Intense stuff. I would love to get one of these special limited LPs...

Listening here through my notebook speakers as I correct my students' monographs. I listen very softly, like a hospitalized Brian Eno, unable to get up to turn up the volume. The sound envelopes my hands, over the keyboard, and it envelopes my ears too, softly, like a concrete fragrance. A beautiful experience, a secret way to feel the sophisticated stereophony of the piece, appreciate the textures and delicate noises. Urban dream, kaleidoscope of everyday events. Gaps sharpen perception. The bed is beside me, here in the bedroom, but I resist and remain at the desk, typing away. Beautiful composition, congratulations!

Great stuff (I saw your performance on ESS)

Untitled #21

'A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-a-string-of-paper-cranes-clenched-between-my-teeth-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic and the profound alike, eschewing politics and society in favor of an “attitude of total self-containment.”

Tomokawa recorded the album over the course of a month—from August 24 to September 25, 1977—at Tokyo’s famed Onkio Haus studio in the bustling Ginza district. The arrangements, accordingly, are amped up: paired with the Black Panther Orchestra, Tomokawa’s “screaming philosopher” vocals find their match with the orchestra’s electric guitar, bass, piano, tuba, and ground-thumping drums played by the Brain Police’s Toshi Ishizuka—who appears on Tomokawa’s first three records and remains his collaborator to this day.

“This is Kazuki Tomokawa in the flesh,” concludes Takahara. A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth is, in Tomokawa’s uncanny way, able to cut through facade and artifice in pursuit of truth. “You call that life?” he heckles, exhausted by the melodrama and nihilism of youth counterculture, “try saying you’re alive!”

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Try Saying You're Alive!

Prism Architecture

From forthcoming LP "Murmurations" available on Cibachrome Editions April 1st 2022 https://leabertucci.bandcamp.com/album/murmurations

A Vast Interiority - Lea B + Ben Vida

james strong's Album

APONIA A.D. "Wind beneath a skeleton key" COR ARDENS 2022

Available now via: IMPREC.com

The Well & The Gentle, two of the major works of Pauline Oliveros, are presented here in a first time reissue on double vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with extensive liner notes.

If Oliveros had followed a more conventional composer's path she may have, all social obstacles aside, been considered among the major minimalist and contemporary classical composers of her time. However, Oliveros approached composition in a more egalitarian manner. She wrote music for musicians to interact with or, in the composers words, she wished to create "an inclusive and interdependent and unfolding world of relationships."

Oliveros' propensity towards inclusion is part of what makes this work so remarkably distinctive. The Well & The Gentle is carefully crafted, allowing performers to participate in the creation of the work. Players are asked to collaborate, focus, react and make imaginative choices. Only then can the performers "pass through stages of awakening to the possibilities inherent in making music, working together, leading to the essence of what can shape musical impulses and individual freedom simultaneously."

Unlike most major composers of the era, Oliveros' work focuses on collaboration and improvisation. Lacking in the rigidity that often defines minimalist work of the era. For Oliveros, the processes involved in making music are as fundamental as the music itself. Oliveros creates, as Arthur Sabatini put it so eloquently in the liner notes,

"A world in which sound and the practices entailed in making music merge; become, at once, source and atmosphere, energy and essence, presence and dynamic."

Pauline Oliveros "The Well & The Gentle" - 2LP - Release Date 3.10.23

core is a feedback loop of the fsh-1 frequency shifter, inside the loop is c0 and mmf-1. modulated by r*s dsg. rhythm and pads itb.

something like a patch diagram: https://imgur.com/6oNm0yH

one output of the fsh-1 goes into the c0 delay (the delay is crucial in this patch, most of the sound gets produced here), the output of the delay goes into a limiter and then back in one input of the fsh-1.
another ouput of the fsh-1 goes into the mmf-1 filter in dual bandpass mode, from there the signal goes again into a limiter and into the second input of the fsh-1.
this is now the basic closed feedback loop, i listen to the mix output of the fsh-1.
by playing around with all the settings i get different tones, again, the delay is crucial here, how much feedback is determined by the limiter and general volume controls or frequency controls of all three modules... now to get a rhythmic patterns going i plugged this "bouncing ball" envelope into the second input of the filter, that is enough to only get feedback at the high portions of the envelope eg i get a rhythmic feedback pattern. variations in tone by manual control of the bandpass settings and the delay time plus occasional tweaks at the limiter section for louder or more distorted feedback. the patch is delicate, i tried to replicate it and i wasnt able to come close to these tones, but other great ones:) enjoy modular synthesis!

fsh1

The B side of Dissolution. LP/digital release on Glistening Examples, November 11th, 2016.  25 LPs were special edition, with 35 mm slides embedded in the clear vinyl. Copies of the regular LPs are still available on Forced Exposure
https://www.forcedexposure.com/SearchResult.html?SearchType=Basic&Type=artist&Key=olivia%20block

DISSOLUTION B

Third and final track on the untitled suite for piano and organ, released on Another Timbre in 2017. Physical copies are sold out.

Toull-Karr

XKatedral presents the first full-length release of the work of Swedish composer David Granström. In four interrelated pieces, Granström’s new collection of sound work – A distant color, secluded – invites us to take part in the creation and destruction of perceptual worlds; worlds whose interiors are at once manifestations of vast topological complexity, and of minimalist, pure non-dimensionality.

David Granström (b. 1987) is a composer and sound artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. His sound work is characterized by harmonic simplicity and spatio-textural complexity, employing sounds of both synthetic and acoustic origin. Part of Granström’s practice consists in researching new methods for working algorithmically with real-time sound synthesis and precision-tuned harmony, a work which is technically realized by employing tools that he himself develops. Earlier releases of Granström’s sound work includes the limited-edition cassette Ephemeris, also on XKatedral.

You can pre-order the album here:

https://xkatedral.bandcamp.com/alb…/a-distant-color-secluded

David Granström - Waning Moon

This year London has experienced several weekends of the hottest summer and that moved the Australian sound artist Kate Carr, whose practice is centred on articulating the relationship between people and place through sound, to point her microphone at the city. This volume is based on her recordings during a particularly hot long weekend in a corner of very busy intersection in London, where she resides now. In Heatwave, Carr is interested in both the serious and also the more prosaic aspects of soundscapes related to climate change. She investigated the throbbing summer music from her neighborhood, people’s efforts to keep cool, and the uneasiness which accompanies these everyday activities in this moment of environmental crisis. The way these pieces construct and compensate, with all the tangible sounds that fold into larger moods via multiple instruments, exemplifies her acumen in creating sonic stories that reflect our multi-layered experience of reality.

Humidity - from Heatwave out now via Hasana Editions

from the 1st album "small souds" 1999.
recording of black mong of north vietnam singing, 
recorded and composed by miki yui.



Mong

Vlada BC

Music and Artwork by Ryan J Raffa
Mastered by Taylor Deupree
Shimmering Moods Records 2021
SHM 163

Ryan J Raffa - Lately

Ústí Údolí

Taken from the album Synopsis Seriation released as 2CD and Digital

Hecker 'Synopsis Seriation (2/2) (excerpt)' (EMEGO 256)

composer of experimental music/performer/artist

DISSOLUTION B

Olivia Block

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