Name: Bororo – Live at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg by Andrew Pekler in Ambient Electro
Duration: 4 min 26 s
Description: Excerpt from a live performance at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg, Russia on April 1, 2018

Ambient Electro

From Am Shhara's Shinsoko, available now for pre-order:
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/shinsoko

Am Shhara - Ano

NEXCYIA  @ IDK 21/11/2024

Portlander Paul Dickow, as Strategy, presents his latest album— A Cooler World. Fascinated by the unfamiliar limitations and inherent playability of a hand-me-down, 1989 model sampling keyboard, he played these pieces by hand, mostly abandoning the sequencer driven framework of sampling based music; he plays the sampler here the way a guitarist approaches the guitar. A Cooler World is a deep dive into glacial, pensive soundscapes that navigate the boundaries between experimental, ambient, and dance music. The pieces unfold with deliberate intention, expressed in a sound vocabulary that originates in the futurism of ambient techno, yet they open to the serendipitous outcomes of his instrumental experimentation. One of his few albums that fully commits to ambience, with this new album, everything is slowed down, gesturing towards stillness, and transformed into something otherworldly under a blanket of snow. Paul has released records as Strategy on Peak Oil, Kranky, and so many others. Prolific and motivated, Paul crafts his music to fill unanswered musical riddles and unexplored rabbit holes he discovers in his capacities as experimenter, record collector, and DJ.

Paul has released records as Strategy on Kranky, 100% Silk, Geographic North, Peak Oil, Further Records, Field Hymns, and so many others. Prolific and motivated, Paul considers himself “a record collector first, DJ second, musician 3rd.” He crafts his music to fill creative voids he identifies in his capacities as collector and DJ.

Strategy - A Cooler World

Living Room n°82 ~ @portamento-318545438

q. pls introduce yourself:
a. Ciao living room 🙂 we’re two Rome based friends that like to make music. 
 
q. is there a story behind the mix?
a. Not really, we just had a feeling in mind and went for that.

q. what’s the best way to enjoy your mix?
a. On the plane on the way back from a failed love-trip ♡

q. describe a favourite object in your living room...
a. A huge broken Metronome belonged to alvaro’s bisabuela!


q. are you working on any projects right now (music or not music)?
a. Yes, lots of music that we’ll be releasing in the next months! We’ve been also very busy programming our Sunday ambi event called scivoliii here in Rome.

Living Room n°82 ~ Portamento

Hiraeth

Nøkken

info + tracklist: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/walking-for-two-w-marie-nonnis
https://soundcloud.com/marienonnis

marie nonnis

walking for two w/ marie nonnis

info: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/peripherie-16-igor-dyachenko
https://igordyachenko.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/igordyachenko

Peripherie

Peripherie 16 – Igor Dyachenko

No trace w/ Alena Petite (29/04/25)

A synapse-popping electro-acoustic soundwalk around Western Europe's cathedrals, chapels and churches, 𝑪𝒂𝒎𝒑𝒂𝒏𝒂 𝑺𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒔 skews recognizable sacred soundscapes, proposing a contemporary mythology that muddles the past, present and future. Following on from his critically-acclaimed 𝑩𝒂𝒕𝒉𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝑩𝒍𝒖𝒆𝒔 full-length, American sound artist Jake Muir familiarizes himself with German and British sonic architecture by studying some of the medieval shadows that still hang over Europe's streets, even as they continue to evolve. Manipulating environmental recordings captured in Germany and England, Muir presents an impressionistic juxtaposition of parallel cultures: the UK's distinctive "change ringing" technique, where a team of bell-ringers play long varied sequences on a set of tuned bells; and Germany's more sober style, with monotonous peals that add rhythm to daily life.

When Muir moved from Los Angeles to Berlin back in 2019, it wasn't just the German capital's damp weather and long, dark winters that came as a surprise. He was immediately struck by the city's anomalous acoustics, and one particular element stood out: the resonant church bells that echo around Berlin throughout the day to mark time, and for 10 minutes on Sundays as a call for mass. Gathering his field recording equipment, Muir acquainted himself with his new home by following the sonorous clangs, wandering from kiez to kiez to capture each church's distinct auditory flavor. And the more material he collected, the more engrossed he became in the history of bell ringing, prompting a deep dive that would shuttle him across Germany and into Italy, Belgium and the UK.

