Anne-F Jacques/Takamitsu Ohta, Oto to Secchi

C H I A R O S C U R O

Most of us know the term chiaroscuro as one of the prominent painting techniques from the Renaissance. Literally translated from Italian into English as light-dark, this method of applying bold contrasts was used to create depth in the representation of an image. The pith of this approach to light lies in the interplay of appearing and disappearing; what is exposed, what is hidden? This observation appealed to me musically and became the point of departure for this composition. The mechanics of gradually revealing and concealing shape the framework in which two textural layers shift back and forth in unsynchronised cycles that progressively move towards synchronisation. 

Performed by Bert Van Stam.
Recording of live performance on 1st of October in Maranatha Church, The Hague, NL.

CHIAROSCURO

https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/before-your-past-lives

Muzan Editions
https://soundcloud.com/muzaneditions

Mastered by Kris Keogh
www.kriskeogh.com

Art by Jo Jarosinska
www.instagram.com/jo_jarosinska/

I(Before Your Past Livess - Muzan Editions)

released Feb 6, 2022

"The clock stopped, but the machine is still there."

Artwork - Lennert Hespenheide
Mastered By Kim, Changhee
Mixing & Mastering Studio - dNTS (dntslab.com)
Producer - CHANG_PARK @chang_park
Supported by - Der Senator für Kultur Bremen / The Senator of Culture Bremen

©2022 dingndents Record Ltd.
dnd_EM02805-4004

@dingndents

ESSEL

Advanced

Sunik Kim’s Raid on the White Tiger Regiment arrives three years after 2019’s Zero Chime on First Terrace Records. Raid has strong political undertones and is named after one of the eight core revolutionary operas produced during the Cultural Revolution. This particular opera focuses on the joint struggle of Chinese and Korean communists during the Korean War, during which there were devastating US attacks on the northern part of the peninsula. Raid is an insanely wild ride made with software Sunik custom-built in Max MSP and SuperCollider using free orchestral soundfonts at hyper-speed tempos. Despite the presumed chaos of this album, there is a strong and present voice that permeates the barrage of noises, almost as if the teeming and swirling sounds coalesce to create a slowly shifting mass that is somehow soothing. There is a constant regeneration of textures and sensations here: simultaneously shedding and accumulating, receding and emerging. A multidirectional presence, both solidly grounded but also unpredictable in its motion. Side B presents a unique live document of Sunik’s performances of the Raid material: a lengthy 30 minute piece created from multiple field recordings of the performances at Cafe OTO in London and Counterflows in Glasgow. “Raid Live” stands as an interesting counter to the meticulously crafted studio-created material. Its weight is held by roomtone, pockmarked with the audience’s yelling and mingling; a cathartic experience felt by many.

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Artist's statement:
This is possibly the second album named after one of the eight core revolutionary operas produced during the Cultural Revolution; to my knowledge, the first is Brian Eno’s Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Raid on the White Tiger Regiment, the opera, focuses on the joint struggle of Chinese and Korean communists during the Korean War—a truly “forgotten war” in much of the world, in which the US dropped 635,000 tons of explosives and 32,557 tons of napalm on the northern part of the peninsula, killing 20 percent of the population, and massacred tens of thousands of Korean communists and suspected sympathizers from Nogeun-ri to Daejeon.

Raid, the album, pulls its titles from the opera’s program and thereby positions the music as a soundtrack: an inherently limited and dependent form that requires a broader historical and political context—a connection with the world—to reach its fullest state of development. In substituting my wordless, “abstract” music for that of the original opera, I hope to establish a living nexus of contradictions between: (1) the original opera, as direct an example of “political art” as there can be; (2) the extended historical and political processes that birthed it; (3) our current conjuncture; (4) the immediate listening experience. In this clashing and intertwining of timelines, histories, and sense-perceptions, I hope to facilitate a visceral act of comparison, a tracking of excess and deficiency: what aligns, what collides, what falls horribly or comically flat, what brings tears of joy or sadness? And why?

