The music project titled Rose Altar was the first to be released under the Nouvelle Gaze label in 2019, debuting with the cassette 'Catalonia'. The name has since been an inseparable element of the Nouvelle Gaze mythos. The enigmatic imprint has released 19 installments up to today, each part seemingly integral to each other, connected within a fractal of the same crystal structure. Its flagbearer presents a wonderful mix for Amulet of Tears, mostly comprised of original soundtracks from digital worlds, imagined stories, and some revisited classics.

Amulet of Tears 022: Rose Altar

Music: Rose Altar

Artwork: @anasisana

Amulet 022: Rose Altar

Rezo Glonti, Georgian sound artist and electronic music producer debuts on the label One Instrument with an album entirely made with the Teenage Engineering OP-1.
He mostly works within the field of experimental music and places a strong emphasis on the incorporation of texture and space into his compositions.

Rezo Glonti, aka Aux Field on his new album “1 For One” created all the layers of the pieces in one take.
As always, Glonti’s playing is deceptively elegant, raw but precise, attuned to resonance, radiance, and negative space.
The record spans a range of emotions and moods and the result acts like a decaying memory, brief shining moments of clarity fighting against something unclear and untethered.

The various combination of layers perform with both a distinguished efficacy and unhurried dreamy drift—charged and beautiful, pulsating and pleasing.
The production is subtle and tasteful.
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Composed and produced by Rezo Glonti
Mastered by Luca Sammartin
Original artwork and layout by Marco Ciceri

Rezo Glonti  - Net Variations (Teenage Engineering OP-1)

Artist: Groupshow
Title: Greatest Hits
Cat#: faitiche 29
Release: Jan 27th 2023 (digital single: Nov 25th 2022)
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche presents Groupshow’s Greatest Hits: The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow (Hanno Leichtmann, Andrew Pekler, Jan Jelinek), recorded between 2005 and 2018, document concert recordings and studio improvisations by the trio.
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In improvisation there are no mistakes, only missed opportunities. Groupshow found their first opportunity in the routines of live performance and they used this opportunity to break with these routines. The trio consisting of Jan Jelinek, Hanno Leichtmann and Andrew Pekler came together in the context of Kosmischer Pitch, playing live versions of the music from Jelinek’s 2005 studio album of that name. During this project, the musical interaction between the three participants quickly emancipated itself from the original programme, departing from fixed roles and finding a distinct form in constant change.
Groupshow sessions – rehearsal, concert or recording – are always improvised. The interplay of the various sound sources, converging from the directions of “electronics”, “percussion” and “guitar”, does not follow the Krautrock wave logic of crescendo and morendo. Jelinek, Leichtmann and Pekler have established a method of transparent density in which links and breaks are not concealed but remain audible. The music works through attraction and repulsion, with a loosely organized structure that always leaves enough room for the next intervention.
The principle here, repeated even in the smallest units, is that of duration. Groupshow think of their music in terms of an installation: no starting point, no dramaturgy, and ideally no end. Concerts take place not raised up on a podium, but in the middle of the room on a level with the audience, who only enter the space with the musicians and instruments once their interaction is already underway. In 2008, Groupshow used this approach to create a live soundtrack for Andy Warhol’s film Empire, over the full length of eight hours and five minutes.
Recordings in general and the “Greatest Hits” format in particular are another key aspect of this ongoing work on a collectively modulated continuum. The ten tracks on this first vinyl album by Groupshow, recorded between 2005 and 2018, document the ephemeral capturing of opportunities that were not missed. Extracts and essences of an endless movement of searching. The sprawling form of the whole, suspended in succinct, separate units.
To paraphrase Lao Tzu and Roland Barthes, one might say: Once their work is done, they are no longer attached to it. And because they’re not attached to it, it will remain. (Arno Raffeiner, 2022)

Groupshow: Music For A Plank Press

Nik Colk Void is well established with her work - using modular systems, voice and guitar - as one half of Factory Floor, one third of Carter Tutti Void (alongside Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti) and with the late Peter Rehberg as NPVR, but perhaps surprisingly, 'Bucked Up Space' is her first solo album release. 

Void explains, “When Peter Rehberg initially asked me to produce a record for Editions Mego, I didn't feel quite ready and asked if we could make a record together instead. Collaboration is so ingrained into what I do, I only felt ready to make this album after working through ideas live, using the audience in place of the collaborator.”

Bucked Up Space combines Void’s love of improvisation with the driving force of beat-driven music absorbed from performing in galleries, residencies and clubs across the UK and Europe. She goes on to say, “You find out more about yourself when you explain your ideas to others, and that’s how I felt the live performance worked for me.”