On 𝑪𝒂𝒎𝒑𝒂𝒏𝒂 𝑺𝒐𝒏𝒂𝒏𝒔, Muir trains his focus on Berlin, where his journey began, and on England, where he encountered the most elaborate bell ringing practice. 𝘌𝘳𝘻𝘬𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨 is a hypnotic lattice of sounds recorded all over the German capital: at Parochialkirche, a reformed church in Mitte; at evangelical church St. Matthäus, at Sophienkirche, another Mitte landmark; and at St. Mathias, a Roman Catholic church just in front of the Potsdam Gate. By fusing the liturgical chimes with snippets of local ambiance - traffic, chattering tourists and birdsong, for example -  Muir takes a blurry snapshot of the city, queering its idiosyncratic color spectrum with his various digital processes. Using reverb to replicate the acoustic properties of both the streets and the church interiors, he subtly disturbs the timeline, stretching out brief peals into long, mesmerizing drones and turning garbled voices into ghostly babble.

The environment alters considerably on 𝘊𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴; Muir uses the same technique and applies it to recordings made at the 1000-year-old St. Oswald church in Oswestry, St. Bartholomew's, Edgbaston and Holy Trinity in Stratford-Upon-Avon, home to Shakespeare’s final resting place. Here, Muir methodically untangles the change-ringing process, linking back to 𝘌𝘳𝘻𝘬𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘨 with a single bell tone before moving inside the church itself and documenting the ringers' shouted instructions, blending the calls with the bells' mathematical cyclic patterns. Muir memorializes what in 2025 is a dying art-form - a community skill that's disappearing worryingly quickly as young Brits lose interest in the church and its rituals. Unsettling distortions bite into the undulating sequences and underneath the noise, Muir highlights the music's latent euphoria, drawing out its most celestial tonalities.

File under: devotional music.

---

recorded by Jake Muir
audio finalized by Glyn Maier
photography by Jake Muir
design template by Joe Bastardo

Campana Sonans

Erzklang [Preview Clip] (ENM-14)

nish

Nick Malkin hosts Post-Geography, featuring ambient and atmospheric selections, live from the NTS studio in L.A.
 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/post-geography/episodes/post-geography-13th-june-2025

Post-Geography w/ Andriy K. 130625

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Tristes Tropiques
Format: LP/DL
Label#: Faitiche14
Release date: November 11th

Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 album Ursula Bogner – Sonne=Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book). Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Andrew Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.  

Find out more about Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques in the following interview:

Jan Jelinek: You’ve titled your album Tristes Tropiques – a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?

Andrew Pekler: Both. Lévi-Strauss’ constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler’s tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it’s the author’s attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me – and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music. 

JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here? 

AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and 60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been ‘ruined’ by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of ‘traditional’ music, I’ve come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I’ve described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand. 

JJ: I know that you perform Tristes Tropiques not only as music, and that there is visual and spatial aspect to the presentation. Can you reveal more about this?

AP: I made an accompanying video – mainly close-up footage, shot in Thailand, of various tropical flora. The video was recorded at very slow speed and this gives the plants, flowers, trees, bamboo, etc. the appearance of rather abstract objects. In live performance, this abstracting effect is further emphasized through real-time modulation of the colors, brightness and other parameters of the video image. There is also an installation version of the video that is meant to be projected on multiple screens / walls and with its own soundtrack of heavily manipulated field recordings captured in the same locations in the jungle.  

JJ: We can get an idea of what this looks like from the beautiful video stills on the back cover of the album.

Andrew Pekler: Theme From Tristes Tropiques / Avian Modulations / Life In The Canopy

Excerpt from a live performance at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg, Russia on April 1, 2018

Bororo – Live at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg

'Zinnen' from the upcoming Release 'Moto Perpetuo' on Marionette.

Video by Frode&Marcus: https://vimeo.com/315931008

Written and Produced by Benjamin Kilchhofer and Michael Anklin
Cat. no.: Marionette09
Format: 12” Vinyl (180g) + Digital
Release Date: March 2019

Moto Perpetuo

Zinnen

Bandcamp

Kilchhofer Anklin - Zinnen (Moto Perpetuo LP)

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Sound From Phantom Islands
Label#: Faitiche20
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.

Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.

Andrew Pekler: Description Of Rain (Over Frisland)

Artist: Frank Bretschneider
Album: abtasten_halten
Label#: faitiche21
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 18th 2020

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

"One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization." Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.
abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.
The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.
The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Bororo – Live at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg

Andrew Pekler

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