The music is constructed with custom software I built with Max/MSP and SuperCollider that controls banks of free orchestral soundfonts at chaotic tempos. I hope the overt “cheapness” of the materials, and their constantly coalescing, collapsing, disintegrating, reassembling movement, establishes a dramatic—operatic!—tension internal to the logic of the music itself: one that, above all, argues that possibilities—aesthetic, yes, but also historical and political—have nowhere near been exhausted, and that the present order will one day be rightfully relegated to “the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.”

Sunik Kim, 2022

Sunik Kim - Raid On The White Tiger Regiment - [sample]

Excerpt from "Waveset / Counterbalance" C40 chrome cassette available 22/07/2014 via Beartown Records.

Various improvised recordings made in London, 2013/2014.(Serge modular synthesiser, Cracklebox, computer).

Order: beartownrecords.com/catalogue.html

Waveset (Excerpt)

Melon Musk

Melon Musk's music shapes abstract soundscapes composed of liquid forms in constant mutation. This electronic music trio, made up of William Binta, Daniel Dariel and Amédée De Murcia, sculpts strange timbres on slow motifs, evoking both melted plastic and nightmarish voices. 

William Binta uses and programs virtual instruments inspired by the mosaicity of sounds, focusing on the technique of granular synthesis.

CFolle, his latest solo project, is characterized by the staging of slow, hypnotic motifs, accompanied by organic and sometimes cartoonish sounds, creating sound miniatures with rubbery textures.

Daniel Dariel plays solo under the pseudonym Csocsó, and has performed and taken part in encounters and residencies in multiple institutions in and around Europe (amongst which: galerie Nadja Vilenne, Gevaert Editions, Grrrnd Zero, Erg, WIELS, Institut de Carton, Lieu Unique, Gaîté Lyrique, Cave12, Braille Satellite, Counterflows, Bad Bonn, Instants Chavirés, OCCII, ...). He is also an active member of the Third Type Tapes label and organizes concerts at les Ateliers Claus, Brussels.

Beside his main alias, Somaticae, Amédée De Murcia leads weird organic and rhythmic excursions filled with breaks and caught in a swarming bath of plastic melts sounds and scary artificial voices. As the author of numerous recordings, flirting with adventurous electronica and a resolutely experimental-based approach, Somaticae mainly plays amongst the crowd, offering live sets filled with impactful and abrasive constructions.

eZen Garden

This is a work-in-progress and part of a research presented via https://a-desk.org/magazine/within-visual-phenomena-vol-i/


Sound Recordings / Sections:

I — Floaters - Minute 0:00 — 2:02
II — Blue Field - Minute 2:03 — 4:40
III — Tree - Minute 4:42 — 8:58
IV — Hourglass Pattern - Minute 9:06 — 11:13
V — Blue Arcs - Minute 11:13 — 11:34
VI — Phosphene - Minute 11:35 — 14:01

Barcelona — August / September 2019

Within Visual Phenomena Vol. I

Arnau Sala Saez — Within Visual Phenomena Vol. I

Recorded live in studio, unedited, for NIME 2020. Intra-action is a computer system for improvisation where listening synthesis agents are capturing behaviours from human performance input and responding to each other.

Intra-action 29.05.20

Phil Julian is a UK based composer and improviser active since the late 1990s principally working with modular electronic devices and computers.

Audio works by Julian (and under the Cheapmachines alias) have been published on labels including Entr’acte, Banned Production, The Tapeworm, Harbinger Sound, Confront Recordings, Staalplaat (Open Circuit imprint), con-v, Beartown Records as well as numerous compilation appearances.

He also runs the Authorised Version label.

Julian has collaborated on remixes, recordings and performances with Tomas Korber, Michael Renkel, Jason Kahn, Daniel Jones, Kostis Kilymis, Tom Mudd, Angharad Davies, John Macedo, Dominic Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, Dale Cornish, Ryan Jordan, Maurizio Bianchi, Nihilist Assault Group, The New Blockaders and GX Jupitter-Larsen of The Haters as well as being a member of the improvised drone ensemble Signals with Mark Beazley and Chris Gowers and playing as part of Mark Wastell’s improvising group The Seen.

Waveset (Excerpt)

Phil Julian

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