Scurlage

Bentley

Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

preperation mix for avant festival 2021 in lecce (italy)

0721_08_mix

Urban Breeze

Download: https://redders1.bandcamp.com/album/ride-the-tiger-free-download

Home Late - Ride The Tiger LP (432htz Tuned)

MEMOREXX

Untitled song made by Samoyed, Tapes & Lukid

https://mindcolormusic.bandcamp.com/album/aux4429

Bunker Acid

À l’occasion de son exposition au Studio, Estelle Hanania invite le musicien et compositeur américain Stephen O’Malley à réaliser un programme radiophonique conçu spécialement pour la MEP, à partir des bandes son qu’il a conçues pour les pièces chorégraphiques de Giselle Vienne. 

Estelle Hanania et Stephen O’Malley poursuivent ainsi une collaboration de plusieurs années, qui a notamment donné lieu à la sortie du vinyle Eternelle Idole en 2015 et du vinyle The Pyre en 2019 aux éditions Shelter Press.  

Stephen O’Malley est un guitariste, producteur, compositeur et artiste visuel né en 1974 dans le New Hampshire (Etats-Unis). Il a participé depuis 20 ans à la fondation de nombreux groupes incontournables de drone doom, metal, musique expérimentale – SUNN O))), KTL, and Khanate comptent parmi les plus emblématiques. Particulièrement prolifique, l’oeuvre de  Stephen  O’Malley se caractérise par son ampleur, sa complexité, son approche expérimentale et minimaliste, son interdisciplinarité. 
Il collabore avec des artistes de tous horizons tels que le musicien et compositeur Scott Walker, la chorégraphe et metteuse en scène Gisèle Vienne, les auteurs Dennis Cooper et Alan Moore, le compositeur Alvin Lucier, le sculpteur Fujiko Nakaya, le cinéaste Jim Jarmusch, et avec les instituts de musique électronique IRCAM, INA-GRM (Paris), EMS (Stockholm). 

Artiste de scène incontesté, il ne cesse d’effectuer des tournées depuis 2003. Ses concerts en live sont une brume de réverbération née du minimalisme d’une guitare électrique, une sorcellerie sonore qui défie les frontières de l’espace et du temps.


Programme radiophonique réalisé par Stephen O’Malley pour l’exposition « It’s alive ! » d’Estelle Hanania à la MEP. Sélection de bandes sons des pièces chorégraphiques de Giselle Vienne qui ont été photographiées par Estelle Hanania. 

Durée : 2h43min45s

Titres des morceaux : 
Sexy Angel / This is how you will Disappear 2010
Glass X / The Pyre 2013
Hit / The Pyre 2013
Eternal Idol / Arrival of The Trainer / Eternelle Idole 2009
Lampshade / Crowd 2017
Last Spring / Last Spring: A Prequel 2011
Forest Floor 3, 4 / Kindertotenlieder 2007
Snow #4 / Kindertotenlieder 2007
Snow M+R / Kindertotenlieder 2007
Theme #2 / Kindertotenlieder 2007

Programme radiophonique - Stephen O’Malley

I (archive + time)
all the sounds are either recorded on the 21st september 2020 or from the archive made or recorded on the 21st september between 2007 and 2019. the arbitrary number of a date serves as an archival organisation and becomes here a structrural method that opposes and modifies the intuitive memory.

II (recordings and ghosts, the dead silence)
the sounds are recorded on a walk between bethaniendamm and urbanhafen alongside the former luisenstaetischer kanal. all the recordings of that walk are either a.) traces of em-signals or b.) resonating objects (hit or bowed) found along the way (so that the listener can follow the traces of the objects during the walk).
the recording itself happened during a monday night around 3 am. in the dead silence of the night. walking around with an em-detector and hitting on things like hunting or summoning ghosts: the sounds stand out against small noises of sleeping swans, startled residents or coincidental droping seeds from trees. so listening in this regard becomes more than listening to the sound itself. the decay of each sound is looking into the nothingness of silence.
the metaphor dead-silence refers to the non-availabilty (unverfügbarkeit) of the dead that slip away into nothingness. only memories hold a connection to the gone, to the past that otherwise would be nothing, silence. a decaying sound in the dead silence of the night thus becomes a sort of bridge, channel, vehicle to the dead (silence).
while for husserl the melody is an example of the process of retention, where we are able to recollect a certain amount of signals even without activly memorizing them, the musical structure at play in this piece works with layering parallels of single events that in confrontation become a (more or less) organized structure (dub and overdubbing).

III (luisenstädtischer kanal)
the luisenstädtischer kanal (1852) connected the spree and the landwehrkanal. mainly used for the construction of the densly populated area luisenstadt, it was filled with earth from the construction of the u8 to be reebuild as a public park in 1926 (as reconstructed today). after the second worldwar it was filled further with trümmer (debris) of the bombings and became 1961 part of the mauer, the border between east and west-berlin, the so called todesstreifen (death-strip).

0920_21 dead silence of the night

V/A — 0/1

A concept-album compilation composed by Shedir, Philip Sulidae, Monte Burrows, France Jobin, Emile Bojesen, Seth Cluett, Attilio Novellino, Stefano Tashi, anthéne, Luigi Turra.

Directed and curated by Edoardo Cammisa.
Artwork and artistic concept by Camilla Pisani.
Supervised by Angelo Guido.
Mastered by Marie Rose at FixInTheMix Labs.
Released by Sounds Against Humanity.

BUY LTD. CD / DIGITAL
https://soundsagainsthumanity.bandcamp.com/album/0-1

V/A — 0/1 (excerpts)

BOOKING: warren.morris@theplayground.co.uk

Bentley

µ-Ziq