yes yes. good. yes yes. good. yes yes. good...

Shelter Press is happy to announce the release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit’s latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by - and dedicated to - the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer.

Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s.

In the piece, Ankersmit explores different “modes” of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up loud, the material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener’s head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as “ear tones”.

The title is a reference to Amacher’s essay “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography”, and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. “Ear tone” stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener’s head reveals changes.

For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion.

The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher.

This is a digital-only release (CD and download) because the “ear tone” material can’t be adequately transferred to vinyl.

Please play loud and use speakers, not headphones. 
credits
releases March 19, 2021

Music: Thomas Ankersmit
Mastering: Kassian Troyer
Design: Bartolomé Sanson
Interview editing: Michelle Arrouas

THOMAS ANKERSMIT 'Perceptual Geography' (EXCERPT) (SP130)

TR160 - Joachim Nordwall - 'FORMS OF ECSTASY'

Electronic musician and sound artist Josep Kamaru, aka KMRU, takes us on our first December sonic journey.
Born in Nairobi and currently based in Berlin, KMRU is a sound artist and producer whose methods include field recording, improvisation, noise, machine learning, radio art and drones. With a paramount sound and visual sensibility, his work is reminiscent of ambient masters such as Lawrence English. KMRU’s sound though is uniquely positioned between the rarely-married cultures of ambient and African music, entwining his compositions with field recordings from his native Kenya and the surrounding countries of East Africa.

Self-releasing his productions, these have been received very enthusiastically by both critics and the audience. In 2020, he released three albums that showed the depth and range of his sound: Peel, an LP of hypnotic drones on the avant-garde institution Editions Mego; Opaquer, a collection of vivid and dreamlike sound sculptures; and Jar, a dreamlike cassette of found sounds and analogue ambience. KMRU hasn’t stopped in 2021 with a few more releases including Logue, an album Formed of tracks written from 2017 to 2019, which represents an artist not only in command of his form but also willing to develop and evolve, ready to deconstruct and radically refocus his music to explore new contours of experimental and ambient sound design.

This mix he shares is a liminal narrative of falling asleep, each track feels like an episode of a hypnagogic state. I’ve been thinking deeply about dreams and nostalgia this past week and these tracks evoke this feeling.


Tracklist:
Patricia Wolf - Morning Light
KMRU & Nyokabi Kariuki – unreleased
Fields We Found – Drops
Alexandra Spence - Suddenly Silent
Perila & Ulla - every something is an echo of nothing
Kevin Richard Martin - In Slow Motion
Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt - Styrofoam Tone
Pita - Two Top Five
Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin - Uptown Psychedelia
Aho Ssan - Outro (KMRU Remix)
Tashi Wada - March 2007
MIGUEL ANGEL TOLOSA - salon 09-02
loscil – Vespera
The Transcendence Orchestra - Weather Series
John Hassel -Hex
Sarah Davachi - Border of Mind

CLOT Magazine presents KMRU - Encouraged Rain

from KR093:  MimiCof - Distant Symphony
LP / tape / DL out on june 10th 2022

Distant Symphony

MIMICOF - Distant Symphony I (excerpt)

from Martina Bertoni's forthcoming album "Hypnagogia", out on 20th january 2023 as LP / tape / DL

Hypnagogia

MARTINA BERTONI - Inversion

Available via Imprec.com

Francesco Gennari is trained as a classical pianist and he commits himself to sound exploration through modular synth practice as further evolution of his musical journey. Gennari's origins are with black and white keys, noise-punk bands and DIY instrument building. This stunning debut, titled Frammenti, is the culmination of all of Gennari's interests.

Through simple ideas developed with classical techniques like counterpoint and harmonic expansions, Francesco uses the modular setup as a virtual companion, allowing him to do what he wants while remaining open to what the machine whispers to him.

Francesco’s music charms with minimal rhythmic patterns, sonic manipulation and lush ambient soundscapes comprised of short ideas full of variations.

Highly recommended to fans of Caterina Barbieri, Jessica Ekomane, Alessandro Cortini

Frammenti

Francesco Gennnari - Ardere - From Frammenti Tape - 5.5.23

Purple Dreams

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'

opening track of BÉRANGÈRE MAXIMIN's upcoming album "Land of Waves" . 2xLP / DL

Land of Waves

BÉRANGÈRE MAXIMIN - Day 41

Amirtha Kidambi and Lea Bertucci duo
From the forthcoming END OF SOFTNESS EP on Astral Spirits - Pre-orders available June 5th, 2020.
https://kidambibertucci.bandcamp.com/album/end-of-softness

Destroying Angel

from KR083:  MARTINA BERTONI - Music For Empty Flats. LP / DL / Tape out january 29th 2021

Music For Empty Flats

MARTINA BERTONI - Music For Empty Flats

Berlin based label for experimental / electronic / contemporary / drone / ambient and related sounds.
Demos, interview or wholesale requests etc. pls via
contact  at  karlrecords.net

thanks.

MARTINA BERTONI - Music For Empty Flats

Karlrecords

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