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Founder of Melbourne-based record label and publishing platform Daisart (@daisart-press), Justin Cantrell(@user-29348158), known herein as J + The Woolen Stars, has been an integral part of the development of the ambient music community in Australia and beyond. From his presence in the duo picnic to his own solo work as J and ju ca, Cantrell’s music brings an abstract, poetic quality that is both personal and universal. His debut performance of his latest moniker brings forth these traits with the sound of found elements from around Nina HQ to bring in additional textures to tell his story.

This performance can be listened to in its entirety and purchased as a digital edition at https://nights.ninaprotocol.com, with 100% of the proceeds going to the artist.

Nina Night - 007 - J + The Woolen Stars (Clip)

integration sounds from the source; an invitation into the shadow.

https://www.nts.live/shows/molinaro/episodes/molinaro-19th-april-2023

An1ma w/ Susu Laroche 190423

Ten years ago, Parish Bracha anonymously released his Disconscious album Hologram Plaza, significantly influencing the still nascent Vaporwave scene. He continued producing a number of disparate anonymous projects until Cascade II was released in 2020 on Arca's Mutant Mixtape.

Cascades of Refinement, which includes the single Cascade II, is Parish's debut album released under his own name and his focus on the dialogue between the digital and the organic continues. The techniques that defined his influential early sound have been refined into a flawless hybrid of analog and digital textures which give his post-minimalist compositions an unmistakably personal expressivity.

Classical instruments are mutilated and transmuted into razor-sharp shards of glass suspended on piano wire above warped opalescent metal while never losing sight of their tonal integrity. Much like the impartial juxtaposition Parish employs in his timbral exploration, each composition explores the concepts of beauty and gentleness through and with extremity, violence, and chaos as equal counterparts, with each successive piece refining and relieving the artificial tension between these states. Employing use of the Una Corda, prepared piano, bowed piano, plucked piano, harpsichord, church organ, untuned violin, voice, synthesizers, and resampled field recordings, Cascades of Refinement lies somewhere in the indefinite space between acoustic and electronic and is beholden to neither.

Parish's initial electroacoustic experiments with piano and strings were interrupted by the pandemic lockdown when he was limited to sampled instrumentation and digital processing available on a computer. Out of this necessity evolved an appreciation for the incidental nature of digitally sampled acoustic instrumentation and the unpredictability of its interaction with digital signal processing.

As work on Cascades of Refinement continued and acoustic recording was reintroduced, the focus turned to the tension between recorded and sampled instrumentation, with the goal of integrating the two into a singular indistinguishable material to be warped and shaped together. Each of the four pieces of the Cascade series explores this tension, successively integrating and collapsing their distinction with each piece. 
 
The subtle artifacts of digital processing and incidental mechanical sounds of the acoustic are amplified and given presence alongside the tonal elements of each piece until a point of indivisibility is reached. The sound of a bow scraping along a string or a granular buffer freezing are neither discarded nor hidden, but selected as the ripest material to accompany and structure each composition. Cascades of Refinement is a dialogue between organic and digital, between the mercurial and infinitely reproducible, not as opposites, but as mereologically cohabiting counterparts with equal expressivity.

Cascades Of Refinement

Parish - Cascade III - From Cascades Of Refinement CD/Tape

A quelques jours du retour de la Slug Rave à la Station F.Pneumonia et LeFrit, tous 2 membres du collectif, viennent sur les ondes stationnaires répandre la bonne parole de la lenteur : entre expériences de ralentissements et exploration des espaces entre chaque temps, laissez vous porter par l'esprit des limaces.

Carte Blanche ~ Slug Rave

An array of commonplace metal objects - chains, pans, a bicycle, a chair - recorded by Ross Alexander at home in Berlin during the pandemic comprise the source material of 11 𝑮𝒂𝒕𝒆𝒔. Functioning as a temporal and mnemonic exploration into the nature and conception of “home”, the album evokes Alexander’s earliest memories and broader hauntological perspectives of post-industrial England:

“Growing up in South Yorkshire in the 1980s and 90s was an existence haunted with the ghosts of a heavy manufacturing industry which once thrived in the region. On both a visceral and sensorial level it might be considered equally as impossible to escape the nostalgic stories of mines and steelworks as it was to escape the smell of molten metal in the air drifting from the Don Valley.”

The improvised metallic scrapes, bangs, and bowings recorded by Alexander were further abstracted in live performances using granular sampling techniques, creating a new and extrinsic world to which subconscious thoughts can flee, sonically and contextually. The results are both dreamy and unpredictable, fusing the immediacy of acoustic percussion with the billowing resonances imbued by granular synthesis.

“On tracing back through distant memories of my formative years for sound-objects which represented to me the essential idea of ‘being from’ as opposed to ‘being a visitor’ I related to a pervasive association with the sounds of metal and metallic objects, mostly in respect to how certain structural properties relate to haptic and resonant nature and the manifestation of those properties as sonic results. I feel this is the result of growing up in a place where heavy industry, or at least the remnant of which, was central to society, community and everyday life.”

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Ross Alexander is an artist, producer and curator based in Berlin working in the context of expansive trans-disciplinary practice and non-individualist ideals. His broad ranging body of work as an artist has encompassed music, performance, sound art, visual arts, installation, radio art, digital media, augmented reality, intervention, social practice and education. Ross has presented and performed at such institutions as ICA London, Transmediale Festival, Nyege Nyege Festival, Documenta Kassel and Martin-Gropius Bau Berlin.

As a curator and organizer his experimental and diverse practice has seen him work with Transmediale festival, Maerzmusik, Glastonbury Festival, Cashmere Radio, Nyege Nyege Festival Uganda and extensively with his own Salon Oblique production collective.

rossalexanderpayne.com
instagram.com/o0rossalexander0o
rossalexanderworks.bandcamp.com
mixcloud.com/rossalexandermix

Parish - Cascade III - From Cascades Of Refinement CD/Tape

IMPREC