DAVID GRANSTRÖM, Empty Room - LP

Release date - April 2th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2102
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) Obsidian 09:22
2) Aeon 10:56
3) Sapphire Visions 04:50
4) Occultations 10:08
5) Transience 04:45

Credits:
All tracks composed, recorded, performed and mixed by David Granström 
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Photography by Aron Mattsson
Cover design by Greenpointless

///
On »Empty Room,« David Granström works with slow transformations, cyclical and isometric patterns as well as just intonation as a way to create harmonic stability, allowing his long-form pieces to develop their own unique temporal and spatial qualities. A prolific figure in Stockholm’s experimental drone scene and a collaborator of Hallow Ground label mates Maria W Horn and Mats Erlandsson, the Swedish composer navigates through moments of quietude and crushing volume on these five tracks. Sonically and atmospherically, the pieces on »Empty Room« simultaneously call to mind Fennesz’s most meditative work or the physical experience of seeing Sunn O))) live, blending guitar recordings and synthesised sounds with forceful effects similar to those of Mario Díaz de Leon’s Oneirogen project while still being as moving and delicate as Alessandro Cortini’s solo work. The album is marked by melodies and harmonies that are the product of a peculiar working process that turned the composer into an intent listener collaborating with, rather than simply using technology. 

Having been invited by the self-organising artist group The Non Existent Center for a residency to Ställbergs Gruva, a defunct iron ore mine in Sweden’s Bergslagen region, Granström took his guitar as a starting point for his compositional work that heavily relies on real-time sound synthesis. »I seldomly use the instrument as a sound source in the final compositions and rather transcribe and orchestrate the harmonic structures using sound synthesis,« he explains. »On this album however, I chose to include the actual recordings of the guitar in order to extend the spectra between non-referential synthetic sounds and embodied referential sounds.« Working with precise tunings in order to blend the timbre of the synthesis with the harmonic structures of the composition, he created composite sound objects in which the harmonic elements blend into each other. 

Through the re-amplification of synthetic musical materials from the inside of the abandoned mine, his original compositions were enriched with site-specific sound qualities before he further refined them in a singular working process. Granström works with algorithmic and generative processes, using the SuperCollider programming environment and thus blurring the lines between generative and creative forms of composition. »One of the things that I like about this way of working is that it creates a distance between myself as a composer and myself as a listener of the music that is produced entirely by the system,« he says. Granström’s technologically aided eschewing of the conventions of composing doesn’t make the end result any less personal, however. By listening again and again to the newly generated output, Granström simply took on a different role in the process of finalising the music, with the technology and the sounds becoming his co-authors. 

By creating systems that generate music, he gains a new perspective on (musical) time, says Granström. »There doesn't have to be a fixed length to the music at all,« he explains. »And by writing music with this in mind, my focus tends to shift towards writing cyclical structures that gradually change and transform over time.« Simple parts, in other words, that emerge as the five complex wholes that form »Empty Room,« a record that itself seems to take on different forms with every new listen.

DAVID GRANSTRÖM - Occultations (HG2102)

LAURIN HUBER, Dog Mountain, LP

Release date - July 30th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2199
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1) Raja (04.59)
2) Nickel (05:50)
3) A Town Is Not A Town (04:54)
4) Storskog-Borisoglebsk (07:32)

Credits:
Composed and recorded by Laurin Huber
Mixed by Rolf Laureijs
Mastering by Lawrence English
Artwork by Michael Bodenmann

///
»Dog Mountain« is the second release by the Zurich-based producer and composer Laurin Huber on Hallow Ground. After last year’s »Juncture« saw the Edipo Re co-founder work mostly with synthesizers and programmed rhythms, the four tracks are much more restrained, drawing on tape loops and feedback, recordings of acoustic guitar and synthesizers such as the Korg MS-10 as well as field recordings that relate to the overarching topic that informed the making of the record. While »Juncture« had previously aimed at deconstructing the binaries and dualities that shape our lives and thinking, »Dog Mountain« is dedicated to geographical divisions that result from political processes and social constructions. »›Here‹ means one nation, ›there‹ another,« writes Huber in a literary piece that accompanies the record. »Being in sound, such a separation seems odd.« 

While treating the metaphor of the border as a »membrane, registering and translating the vibrations of its surroundings« and thus as something that is constantly (re-)defined, maintained and defended however, the artist also takes into consideration that »one cannot escape one’s standpoint,« as he puts it. The music on »Dog Mountain« may transcend and overcome certain borders, but it does not deny the realities that they impose on each and every one of us – whether in our political lives or in the realm of sound. This is mirrored in Huber’s engaging in the structural and sonic interplay of repetition and difference. Working with slowly evolving and modulating elements that are exposed to slight shifts, »Dog Mountain« puts a focus on the interaction between small elements that together form a bigger whole which is marked by constant evolution and change. 

