Name: Voice by Maja S. K. Ratkje
Duration: 6 min 16 s
Description: From the record by Maja S. K. Ratkje with the same title released on Rune Grammofon 2002.

Great atmo ! Sounds nicely chosen and arranged 

a...  transcendental vocal opus!)) =  masterpiece!

Inspired by the final lines from the poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood by the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

"The Clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."



Intimations: A Prelude

Holly Herndon - Home (acappella) djynxx bootleg

From the record by Maja S. K. Ratkje with the same title released on Rune Grammofon 2002. 

Voice

Tra l’andarsene e il restare dubita il giorno,
innamorato della sua trasparenza.

La sera circolare è già baia:
nel suo quieto viavai oscilla il mondo.

Tutto è visibile e tutto è elusivo,
tutto è vicino e tutto è intoccabile.

Nel centro dei tuoi occhi mi scopro;
non mi guardi, mi guardo nel tuo sguardo.

 Si dissipa l’istante. Senza muovermi,
io resto e me ne vado: sono una pausa.

I fogli, il libro, il bicchiere, la matita
riposano all’ombra dei loro nomi.

Palpitare del tempo che nelle mie tempie ripete
la stessa ostinata sillaba di sangue.

La luce fa del muro indifferente
uno spettrale teatro di riflessi.

Nel centro dei tuoi occhi mi scopro;
non mi guardi, mi guardo nel tuo sguardo.

Si dissipa l’istante. Senza muovermi,
io resto e me ne vado: sono una pausa.

Si dissipa l’istante. Senza muoverti,
tu resti e me ne vado: sei una pausa.

Si dissipa l'istante. Senza muoversi,
tu resti non me ne vado: siamo una pausa

Cento based upon Octavio Paz's "Tra l'andarsene e il restare".

Una pausa

See here for more info: https://wp.me/pwcbn-kMH

Makeda, 'Me, First' (2018). Courtesy Nice Music, Melbourne.

Ekin Fil - Heavy is now available as remastered LP via the Vaagner bandcamp

"Around the ancient city of Istanbul, a defensive wall dating back to classical antiquity sits embedded in a landscape that has been a crossroads of civilisation for thousands of years. Over time, the forces of erosion have softened its hard edges, rounding its once imposing form into heaps of crumbling ruins. In some places, the wall has been rebuilt using a patchwork of old and new bricks; in other places, it has worn away altogether, conquered by the persistent efforts of wind and sea and summer weeds. 

Like the ruins of an ancient wall, the music of Turkish composer Ekin Üzeltüzenci stands as a soft reminder that hard boundaries are a fleeting illusion. "

-Emily Pothast for The Wire

VAA04| Ekin Fil - Still Numbers

Anne Imhof - Faust
Format: 2xLP / CD / Digital
Cat.No: PAN 98
Release Date: 13 September 2019
Purchase: bit.ly/2NCegzC / bit.ly/2zo1bRY

Deriving from the acclaimed performance and exhibition—staged by Anne Imhof at the 57th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia and awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation— the album Faust is part documentation and part elaboration, the sonic capture and extrapolation of the gestures, intensities, and durations of the live event.
Serving as the dramatic backbone of a several-hour long performance seen by thousands over the course of the Biennial, the soundtrack was a product of the collective and its individuals, animating and organising the performers while immersing the audience in the potent images of power and paradise. The music for Faust was written in a band-like process by Imhof and her close collaborators Billy Bultheel, Eliza Douglas, and Franziska Aigner during the months leading up to its premiere at the opening of the German Pavilion in Venice. From the chaos of the performative, the album is constructed out of live recordings and original arrangements, teasing out the most potent strands and weaving them into a new composition of brutal feeling and baroque intricacy, each track a testament to the energy that brought it into being.

Faust is anchored around three pieces—Medusa’s Song, O.W.E.N., and Queen Song—written and sung by performers Eliza Douglas and Franziska Aigner, whose sonorous and elegiac voices imbue the work as a whole with their crushing depths and dolorous moods. Between these urgent vocal interventions march and twist the winding fugues and electronic abstractions of Billy Bultheel, who has dismantled and reassembled the sonic landscapes of the pavilion, crafting new arrangements that couple the forcefulness of the physical encounter with the artifice of the studio. Throughout the album and culminating in its closing act—the brutal chorus of Douglas’ Faust’s Last Song, a pulsing canon of looped and layered voice pierced by black metal screams—the record admits the listener into the inner space of Imhof’s dramatic vision of power, complicity, and vulnerability.

Shifting hypnotically between times and spaces, between cries and calls, between polyphonic antiquity and polyrhythmic complexity, Faust is the record of a lost event and the promise of a new creation. The release of Faust illustrates the centrality of music to Imhof’s artistic practice. Her musical collaborations with Bultheel began in 2013, and this generative constellation expanded to include the contributions of Douglas and Aigner, together scoring Imhof’s Angst (2016) and recently her performance trilogy Sex (2019).

