Current Ambient I keep on coming back to

Marco Lucchi : piano
M.Nomized : electronics
James Hill : trumpet

for "piano patterns" vol. 2 https://soundcloud.com/marcolucchi/sets/piano-patterns-vol-2

marzo 2021

Marco Lucchi, M.Nomized & James Hill - #9

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)

"Make the Secrets Produtive" is taken from "Fold Unfold", Katrine Grarup Elbo´s debut album. Handmade LP and CD editions available April, 2021.

Fold Unfold

Katrine Grarup Elbo - Make the Secrets Productive

Based on Franco Battiato's L'Egitto Prima Della Sabbia

L'Egitto dopo La Cicala

from 'The Faded Orbit' [CD|LP|DIGITAL]
Denovali Records · den363
available on all formats at http://denovali.com/saffronkeira

Siavash Amini is a composer from Tehran, Iran. He Has worked with labels like Room40, Hallow Ground, Opal Tapes and Umor Rex for the better half of the past ten years. He has performed at festivals like CTM & MUTEK and many other well known international events. Apart from it Siavash is a co-founder of the “SET experimental art events” and “SETfest” in Tehran, Iran. His work ranges from fragile ambient pieces and brittle IDM (incorporating his distinctive style of atmospheric guitar playing) to noisy drones and bleak modern classical pieces. His compositions have been inspired by films such as Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror as well as novels by Dostoyesvky and poems by T.S. Eliot.

Saffronkeira is the Sardinian sound researcher Eugenio Caria being active in the electronic music scene since almost two decades. His most recent work - a cooperation with the Italian jazz trumpet legend Paolo Fresu - earned a lot of praise from the international music press for the pure timelessness of the album.

"Upon hearing a small snippet of sound an image is conjured, not a memory but not unfamiliar. A shell of a memory, thousand events superimposed on each other. While trying to extract points of a narrative to ease the discomfort of this recollection, I try to separate and unfold the image and with it the points of the spectrum which make up the sound, a shell of a narrative. Here is an album based upon an almost entirely imagined/ synthesized happening upon hearing a snippet of sound. It sounded like of a whole story that never happened but yet I felt myself  amongst it’s participants, a sound triggering a false memory. Each sound in Eugenio’s collection of sounds and ideas guided me a to a point in the narrative and it’s construction. He had handed me a portals of some kind to a few scenes of the whole narrative. This is the soundtrack for that false memory from all the perspectives I can think of."

The Faded Orbit

Saffronkeira + Siavash Amini - A Lambent Assembly

The Threshold HouseBoys Choir was a project by Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson. Operating out of Bangkok, Thailand, the Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV founding member started this audio and visual endeavour after Coil’s conclusion.

Despite the name, it was a solo project relying heavily on computer generated vocals. The name was derived from a play on words, combining the terms houseboy, house of boys, boys' choir, and Threshold House, which was Coil’s own label. "Form Grows Rampant" is the soundtrack of a film shot by Christopherson (a video capture at the GinJae Vegetarian Festival in the south of Thailand) and his first major musical project since the tragic death of John Balance and Coil’s subsequent demise.

The music is a suite of lengthy dense atmospherics that combine shuddering electronics with sampled vocals, eerie digitalia, buried melodies and sinister undercurrents hinting at a gleaming heart of darkness, with a joyful melodic progression that sounds positively triumphant towards the end of the album. It's both Coil-esque and quite different, and is undoubtedly the worthy successor of the essential project that Christopherson created with his partner John Balance.

First released in small quantities in 2007 as a mixed CD/DVD set, this is the first time it is released on vinyl, CD, and digital. This reissue has been mastered from original files by Sidney Claire Meyer at former Deutsche Grammophon studios Emil Berliner in Berlin, using the half speed mastering process, and pressed on heavy vinyl at 45 RPM. Limited Edition of 1000. Printed on inside out on heavy 350g cardboard. Gatefold sleeve features stills from the movie in chronological order (Warning: contains explicit graphic images depicting religious devotees in trance-like states, tongue slashing, partial skinning, impaling through cheeks, ears, etc). Includes original liner notes by Peter Christopherson.

