https://12thisle.bandcamp.com/album/brace-mend

Lucy Duncombe - Brace

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]

From the album Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi "Palimpsests" out on Shelter Press om October 22, 2021. Preorder: https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/palimpsests

Bandcamp

Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - Simferopol

Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spontaneous and confessional improvisations, despite that fact that making them was a way of “making peace with myself and the reality around me” for the Kraków-based artist. The artwork created by costume designer, sculptor and illustrator Julita Goździk and track titles also allude to an interest in rituality, repetitiveness and the cyclical nature of our existence.

Constant listening, instinct and intuition are key to Martyna Basta’s practice. Having studied classical guitar for many years as a child, Basta now focuses her energies on more abstract forms of art as a photographer, musician, member of the PROGREFONIK collective and Radio Kapitał resident. Making Eye Contact With Solitude follows a string of shorter self-releases and is her label debut, and a wonderful introduction to her back-catalogue for many. Slotting in somewhere between the vocal mantras of Cucina Povera, the emotional immediacy of Claire Rousay’s recordings and the carefully crafted sonic environs of Félicia Atkinson, Martyna Basta is carving out a unique corner of the ambient world for herself. 

Pre-order: https://martynabasta.bandcamp.com/album/making-eye-contact-with-solitude

Making Eye Contact With Solitude

Martyna Basta – Awakening

speak all voices

Polish composer Aleksandra Słyż joins Warm Winters Ltd. with A Vibrant Touch, her second full-length album. While her debut Human Glory released by Pointless Geometry explored two distinct approaches and techniques, here she finds her unique path forward: finding connections between acoustic and synthetic sounds, creating rich drone structures, slowly but intensely pulsing and resonating within the surrounding space and within each listener.

“I am very much fascinated by the processes related to the body sensations experienced through sound and its movement. I have always perceived sound as a physical phenomenon, travelling as waves of energy, as vibrations which we can literally feel and physically experience,” she shares. “Therefore, from the very beginning I wanted to use recordings of specific acoustic instruments, which in my opinion beautifully represent the motion itself.” Joining Słyż and her modular synthesizer on A Vibrant Touch is a quartet of musicians playing violin (Kosma Műller), viola (Kamil Babka), cello (Anna Szmatoła) and alto saxophone (Marcus Wärnheim).

The three pieces on the album explore the physicality of sound of these instruments – like the way a finger or bow presses down on the string of a cello, or the air pressure in the saxophone when someone blows inside it – as they intertwine with expert navigation of modular synthesizers by Słyż. Drawing on the work of 20th century spectral composers like Grisey or Scelsi, just intonation, drone music and microtonality for inspiration, the Polish composer uses dissonance, tension and pulse with incredible grace and power.

She opens the proceedings with the patient, gliding and stirring piece “Healing”. “The Ruthless Act” is slightly more ominous and grainy, as the cello and modular synthesizer mimic each other's movements to disorienting effect. The final piece “Softness, Flashes, Floating Rage” is a monumental composition lasting almost 26 minutes, a crowning jewel of the album. Słyż and the instrumentalists are exceedingly patient as the piece slowly unravels into a brutal, heart- and ear-shattering climax. It's a testament to her compositional prowess, that a piece of this length is imbued with so much weight and elegance.

A Vibrant Touch

Aleksandra Słyż – Healing

20240503demo

Insect March

"a distinct new shade of modern, adult, atmospheric emotion and feminine pressure"

Answering a need for sincerity and intimacy in overwhelming times, Berlin's @perila makes her striking solo debut with a blush-worthy suite of sonic erotica, ASMR and sensuous ambient environments...

Tracklist:

A1. Natʼs Poems (with Nat Marcus) 
A2. Mouth Full Of Tahini

B1. Sweat (with Inger Wold Lund) 
B2. XY Object Of Desire 
B3. Message From Another Table

Digital Bonus: Wet

Edition of 300 copies.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space, cut at D&M Berlin.
Release Date: 18/07/2019

Perila - Irer Dent (sferic004) [Preview]

Available now via Imprec.com

Akhira Sano's  Penetrating, For Filtration was manufactured on C60 Super Ferro tape for a low noise floor, high output, and an incredible warm sound. Packaged in a purple tinted case with silver shimmer printing. 

Japan's Akhira Sano is a young master of slow, ambient, electro new age music. His compositions are highly organic, growing and flowing with great patience and care. But, like in nature, imperfections and incidentals are allowed to evolve producing sublimely primal and imperfect music. In a world where everything can be made perfect, Sano's work is deliciate, shimmering and electric; abolishing and preserving time simultaneously. 

Sano creates painterly music (he is also a painter) based on the themes of error and constraint. He is a visionary sonic architect who sees his musical structures as incomplete; always unfinished. His debut on Sun Ark Records in 2019 was very well received and his demo for Imprec was immediate and compelling. Lose yourself in these two long tape sides on the second official release from Akhira Sano.

Akhira Sano - Missing Cell - from Penetrating, For Filtration - C60 - Available now

From ANM047 "Climat Avenir", by Simon Chioini — CD Digipack

Climat avenir ; portrait of unexploited lands, of deserted spaces, of a corrosive and venomous flora. Irked protagonists, roaming livestock, their acidic cries.
Beauty of the blue-green lakes, of the scintillating stars under clouds of bronze. The earth's foundational movement.
Crashing ice. Solar winds.
This work cycle is an imagined world voided of any human presence, or succeeding it. It is a prismatic composition: a vibrant landscape, a topographic map, an exploded geode.
Macro. Micro.

Music composition and mastering by Simon Chioini.
Photography by Violeta Mayoral. Sculptures by Lara Fluxà. Art Direction and concept by Violeta Mayoral and Lara Fluxà.

Akhira Sano - Missing Cell - from Penetrating, For Filtration - C60 - Available now

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