adore how it plays out together with an artwork. dance of two souls!

Extract from 'Image Langage' (SP140)
Out June, 24th 2022 on 2xLPs, CD, digital download.

Order: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/image-langage

—
Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast.

Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life.

At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound.

Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments.

Image Language is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity.

— Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Image Language

Becoming a stone

FELICIA ATKINSON 'Becoming a Stone' (SP140)

from the album Charles Cohen - "Brother I Prove You Wrong" out on Morphine Records 2015 - doser026LP

Composer, improviser, and Buchla Music Easel master Charles Cohen returns to Morphine with a suite of new material. In keeping with the timbre spectrum of his semi-modular system, Brother I Prove You Wrong is built around pointillist analog tones—Cohen's cosmic "beeps and boops"—that swarm and scatter in mesmeric patterns across four sides. Moving through surrealistic textural overlays and industrial miasma, the album's nine tracks reveal a more introspective and personal side of the artist, following from a retrospective LP trilogy released via Morphine in 2013. Those assembled works, dating back to the late '70s, quickly became essential listening and brought Cohen—at the time largely unknown outside Philadelphia's experimental circuit—to critical renown. 

Brother I Prove You Wrong was recorded in Berlin in September 2014 using the Buchla Music Easel, with production help and support from Rabih Beaini. Mastered by Neel and curated and designed by TankBoys; cover art by Nathalie du Pasquier.

Charles Cohen - The Boy and the Snake Dance

Pre-orders available here- https://alienjams.bandcamp.com/album/rkss-cutoff-ep

Artwork- Maxi Springer 
Graphic Design- Joe Gilmore
Mastering- Rupert Clervaux

Special thanks to the Carvery

rkss- Wave

ulla - table

B1  Speculation

MIKA VAINIO + RYOJI IKEDA + ALVA NOTO - LIVE 2002 [N-043]

In September 2002 Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) were invited by the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art for a residency. As a result of this project three live performances followed this research period.

All the tracks on this record were recorded live on September 23, 2002 at the Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art in Newcastle, UK.

All sounds by Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai.

LIVE 20O2

MOVEMENT 4

MIKA VAINIO + RYOJI IKEDA + ALVA NOTO - MOVEMENT 4

Moon Wheel — Maze Siren

Taken from:

Jay Glass Dubs - Plegnic [E039] 
Out on vinyl and digital on Ecstatic Recordings
07/09/2018

Jay Glass Dubs sublimates Athenian distress and ennui into plasmic dub ether on ‘Plegnic’, his lushly evolved 1st collection of new material for Ecstatic, following from their acclaimed, 2LP ‘Dubs’ [2017] set of his earliest, hard-to-find tape releases. 

Deconstructing and rebuilding Jamaican dub with musique concrete production methods and a lingering air of inspiration from new age and Laïko, or Greek popular music, on ‘Plegnic’ Jay Glass Dubs fascinatingly evolves his sound with richer melodic and harmonic arrangements in a concerted effort to bridge and expand the nostalgic, esoteric and dancefloor dimensions of his unique sound world.

The key to the record lies in its title, ‘Plegnic’; an extinct word meaning “to strike like a hammer”, as well as its palpable sense of nostalgia. In this archaic context, JGD uses vintage machines and obsolete samples into junction with vocals from Yorgia Karidi - sound artist and coincidentally former beau of his childhood neighbour, and Andreas Kassapis one of his oldest friends, who provides the cover art - to conjure a strikingly new, mutated take on classic and well-trodden styles; metaphorically and anachronistically renewing their purpose while connoting his newfound dancefloor drive in the process.

Recording took place at his mother’s house in the Athens suburbs, with Fugazi’s ‘Steady Diet of Nothing’ on repeat. It was here that he dug out an old Juno, a Yamaha RX5 drum computer, and some “…crappier equipment” that provides the structural scaffold to his array of nostalgic, melancholic Laïka samples, which could be considered the ghost in the shell or the diffused soul of this superb five part crop.

On the A-side he sets out to spook with the desiccated, teetering steppers motion of ‘Temple Dub’ featuring heavily processed vox by Yorgia Karidi, but the heady nostalgia takes over with a sublime tactility in the vaulted chorales and endless reverb tails of ‘Umbro Dub’, and again in the aching sehnsucht of ‘Mouthless Dub’, where traces of Laïka’s bouzouki melodies most beautifully glimmer thru. 