Opener »Raja« (»border« in Northern Sami and Finnish) starts off with a two-note melody played on an out-of-tune guitar. Different field recordings and synthesizer sounds drop in and out of the mix until the dynamic shifts and Huber starts playing more notes on his instrument, thus increasing the tension. It’s a meditation on minimalism, but also a piece that mediates between notions of what constitutes the difference between noise and music or referentiality and abstraction in sound. After »Nickel« (named after a Russian monotown near the border to Norway) dedicates itself to explore the friction between hissing white noise and melancholic tape loops, »A Town Is Not a Town« (a phrase taken from the documentary »Kiruna – Rymdvägen«) structurally mirrors the experiment of »Raja« with very different sonic means. 

Closing the record, »Storskog-Borisoglebsk« (the title refers to the northernmost land border between Schengen-Europe and Russia) is the longest and most challenging piece, working with both long-form drones and musique concrète elements. It proposes a synthesis of the opposites that are explored patiently and with much attention to detail throughout this record.

LAURIN HUBER - A Town Is Not A Town (HG2199)

Hope Spring Eternal

Things Desired

Efemerides - De Luz Lila

track done in collaboration with Noémi Büchi for Biodiversità compilation. Symbiotic Chants 2022

photo: Jean-Marc Avila [ https://jeanmarcavila.com ]
Mixing and Mastering: Suoni Speziali

Symbiotic Chants

Feldermelder & Noémi Büchi - Chasing Crispr Variants

Limited edition of 50 purple tapes available here: https://granderoussedisques.bandcamp.com/album/sopoorific-waterfall-cave

Waterfall Cave

Sopoorific - A Place to Remember

soil/farm related sounds - Trophicverses
Trophic Verses is an artistic exploration into the life and phenomena in and around of Earth's body of soil. The project spans a period of nearly four years and has commenced in summer 2018. Each year the project manifests in different kinds of artistic and curatorial practices, and launches new collaborations with other art, research and environmental initiatives.
~Teemu Lehmusruusu Media artist and project director

live oqko+Klammklang at OHM 7.11.19

The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concrete threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date.

Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to “elevate the everyday,” transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition.

Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone.

But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, “Champagne Smoke.” A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house.

14 Gestures associated with this album will be performed in experimental film and online viewing room of graphic notation at 14gestures.com from 29th July to 29th October, 2020.

Collagen releases on Shelter Press in LP / DL format on August 21, 2020. LP mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at D+M, designed by Bartolomé Sanson with art by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, housed in reverse-board inner and outersleeve, including a 16 pages limited edition score book.

LISA LERKENFELDT 'The Weight Of History'

A1 - Kleptophonies - 10000 ans que je marche

AUTRE BROUSSE par Johann Mazé & Jihem Rita

Huit morceaux, huit tentatives d'approcher, parmi d'autres obsessions habituelles, la chanson, la pop, l'emballement rythmique, la danse, et ce qui se situe entre.
Avec les voix et les sons précieux de Cesar Amarante, Lou-Mah Al Abed Ratier, Johann Loiseau, Christophe Ratier, Antoine Souchav et Laszlo Mazé.

Enregistré à Floirac, à Bordeaux, à Marcillac-Vallon, à Lima, à Saint-Laurent-des-Bâtons, à Porspoder, à Bergerac, quelque part entre Tan-Tan et Dakhla, et le plus souvent à la maison.

Joué et assemblé en 2020.

Mixé en décembre 2020 à la Grange Cavale avec Manuel Duval.
Mastering par Fabien Meunier
Conception graphique par P.M Laroche

Merci à Cesar pour son inspiration lumineuse et rapide, à Lou-Mah pour avoir finalement accepté de chanter, à Christophe, à Johann, à Antoine, à Valentin Portron pour le moment “chapelle“, à Manuel, à Johan Mailleret pour la proposition, à Elise Amiet pour le piano, à Anne-Cécile et à Laszlo pour leur patience.

Autre Brousse

Dégauchisseur

From "SOFT EYES" (iDEAL210) LP

Edition of 300 copies. Distributed by Boomkat.

Vocals: John Duncan
Saxophone: Gabriele Zobele
Percussion: Francesco Cossu, John Duncan
Church organ, Brass, Bass: Ivan Pjevcevic
Backing vocals: Elisa Mazzola, Mattia Bonafè, Yelena De Luca Mitrjushkina, Tullia Benedicta, Ivan Pjevcevic

Recorded and mixed at ShortStraw Studio, Bologna

Mastering by Ivan Pjevcevic at ShortStraw Studio, Bologna

John Duncan - The Rabid Position (iDEAL210)

Electronic Sound Disturbances & Pleasures since 1998.

John Duncan - The Rabid Position (iDEAL210)

iDEAL Recordings

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