

UK record label based at fabric, East London. Run in part by Rob Booth (Electronic Explorations)

Tomoko Sauvage - In Some Brighter Sphere (Clip)

Houndstooth

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