File under COIL Forever, Religious IDM, Ecstatic Classical, Post Ethnic Industrial Exotica, Erotic Trance and best album ever heard.

The Threshold HouseBoys Choir ‎- Intimations Of Spring

enigma

AddyDomarus

Marco Lucchi : analog synthesizer, electronic tampura and tape

droning with "Medea" by Wim Mertens

25 marzo 2022

Trobar clus

Vinyl & digital album: kmruahossan.bandcamp.com/album/limen

Released on April 29th, 2022

Last year, Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU) and French digital alchemist Niamké Désiré (aka Aho Ssan) were invited by Berlin Atonal to collaborate on a project for the festival's Metabolic Rift edition.

The duo had already been working together, but the offer provided the momentum to shift the conversation into another gear. Initially, they looked for thematic connections within their individual practices that might match Kamaru's meditative soundscapes with Désiré's crumbling cyberpunk expressionism, and surprisingly for two artists renowned for their grasp of minimalism, it was the opposite that drew their attention. Watching the world shift as it reacted to the spiraling pandemic, Kamaru and Désiré were moved to experiment with volume, physicality, and intense emotionality.

“I never made something so extreme," Désiré says of the duo's first recording, 2021's 'Ruined Abstractions', an extended composition that matches dense, powerful low-end drones with fractal digital fuzz and smokestack bruit. It set the mood for a back-and-forth that resulted in their seismic debut full-length, "Limen", described by the two acclaimed artists as an attempt to scrutinize the yin and yang of destruction and creation.

Cacophonous, concrete crunches fanfare the album's opening piece 'Resurgence' - the result of their Berlin Atonal commission - but the track refuses to languish in wrecking ball devastation. Instead, powerful synthesized harmonies ring from beneath the rubble, before stifling everything in a humid fuzz of dense, emotionally-charged cinematic electronics.

Influenced by the prescient post-apocalyptic mood of Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" and the mythological phoenix, an immortal bird said to be reborn from the ashes of its dying predecessor, "Limen" is an album that sonically snapshots the anxious, floral beauty of an explosion or the colorful intensity of a raging fire. It's rooted in concepts of duality - the idea something unsettling can be viewed from a different angle and re-interpreted.

On the album's epic, 21-minute centerpiece 'Ruined Abstraction I + II', swirling electromagnetic interference paints a haunted parallel vista that dissolves slowly into subtle, orchestral tones and booming, widescreen thuds.

Almost angelic closing track 'Rebirth' meanwhile is the most unashamedly beautiful composition Kamaru and Désiré have written together, but its choral bliss is doused in petroleum noise and saturated distortion.

"Limen" is an album that seeks to lift a veil of silence from the world, replacing it with maximalist bombast and vivid passion. It's a dynamic piece of work that finds its creators pushing themselves to the limits, deconstructing history as it detonates around us.

All tracks written and produced by Joseph Kamaru
and Niamké Désiré; mastered by Joker

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2022

subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

Vinyl & digital album

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Ruined Abstractions

From the album Palimpsests (Shelter Press, 2021) 
https://andrewpekler.bandcamp.com/album/palimpsests

Buy on Bandcamp

Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi – Ravenna

Gruth is set to release his 3rd solo album, this time via Temporize. Scenes From  was written between 2018 and 2021 in Brazil and follows Gruth’s debut album Laments released in 2018, and his second album Somnum Exterreri.. Written as a two-act play, 'Act I, Scene I - Wake In Fright' is the opening track and captures Gruth's light, euphoric sound that perfectly transitions from the final moments of Somnum Exterreri. 


words: https://www.asifnoway.com/premiere-gruth-act-i-scene-i-wake-in-fright-temporize

Scenes From

Premiere: Gruth - Act I Scene I; Wake in Fright (Temporize)

Metamorphoses

A collaboration with Marco (https://soundcloud.com/musichevirtuali) (https://soundcloud.com/marcolucchi/tracks)   for his 'Tides' project;
https://soundcloud.com/marcolucchi/tides-looking-for-contributors-reworkers-morphers-and-so-on
:D