However, the B-side is far more upfront and up-for-it, firstly putting his weight behind the cranky skank of ‘Dry Dub’ with its hexagonal drums and acidic bass squirm, then in the super squashed swagger of ‘Fearless Dub’, a near 10 minutes long pinnacle of his dancefloor output to date.

Ultimately Jay Glass Dubs’ music is riddled with the kind of nostalgia that can make an unfamiliar piece of music feel like an intense déjà entendu, like you’ve heard it before in a dream or some altered state. That’s a rare and precious thing.

BUY!

JAY GLASS DUBS - TEMPLE DUB [E039]

Accident du Travail. We fell in love with their album on Trilogy Tapes and after a coincidental (or not) meeting in Brussels, our 29th release and first ever live album slowly took shape. Recorded in the mythical London Cafe OTO in 2016, the outfit of Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux explores a beautiful path of arrhythmic music, subaquatic sounds and celestial zones.

[vlek29] - Accident du Travail - live at Cafe OTO
Julie Normal_ondes Martenot + Olivier Demeaux_harmonium & machines.
Cafe OTO, Londres, 2016
enregistrement. Adam Matschulat 
mastering. Fred Alstadt 
artwork. Takahiro Kurashima
remerciements. Will Bankhead , Abby Thomas , Jean-Charles , Hugo Sanchez,  Hiro Abe
distribution. Crevette

Out September 27th.
Pre-order: https://vlekrecords.bandcamp.com/album/vlek29-accident-du-travail-live-at-cafe-oto

Accident du Travail - Ouverture All'Inglese (taken from the upcoming [vlek29]: live at Cafe OTO)

"Reiterations" by First Tone from "Reactions" 2xLP/Digital due out October 2019.

"Reiterations" by First Tone

Nick Klein has released a fine line of killer vinyls through labels like Bank Records NYC, L.I.E.S, Viewlexx and recently the tasty "No Shortage of Rope" on Helm's Alter. His record for us is called "Actor Network Theory" and is a monumental trip touching down in darker ambient stuff and slower techno for that party you need to go to when all this lockdown bullshit is over. Klein is based in Holland nowadays.

300 copies. OUT IN NOVEMBER 2020!!! 
Distro through Boomkat. Digital will be available.

NICK KLEIN - SPIDER IN BROWN POWDER (iDEAL190 LP)

ᴅɪꜱᴄᴏɢʀᴀᴘʜʏ
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&#128192; Sketches from Babahan (Indonesia 2023)
&#128192; Khorlo (Berlin 2021)
&#128192; Phyal (Berlin 2020)
&#128192; A Blissful Amnesia (Berlin 2021)
&#128192; Okänt Land — Where To Now (London 2015)
&#128192;  Moon Wheel — Not Not Fun (Los Angeles 2013)
&#128192; Black #3 — Nous (Berlin 2016)
&#128192;  For S.M.J — Wool Recordings (Paris 2013)
&#128192; Conglomerate 2 — Minicromusic (Warsaw 2017)
&#128192;  Firmament — Habitat Tapes (Melbourne 2015)
&#128192;  Split w/ Ill Winds — Noisekölln Tapes (Berlin 2012)

&#128221; hello @ moonwheel.org

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&#x1F1F8;&#x1F1EA; Intonal, Malmö, Sweden, 28/4/17
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&#x1F1FA;&#x1F1F8; Washington D.C, Broken Dreams Club, 27/2/16
&#x1F1EB;&#x1F1EE; Kaiku, Helsinki, 29/1/16
&#x1F1E8;&#x1F1E6; Bethlehem, Chaudetime, Montréal, 27/11/15
✔ Total Control, West Germany, Berlin 20/11/15
&#x1F1F8;&#x1F1EA; Norbergfestival, Sweden, 31/7/15
&#x1F1EC;&#x1F1F7; Βαζακι, Chaniá, Crete, 21/6/15
&#127970; Panorama Bar, CTM Festival, Berlin, 29/1/15
✔ F.T.K., Neue West, Berlin, 8/1/15
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✔ BCR #2, ACUD, Berlin, 12/7/14
&#127970; Berghain, Not Equal, 16/5/14
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&#x1F1F5;&#x1F1F1; Brutaż, Warsaw, 18/10/13
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✔ Gegen, KitKat Club, Berlin, 3/4/13
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Moon Wheel — Maze Siren

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