kiss kiss 2024

ssabæ – azurescens

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need.

But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed.

The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece.

That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.

—
Music and text by Ben Vida
Recorded 2021 NYC and Shady
Performed by Laura Barger, Nina Dante, Russell Greenberg and Ben Vida
Mastered by Helge Sten
Front photo from ISSUE Project Room, New York
Back photo from Lampo at the Poetry Foundation, Chicago
Bird Show (ASCAP)
Shelter Press 2023, SP145

The Beat My Head Hit

BEN VIDA W/ YARN/WIRE AND NINA DANTE 'Who's Haunting Who Here' (SP145)

Archaic Vaults is pleased to present the first vinyl album for the label, cataloguing ten tracks from ten artists spanning the globe. This curation brings together a multiplicity of genres within the label’s ongoing thematic output - durational ambience, field recordings, oversaturated improvisations and spatialised synthetic loops among them. A diverse cohort of familiar and new collaborators alike.

Edition of 300. Design by Severin Black.

https://archaicvaults.bandcamp.com/album/continuing-a-worn-out-tradition-iii

Continuing A Worn Out Tradition III

A1. Yeong Die 'Part of the Poetic Talent [AV011]

Billy Bultheel - The Arcades Project (Snow Cycle)
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 138S1
Release Date: 09 February 2024
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/TheArcadesProject

Billy Bultheel shares 'The Arcades Project (Snow Cycle)', the first single from the upcoming full-length album 'Two Cycles' out via PAN on March 8th.

Written for Trackers by Billy Bulheel / IXVEUTAI by Sophocles, directed by M. Marmarinos at the Ancient Amphitheater of Epidaurus, 2021

Played by Spyros Vergis and Menelaos Moraitis
Recorded by Ilias R. Flammos at Antart Studios, Athens, 2022

Mixed by James Ginzburg
Mastered by Enyang Urbicks

Billy Bultheel - The Arcades Project (Snow Cycle) (PAN138S1)

listener

'SKEL(O)DUST', clip.

low quality; unreleased;

`·. SKEL(O)DUST `·. ©®™

Hesaitix - Noctian Airgap (PAN 152)
Label: PAN
Cat.No.: PAN 152
Release Date: 06 December 2024
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/NoctianAirgap

Through the haze we could make out hardly anything. Just the black line of the horizon. And in the distance the faint glimmering of the sea.

James Whipple returns from a long period of musical dormancy with his first full length LP for PAN since 2017.

As M.E.S.H., he honed a singular and unpredictable sonic identity on his debut album Piteous Gate. Re-emerging as Hesaitix, the now-familiar motifs have become streamlined, the sound palette both more refined and more elaborate. Even at its most abstract, there is an uncanny presence permeating the record, a convincing emotional reality with its own narrative and spatial logic.

Opener ‘Cusp of Unknowing’ announces itself with crushing low end synths feathered with delicate chimes before dissolving into the oceanic din of a data center. Rolling, engine-like subs mark the start of ‘Taurian Shade,’ a low- tempo percussive drive past iced-over chords and angular synth lines. ‘Geflatnet’ and ‘Volunteer’ dip into grooves bordering on nostalgic, referencing a misremembered golden era of electronica long-players. On ‘Santarosae (Black Dolphin),’ a sense of primordial awe comes to the fore, while ‘Black Line,’ originally presented as an audio installation in 2022, uses the human voice to explore a narrative approach to sound. ‘Noctian Airgap’ and ‘Anticrime’ return to syncopation and its complex moods, while ‘Subdermal’ and ‘Hypersea’ embrace repetition in service to atmosphere.

Hesaitix - Cusp of Unknowing

Kokiri

Take Me Home (Kokiri Remix) [feat. Fatshaudi]

See it like you see it

SOUL OF THE ROSE

A short ride on a long trip

Another New Moon

Originally aired October 2018 on n10.as
https://soundcloud.com/djlostboi

CM Mix

s.M.i.Le. Radio 023 : DJ Lostboi

www.hinakoomori.com
www.instagram.com/hinakoomori

Debut EP Auraelia released on 22nd November via Injazero Records.

Buy the EP here >>> http://bit.ly/auraeliabc

Co-mixed by Peter Lyons. ❤️
Mastered by Cicely Balston. ❤️
Artwork by Gustavo Eandi. ❤️

Billy Bultheel - The Arcades Project (Snow Cycle) (PAN138S1)

PAN

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