Anti-Techno EP

A1. A'Bear - You're In There Somewhere

A hörspiel of speculative documentation.

Voices: Alison Smithson, Peter Smithson, Peter Daniel, Neave Brown
and a chorus of anonymous narrators.

Organ: Mozart's Fugue in G Minor played by Martin Haselböck.

Text extracts: Paul Sheerbart's Glasarchitektur (1914).

Featuring recordings from the initial demolition stages of Robin Hood Gardens.

"God in Christ, why do we destroy our prophets and our poets? Like animals we soil each other and the land around us. Hollow men in a wasteland - it is too late, too late." (PD)

A sound installation from the Disappearing Landscapes exhibition at LUBOMIROV / ANGUS-HUGHES Gallery, 4th - 26th November 2017.

In memory of Neave Brown, 1929-2018.

cassette masters

A thin veneer of fake brick cladding  and the bitter sensation of loss

"Mother Pig (Opposing Disneyland)," the third installment in the ongoing Tyrant Hotel project, was broadcast at 4pm, March 12th, on Resonance 104.4FM.

Readers, in order of appearance:


a. Iain Sinclair, ‘Animal Drums’ (Prompt Note) [0.00];
b. Lily Hackett, ‘Seabird’ [4.12]; 
c. Brad Phillips, ‘Mom & Dad’ (Deleted Scenes) [7.38]; 
d. Frederic Tuten, ‘Rimbaud in the Kitchen’ [12.13]; 
e. Ashton Politanoff, ‘She had Wanted to be Closer to the Ocean’[23.19];
f. Isabel Waidner, ‘Stranger Things’ [28.19];
g. David Keenan, ‘Bible Time’ [41.50];
h. Vi Khi Nao, ‘Human Camouflage’ [45.26];
i. SJ Fowler, ‘Animal Drums’ (Reprise) [55.10]

The readings are accompanied by a soundtrack of pirated and plagiarized materials with additional original contributions from Satan Li Schtinter.

Tyrant Hotel #3 — "Mother Pig (Opposing Disneyland)"

Scrapes and Sighs (2019) - Alexis Weaver

Premiered at the ANTIMATTER album launch, 2nd December 2019, 107 Redfern.

Track mixed for stereo diffusion. Headphone mix coming soon.

Scrapes and Sighs (2019)

Graham Dunning explores the world as a giant record player in his new tape Something About Still Trying. Well known as a turntable experimentalist  Dunning brings this sensibility to field recording in this album which sees him building a giant stylus out of a stick for A Tracing of a Single Tide, re-configuring a windmill as a huge turntable in Windchange, and finding a recording which sounds like a scratch loop to compose the opening title track.
Something About Still Trying is out January 30 on cassette.

A Tracing Of A Single Tide (excerpt)  - Graham Dunning - Something About Still Trying out Jan 30

Beatrice Dillon - Workaround
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No: PAN 106
Release Date: 07 February 2020
Purchase: bit.ly/33ISoYr

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythmobsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro- Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

Recorded over 2017-2019 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14 bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.

‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.

With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.

Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace.

The album is mixed by James Rand and mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Thomas Ruff, layout by Johannes Schnatmann & Bill Kouligas.

Workaround

Beatrice Dillon - Workaround Eight (PAN 106)

"Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all"

Five radio producers from around the world hijack The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature, in response to Emily Dickinson's poem 'Hope is the thing with feathers'.

In this edition Axel Kacoutié offers a story about a man's journey home, which interweaves with the discovery of a lesser-known truth about hope.

First broadcast 4th February 2020, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Axel Kacoutié

Between the Essays: Paradise 2/5

A selection of experimental frequencies, interviews and sessions plus cuts from the First Terrace label by Alex Ives (Specimens) and Joe Summers.

In this episode, Joe & Alex invite the prolific composer, field recordist, sound-sculptor and deep listener Annea Lockwood to the show. She provides an insight into a selection of her works from the past 50 years, as well the work of her late partner Ruth Anderson, who’s debut album ‘Here’ was released by Arc Light Editions this year.

Resonance Extra - 24/7 sound art, radio art and global music. Listen on DAB+ in Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, London and Norwich or via http://extra.resonance.fm

First Terrace #24 - Annea Lockwood - Tuesday 9th June 2020

Text and Voice - Leila Peacock
Sound Design - Robin The Fog

WAITING ROOMS

Une voix parcourt le Rhône - I
Cette œuvre de Julie Rousse est le fruit d'une recherche qui a commencé en 2019, travail au long cours donnant corps à la voix du fleuve Rhône. Field recordings, procédés expérimentaux et création sonore.

A thin veneer of fake brick cladding and the bitter sensation of loss

James Torrance

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