The process steadily teased out a language and Void employed a variety of tactics in the recording process including a methodical approach of collecting data at her home studio in a manner not dissimilar to keeping a diary. Her microscopic focus on raw instrumental noise, layered and reformulated, resulted in a sound catalogue that Void divided into groups for their tone, density and texture. 

These initial pieces were taken to a studio in Margate to put them into a more cohesive compositional context. Something that pragmatically started as cold and detached was given warmth, unity and emotion in the studio. Via improvised repetition co-existing alongside organised production, Void conjures new sonic muscle with tracks such as ‘Interruption Is Good’ and ‘FlatTime’. Initial recordings are rendered into sequences initiating the organic rhythms, triggering awkward jerks of high hats and percussion, or used to activate the margins of post effects detectable in the tracks like ‘Demna’, ‘Big Breather’ and ‘Oversized’.

Void explains: “It was important to me that the simplicity in the work disguised a lot of complexity, I want this work to be absorbed instinctively.” 

The sleeve image, a still from We Are City by Brazilian artist Maria de Lima, was chosen to illustrate Bucked Up Space, which Void describes as “a distorted reality,  the space that lives at start of an idea, then floats in public view, before returning to inform my understanding of the idea. Once the idea is out in the world, it moves and morphs into something else entirely.”

Written, performed and produced by Nik Void, the album was engineered by James Greenwood, mastered by Rashad Becker and tracks 1, 4, 5, 7 and 9 were mixed by Marta Salogni.

Bucked up Space is the result of the ideas and resulting sounds of free exploration morphing into a personal structured album that fearlessly moulds patience, listening and restraint. It’s a sharp focussed work embracing collective action through the lens of the self. All this, and also one of the best abstract dance records you will hear in some time!

Bucked Up Space

Interruption Is Good

Nik Colk Void 'Interruption Is Good' (EMEGO 295)

On her third album, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, asks what guiding forces might be driving, enticing, and affecting us. “All Above” is rooted in her deeply personal philosophy as an artist, blurring the boundaries between electronic music and acoustic music and sculpting familiar ambient forms into personal themes painted with rich emotional colours. Written painstakingly over the last two years, the album is the most ambitious and divergent set of music Portioli has assembled so far, with a wide variety of instrumentation (including voices, strings, organs, guitars, and synthesisers) focused around the piano. She‘s keen to assure listeners that while that instrument isn‘t always heard, it‘s constantly at the forefront of the album, shepherding its emotions and anchoring its mood. It makes sense then that on the opening track ‘Quasicristallo’, the acoustic piano is the first element we hear, recorded closely, so its characteristic rattle and creak can speak as loudly as the familiar tones themselves. When the music blooms into abstraction and processed electronics, it‘s almost imperceptible: reverb mutates into ghostly vapour trails, and distortion forms the keys into another instrument entirely.

“All Above“ follows 2020‘s acclaimed “Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes“ and 2018‘s “Pineapple” released on Donato Dozzy and Neel‘s Spazio Disponibile imprint. Having garnered praise from outlets like Resident Advisor, XLR8R, The Quietus, Inverted Audio, and The Verge, Portioli operates in a unique space within the electronic music scene, straddling the art world and the wider electronic music scene. She‘s developed sound art installations for Rome‘s La Galleria Nazionale and the Terraforma Festival-related Il Pianeta, and has appeared at Barbican, MUTEK, Le Guess Who?, Kraftwerk, and other internationally renowned venues and festivals, often collaborating with Marco Ciceri on A/V presentations. Ciceri also maintains the visual identity of Portioli‘s label One Instrument, a concept imprint that asks artists to create music only using a single device. All this experience is poured into “All Above”, a richly visual album that‘s far more than just an imaginary film score. While on ‘Human’, her piano punctuates a rhythmic synthesised bassline and smudged choirs that can‘t help but trace out the silver screen. The composer is keen to clarify that she doesn‘t think of her music (or sound in general) in visual terms.

Portioli studied as a linguist and used her art to develop an emotional language that‘s not bound by expected cultural constraints. When she adds a different instrument or process, it‘s not to reference a visual cue but to mark a journey through different states of being. Each element embodies a different emotion or mood: the electric guitar represents strength or violence, synthesisers shuttle us into the dream world, and the acoustic instruments highlight intimacy and warmth – even heart. Read like this, the tracks are like meditative poems rather than cinematic vignettes.