The album comes with an expansive booklet of photography by Nadine Fraczkowski, another long-standing collaborator of Imhof and a prolific photographer, whose images of the performance and portraits of its cast offer intimate views of the work far beyond documentation.

It was mixed by Nanni Johansson at Hansa Studios and Ville Haimala, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, and designed by Zak Group featuring artwork conceived by Imhof together with Douglas and Fraczkowski. Co-published with German Pavilion 2017 and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin / Cologne / New York.

http://p-a-n.org

Faust 

Billy Bultheel - Headbanger (PAN 98)

Charles Curtis: Performances & Recordings 1998-2018 3xCD (SLT-005)

Saltern presents its fifth release, Charles Curtis: Performances & Recordings 1998-2018, the first comprehensive collection of recordings surveying the career of renowned, American cellist Charles Curtis. Selected by Curtis and Tashi Wada from recordings spanning the past two decades, the collection offers a broad, inclusive view of Curtis's activities across the diverse worlds of music he inhabits, containing rare, unreleased recordings, and never-before-released music by Terry Jennings, Richard Maxfield, Éliane Radigue, Alison Knowles, and Curtis. The wide-ranging scope of this release speaks not to a musical restlessness, but to a genuine spirit of inquiry, as these areas of activity for Curtis have existed concurrently in dialogue, not simply in succession, for decades. Over two hours of music by composers and artists with whom Curtis is closely associated including Éliane Radigue, Guillaume de Machaut, Tobias Hume, Silvestro di Ganassi, Terry Jennings, Morton Feldman, Anton Webern, Olivier Messiaen, Alison Knowles, Richard Maxfield, and Curtis himself. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with liner notes by La Monte Young, Spencer Gerhardt, and Tashi Wada. Custom packaging and screen printing by Alan Sherry; edition of 500.

Performances & Recordings 1998-2018

Charles Curtis – Unfinished Song (1998)

Elephant

Loke Rahbek & Frederik Valentin, 'Solina' (2020). Courtesy Posh Isolation, Copenhagen

Aire 
En el aire se que vas a aparecer 
Siento el suelo aunque no alcancen los pies
En el aire

Air
In the air I know that you’ll appear
I feel the ground even if my feet won’t
reach
In the air


Credits:
Mix and Master by Nathan Larrinaga, recorded on tape at  Electric Emerald Records, Hermosillo Mex.
Violin - Gibrana Cervantes
Cello, Vocals - Mabe Fratti

Mabe Fratti - Aire (feat Gibrana Cervantes)

Morita Vargas '8', released as HH03 LP by Hidden Harmony Recordings (Estonia)

Morita Vargas – composer, producer, voices

Mastering - Diego Crisalida
Vinyl mastering, lathe cutting - Matt Colton (Metropolis Labs, London)

Recorded in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Recording period 2014-2018)

Long Play purchase:  moritavargas.bandcamp.com
12" 180-gram vinyl record, 33 RPM, black vinyl. Edition of 1000 hand-numbered copies coming in die-cut outer sleeve, color print inner sleeve and protected by additional poly-liner sleeves.

I Feel Lost

Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje, composer and performer (born Dec. 29th 1973 in Trondheim, Norway), finished composition studies at the Norwegian State Academy of Music in Oslo in 2000. Her music is performed worldwide by performers such as Klangforum Wien, Oslo Sinfonietta, The Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Fretwork, TM+, Cikada and Vertavo string quartets, Quatuor Renoir, Ticom, crashEnsemble, Pearls for Swine Experience, Torben Snekkestad, Marianne Beate Kielland, SPUNK, Frode Haltli, POING and many more. Portrait concerts with her music has been heard in Toronto and Vienna, she has been composer in residence at festivals like Other Minds, San Francisco, Nordland Music Festival, Bodø, and the Avanti! summer festival.

Ratkje has received awards such as the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris for composers below 30 years of age, the Norwegian Edvard prize (work of the year) twice, second prize at the Russolo Foundation, and in 2001 she was the first composer ever to receive the Norwegian Arne Nordheim prize. Her solo album «Voice», made in collaboration with Jazzkammer, got a Distinction Award at Prix Ars Electronica in 2003.

Ratkje is active as a singer/voice user and electronics player as well as studio engineer, as a soloist or in groups such as SPUNK or Agrare. Other collaborations are with Jaap Blonk, Joëlle Léandre, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins, Stephen O’Malley, Stian Westerhus, Lasse Marhaug, POING and the metal band Trinacria. Ratkje has performed her own music for films, dance and theatre, installations, and numerous other projects. In 2003, she played a leading part in her own opera, based on the texts from the Nag Hammadi Library. In 2005 she performed the voice solo part of her first big work for orchestra, commissioned by Radio France. She has also been soloist with Klangforum Wien and Oslo Sinfonietta.

Her scores are found at the Norwegian Music Information Centre and her records are released on Tzadik, Rune Grammofon, ECM, Kontrans, Asphodel, Important Records and others.

Voice

Maja S. K. Ratkje

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