First single from Vanessa Amara "Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback" Out May 28th as Posh Isolation 249

The beguiling yet inviting music of Vanessa Amara has long presented studies and invocations of ambient music and experimental sound practices with a graceful relief. Their  latest album, 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback,' is a collection of unedited live recordings from 2016-2020. It charts a formal path for creation, and in doing so manufactures their most dazzlingly beautiful album to date.

Vanessa Amara is a duo from Copenhagen. More recently they've forged links to Coomkeen, Ireland. Together, Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana have released a small plenty of recordings, with their 2016 album 'You're Welcome Here' bringing them into a critical orbit with contemporary experimental music and earning them much-deserved recognition. A cluster of releases followed that took their intricately rendered worlds into new constellations and alignments with the suite of instruments that they recurrently call upon. Last year's 'Leopards' and 'Poses' introduced a daring alacrity to the dreamy forms one may associate with Vanessa Amara, suggesting a wealth of silhouettes and wicked suns.

'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' hints at a similar mischief through its inventive formal strategy, accompanying ideas, and charged theatre, yet it pursues the melancholic kernel at the heart of the project more intently than any previous release.

The album's title is descriptive of the album's process. Utilising an arrangement of microphones, speakers, and tape machines, Vanessa Amara created a system that allowed them to work with acoustic feedback. In the group's own words, "We don’t have a studio or a piano, so instead we work briefly in other peoples' homes or in any room made available to us. Each of these rooms, what is within them and how the instruments resonate there, is what generates the sound." With piano, accordion, pipe organ, carillon, and bells, this system generates an exquisite space of delicately placed harmonics and sweet ricochets.

The track 'Accordion' captures a passing all-terrain vehicle from inside a church—it's these kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that are found at the edges of the album, refracting the heart-aching meditations and formal constraints with a novel spontaneity. However, at the core of the album's making is feedback. As Vanessa Amara explain, "The autonomy of the feedback is critical as it demands an improvisational relationship to the shaping of sound. We wish to trigger a capacity for refusal of perfection forcing awareness. Our hope is that the transparency that we believe improvisation holds a capacity for can at once connect and nourish solidarity, provoking movement as well as continuity in and between our, as well as our audience's, collective and individual labour in life."

The resulting shapes and figments rustle a new wonderous bearing, making 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' an elegant transformation in the project's evolution.

Posh Isolation 249 
Mastered by John Hannon

Tracklist
1. Bells 01:11 
2. Piano & Accordion I 07:35 
3. Accordion 06:52 
4. Piano & Two Tape Loops 05:47 
5. Pipe Organ 07:22 
6. Piano & Accordion II 02:19 
7. Cembalo & Carillon 05:27 
8. Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops 05:32

Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback

Vanessa Amara - Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops

〜 Taken from Debit's album 'The Long Count', out via Modern Love on Feb 18th 2022 〜

Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released EP “SYSTEM” harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. 

On “The Long Count”, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane.

“The Long Count” is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments – whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets – using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music.

The ten tracks of ‘The Long Count’ form a ritual that’s a few footsteps out of time – neither a part of our present, nor the past. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance.

Beatriz’s soundscapes are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, and are as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner. Her microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images, while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that’s all too rare. Although “The Long Count” was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA – an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations.

File under magick concrète.

All tracks written, produced & mixed by Delia Beatriz
Additional Machine Learning for Audio by Isomov
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Album Art Photography & Creative Direction by Debit
AI Album Art by Moisés Horta Valenzuela

The Long Count

Debit - 2nd Day

Earwitness

12" PURCHA$E

PLIB019 - Joyul - A2. Marginalia

Pt. ii of Teresa Winter's livication to the Gaelic traditional festival Imbolc, 1st February - marking the mid-way point of winter solstice and spring equinox - and  St. Brigid's feast day in the Christian calendar. Hail new cycles.

Drowning By Numbers

Teresa Winter - Drowning By Numbers Pt. ii [RAVE038]

@wesurf debutant @jungdeejay delineates Bitcoin's volatile trading history through static-flecked ambient composition.

'Sonifications of Price' is out now on surf.

Buy: bit.ly/3gMtTBD

Premiere: Jung DJ - Bitcoin [surf]

An older track featured on BBC Radio 3's 'Sleeping Forecast' 🌚

Back Home

First release from CAF? with the work of Flammkuch, ARIS 1201, Tissu, FSS, lks, Morizio Lemano, 909 Hz, Mystic V, lks & Tissu.

IR-90

Tissu - how many guns do you own

Kali Malone’s “Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017" is a collection of isorhythmic canons following the tradition of pipe organ requiems found in early modern music. Malone’s purified organ dirges echo embodied recollections of the piercing numbness of those battled encounters when the armours were stripped down, left with nothing other than will power, yet still standing upright as the columns of Sounion. The soothing and perceptive harmonies resonate to a presence that leans elegantly towards a courageous aftermath and a gleaming salutation. While the dirges themselves have minimal melodic and rhythmic variation, they appear in constant cyclical motion, revealing their refracted selves in a coherent yet unpredictable manner; like a rotating wheel where all spokes are perceptible but at any given moment in a different place.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone’s 2017 debut LP “Velocity of Sleep” was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies, Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. Her sophomore LP “Cast of Mind” is due spring 2018.

http://shop.ascetic.house

ASCETIC HOUSE
201∞

Kali Malone "Locus Of Repetition"

The soundtrack to 'O Magic Power of Bleakness', an installation at Tate Britain in 2019. Scallies & Fairies become mired under a Motorway Bridge below the M53.

O Magic Power of Bleakness

ZERO IS MORE THAN NOTHING - VARIOUS ARTISTS
@ecstaticrecordings @angeloharmsworth

https://ecstaticrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/zero-is-more-than-nothing

Felisha Ledesma & Angelo Harmsworth - PDA (ECSTATIC 057)

Under their exael moniker, Berlin-based producer Naemi makes highly imaginative music that can be seen as a study in contrasts- precise, hyper-detailed drum programming sits atop fuzzy, organic pools of ambience, virtuosic futurism is wrung from a falling apart laptop. Following a string of excellent releases, both solo and in group settings, “Flowered Knife Shadows” features eight productions that feel like the full realization of the project, demonstrating the artist’s range and knack for vivid, pressurized productions. From the dextrous, chops-flexing “Koch Metish” to the sanguine “Reality’s Sweetheart,” Naemi’s clarity of vision and instantly recognizable aesthetic are delivered here with remarkable potency. Frost on the window, whispers in the dark.

Releases February 5, 2021
Written and produced by exael
Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M
Artwork by Alex McCullough

sodagong.com
sodagong.bandcamp.com

exael - Reality's Sweetheart (with Zoe Darsee) (Moon Pie Mix)

www.poshisolation.net
https://poshisolation.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/poshisolationsounds/

Vanessa Amara - Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops

poshisolation

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