Dedicated to Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, who died suddenly last year, “All Above” demands engagement and refuses to evaporate into the background. The album asks listeners not just to absorb the album as a whole but notice the cracks in the structure and discern the tension they cause. That‘s never more evident than on the closing track ‘Cost What It May’, a piece of music almost jarring when Portioli chops into noisy waves of electric guitar. In the wrong hands, this might sound like a power move – some rock posturing to act as a finale. But Portioli‘s expression is different. She‘s forcing a level of engagement that perceives the negative space as just as necessary as the saturated positive, and what could be more haunting and emotionally resonant than that?

All Above

Human

Grand River 'Human' (EMEGO308)

A monthly hour of warped, percussive and pulsating selections. Punctuated with original productions and unreleased material from producer, singer and DJ Meuko! Meuko!

https://www.nts.live/shows/meuko-meuko/episodes/meuko-meuko-5th-december-2022

Meuko! Meuko! 051222

An excerpt from NID composer Atul Desai’s sound collage for the Indian Pavilion dome at the 1970 Osaka Expo.

»We Found Our Own Reality« 
An Exploration of India's First Electronic Music Studio and its Resonances into the Present

27.1.–4.2.2023 | CTM Festival | silent green | Berlin

We Found Our Own Reality: Atul Desai – Recordings For Osaka Expo 70 (1970)

original material composed during a period of creative exchange and inspiring conversations between Zhe Pechorin and her special guest Nocturnal Phase resulting in 1 hour of deep and soulful sound experience

@ernestobellicini
@zhe-pechorin

Zhe Pechorin & Nocturnal Phase 16/07/23

Marked Unknown

»KAMILHAN; il y a péril en la demeure« is the conclusion of a 5-part cycle of works by artist Grischa Lichtenberger which was initiated with the album »LA DEMEURE; il y a péril en la demeure« in 2015 and continued with the triple EP release »Spielraum, Allgegenwart, Strahlung« in 2016.
In addition to the concept of „demeure“, ones residence as a symbol for the joy and artistic possibilities one can find in isolation, Lichtenberger places a further emphasis on the expression of the voice, represented by the word „Kamilhan“. „Kamilhan“ is a non-existent word, an expression that Ernst Bloch once mentioned in an anecdote about his childhood. Fascinated by its sound but without knowing its meaning, it remained vivid in his memory in its purely „material“ form.
Lichtenberger also refers to this childish perception of language. Words that we do not know, but repeat in our thoughts until they become insignificant. Lyrics in a foreign language that we do not understand and still sing along and imitate. With computer-generated voices, Lichtenberger tries to reproduce these experiences. In his tracks we hear syllables and phrases that are similar to words and that seem familiar to us, but whose meaning remains a secret.
As on the previous album, the tracks on »KAMILHAN« are constantly torn apart and reassembled. Borrowings from hip-hop and even pop are unmistakable, desired, and yet delusive. Rhythms that are repeatedly broken in order to re-organize themselves into new temporal patterns. Melodies that are pierced by precisely these intricate rhythms. Voices that lack any empathy due to their artificiality.
Lichtenberger himself describes these tracks as „crooked ballads“, which, by deliberately following classic pop song structures, try to sell us the absurd as the normal, and in turn smuggle some hope of recognition into the absurd.
»KAMILHAN; il y a péril en la demeure« will be released on May 08, 2020 on CD and as a limited double vinyl edition including a handmade and signed silkscreen print.

KAMILHAN; il y a péril en la demeure

Grischa Lichtenberger »s4e« taken from »KAMILHAN; il y a péril en la demeure«

https://12thisle.bandcamp.com/album/on-nature

We've decided to take a brief traipse away from our typical release schedule to present this digital exclusive from Athens based multi-instrumentalist Christos Chondropoulos. We're currently crossing the t's and dotting the i's on a forthcoming double LP, but such is the quality and quantity of his archive we opted to release these 9 recordings with a coinciding riso print from Crud* for you to do with as you please. Strictly available via Bandcamp, releases August 25th. From Christos:

"Philosophically you can regard this music as a fresh view of the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure - Structuralism and Deconstruction. It is a new approach when it comes to linguistics, the traditional music of the area, where Greece stands as a crossroads and future intelligences. I was interested to hide a fundamental philosophical question in music which would have the same qualities and immediacy as the authentic local music of the area."

*Slow-to-cop chumps beware: The prints are a one-off run. Once they're gone, they're gone.

On Nature (12th Isle Masters)

Christos Chrondropoulos - On Nature (ISLE-DR01)

a record label with guidelines: https://shorturl.at/bfkuW
run by https://soundcloud.com/grandriver and Teo Mannu

no direct messages, only email

Rezo Glonti - Net Variations (Teenage Engineering OP-1)

One Instrument

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