Night Tides [Marco Lucchi & Boson Spin]

Time is Local

We like We & Jacob Kirkegaard - Clotho

Pre-order https://boomkat.com/products/primal-forms

In a world seemingly hellbent on tearing itself apart, it makes perfect sense for two musicians from such disparate backgrounds and disciplines to come together to create a new musical vernacular. Sam Shackleton, returning on Cosmo Rhythmatic after his previous outing on the label as Tunes of Negation, and Polish clarinetist/multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel have joined forces. Their offering is a new album for the label: three long tracks of spiritual introspection and ascensional energy. A work of unison and  solidarity.

Primal Forms 

More exclusive music

Premiere: Shackleton & Zimpel 'Primal Drones'

(Within An Ectopic Existence, An Exemplary Flair For Active Disassociation, Cave Pit Drops, We,Perpetually Seduced By Pain, After     the Brow Is Beaten)

The Falcon Stoops

a rework from Lärmschutz of "piano patterns n°14" by Marco Lucchi

for "piano patterns" vol. 2, a project by Marco Lucchi
soundcloud.com/marcolucchi/sets/piano-patterns-vol-2

gennaio 2021

Marco Lucchi - Open After Nutter (#14 Ruined By Lärmschutz)

NORMAN WESTBERG & JACEK MAZURKIEWICZ, First Man in the Moon - LP
Release date - March 12th 2021
Catalogue nr. - HG2101
Format - Vinyl / digital
Hallow Ground
Vinyl / digital, catalogue nr. HG2101

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
What Is Good For The Goose (09:35)
That Was Then (08:29)
First Man In The Moon (06:45)
Falsely Accused (06:33)
Oxnard (05:47)

Credits:
Recorded at Studio Diamentowy Pies
Damian Pielka, engineering
Piotr Mazurek, engineering assistance
Jacek Mazurkiewicz, mix
Lawrence English, mastering
John Fell, photographs
Greenpointless, design

///
An unlikely meeting of two like-minded spirits, »First Man in the Moon« sees the former Swans guitarist and Hallow Ground regular Norman Westberg and the prolific double bass player Jacek Mazurkiewicz collaborate for five evocative tracks. The pair finds common ground beyond the boundaries of atmospheric drone, abstract jazz and experimental music and blurs the lines between the acoustic and the electronic. 

The two first met when the composer Mazurkiewicz supported Swans with his solo project 3FoNIA on their 2014 European tour. »I really enjoyed his approach,« says Westberg about the Polish musician’s blending of the acoustic qualities of his instrument with electronically generated sounds. A decision to collaborate was made and when the US-American musician returned to Eastern Europe to support Michael Gira on his solo tour in late 2019, Mazurkiewicz reached out to him with the idea of booking some studio time before Gira’s two concerts in Warsaw. »Recording was very fun and easy,« remembers Westberg. »It was just two people enjoying hearing and reacting to what the other is doing.«

»First Man in the Moon« is not however a plain document of these improvised sessions, but also shaped by Mazurkiewicz’s approach as a composer. Once the recordings were finished, he selected and edited the recorded material, refining the peculiar dialogue between the guitarist’s meditative drones and bright chords and his own rhythmic yet subtle approach to playing the double bass, sometimes plucking the strings and occasionally using his bow to underscore Westberg’s fleeting melodies, but also using the instrument in unconventional ways to generate sound. 

A feeling of weightlessness prevails throughout the aptly-titled »First Man in the Moon.« Even at their most abstract however, these five improvisations-turned-compositions remain tangible, lively, and joyfully explorative. It is a record that you wouldn’t expect from either of these musicians, but the logical result of two idiosyncratic minds sharing not only space and time, but also their respective visions with each other.

NORMAN WESTBERG & JACEK MAZURKIEWICZ - What Is Good For The Goose (HG2101)

From Atlas der Gedanken, available now on cassette tape and digital.
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/atlas-der-gedanken

Current Ambient I keep on coming back to

Goner Music