Following on from the 2016 Korea Undok Group compilation LP Penultimate Press is proud to release the follow up, Senescence. Covering material recorded in the last two and a half years, this new cd comprises 50% works previously available on private tiny run cassettes and 50% works made for an abandoned lp. Abandoned being a good word to use again here as this collection of barley-there trace element songs and decaying acoustic snapshots will leave the listener with a sensation not so dissimilar to the feeling abandonment conjures.

Please note there has been zero mastering on this release as we wanted it to sound as shit as possible.

Fixed Ending

Taken from the self titled Penultimate Press vinyl LP (PP8)
http://penultimate-press.blogspot.co.uk

Księżyc  'A Ile Ma Lat?' (PP8) LP

Take from the cassette Komare – Grace to the breathe that void (PPCS8)

Grace to the breathe that void

Komare

Taken from the compendium coffin closer release from Pat Klassen’s Barn Sour project. A project where the batshit crazy defies the beautiful whilst relishing in unease. Animals appear as phantasms, humans expel intense emotional states. Borderline music and borderline funny this is not for the faint of heart. Soap and Glue collages material from all six Barn Sour releases on a variety of labels, Staighre, Careful Catalog, 72 Fold Mane etc alongside a small sprinkling of exclusive material. The final Barn Sour release is the ultimate Barn Sour release and all you need to engage with one of the most twisted outfits to emerge from the underground in recent years.

Barn Sour - Soap & Glue (excerpt)

I'll Know You

Janet's Song

Maths Balance Volumes follow up their acclaimed 2020 release A Year Closer with a further and sturdier bucket of songs scraped from the dust of being. Haunted, fragile and beautiful, this is music that explores the ghostly zones of its own creation. The loneliness and vulnerability that unfolds with the opening cut Stay lays the way for exploration of sound and song as simple melodic guitar and organ whilst the subsequent and subsequent Janet’s Song weaves these elements alongside the sound pebbles entering a water. 

This is evocative music made thoroughly by humans with the most basic of tools. Unafraid to step away from their screens Maths Balance Volumes stroll with breezy resistance to the current thread of platform regurgitation. 

Tonight flips the song on its side as a barnstorming melange of concrete hustle made from shakers, animals, humans and beelzebub knows what. Egyptian Wedding sounds like Still House Plants if they operated off the depths of a rotating well. Forming a round is a dusty scratchy heartbreaker that encapsulates the hybrid Smithsonian Folkways label approach that only MBV do. 

There is something enormously human about Maths Balance Volumes take on underground experimental music, one far more so than the human pitched music made in the mainstream today. In the 20th Century it was the other way around. What has happened ? I will let you contemplate that. But for me, in this case explicitly this press scribe is chuffed at the consequence of this reversal. Very happy indeed. 

Released June 30, 2023

Maths Balance Volumes - Stay

Far from the extended still lifes and mises en abîmes of their acclaimed Penultimate Press debut A Sunset for Walter (PP43, 2019), Noetinger & Pateras’ 15 Coruscations weaves frequencies & stirs data into an agitated series of deft psychoacoustic miniatures. Employing electronics as a deformed mirror reflecting joyous lacerations & interweavings, 15 Coruscations borrows from both brut & skilled musical practises, emerging from the current despair to blister light across the moribund horizontalities of post-surveillance musical product. 

Jérôme Noetinger (Marseille, 1966) is one of the most respected composer/performers of electronic music working today. Discovering the ReVox B77 as a powerful tool for live electro-acoustic creation in the mid 1980s, he has developed a singular performance language unmatched in agility & invention. 

Anthony Pateras (Melbourne/Naarm, 1979) works at an evolving nexus of notation, improvisation, electro-acoustics + keyboard instruments. Active since the late 90s as both a composer of concert music and independent bandleader, he has created a unique body of work across multiple genres & contexts. 

Noetinger & Pateras’ working relationship began in 2009 in the Thymolphthalein quintet (Editions Mego, 2011), extending through to the development of the 6-channel tape part for Pateras’ percussion sextet Beauty Will Be Amnesiac Or Will Not Be At All (Immediata, 2017). Establishing their duo in 2018 with A Sunset For Walter, they have performed across Europe in both piano/tape and pure electronic configurations. 15 Coruscations is their latest testament to their quest for the unheard, deploying tape, computer, samplers, garbage, environmental recordings, lo-fi electronics, hi-fi circuitry and a deep love of all things concrète.

Jérôme Noetinger & Anthony Pateras - Coruscation 1

Penultimate Press is proud to unveil a global collaboration that embraces the planet we inhabit. One with a combined member and atmosphere of Santiago, Chile, Salsipuedes, Argentina and Berlin, Germany.

El Jardín de las Matemáticas (The Garden of Mathematics) was written and recorded by Alvaro Daguer (Glorias Navales/A Full Cosmic Sound/ETCS Records), Pablo Picco (Bardo Todol/Bolinga Everest Records), Tomás Salvatierra (Glorias Navales) and Mark Harwood (Penultimate Press).

Utilising Chinese drum, ocarina, shakers, flutes, whistles, violin, bells, acoustic guitar, gongs, clarinet, n’vike, harmonium, Korg ms-20, moceño, tapes. owl flute and more, The Garden of Mathematics is an alluring, alien, bizarre, colourful, curious, fascinating, peculiar, romantic and astonishing recording where beauty and unsettled beasts coexist in an exotic exploration of sound and song.

Navigating waters possibly traversed by Angus Maclise, Pygmy Unit and Charlie Nothing, the nine tracks this garden brings forth take the listener on a journey through sound and song via nature and the expansive mind.

The results are a a unique record steeped in a wild mix of folk, ethnomusicology, musique concrete and psychedelia.

El Jardín De Las Matemáticas - The Garden Of Mathematics

Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect.

After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet's regime of terror, aiding in the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, weapons production, etc. Since the end of the 1980s, there has been a legal reappraisal of the C.D.'s crimes in Chile.

Its successor organization makes a living from tourism.

The C.D. project uses, on the one hand, a series of documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses, and on the other, a set of melodic improvisations (MIDI files), improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, tension, claustrophobia and fear associated with the Colonia. CD 2 (Knochenstückchen) directly reflects this atmosphere. CD 1 (Reue?) on the other hand, is characterized by the contradictory breadth of the statements found after the dissolution of the sect: Denial of atrocities to glorification of the C.D. by leaders who returned to Germany against the professed traumas of formerly abused inmates and exploited community workers.

For this purpose, the eyewitness recordings were sound-modified to a considerable extent. The MIDI files were played back with a variety of virtual instruments (piano, guitar, sax, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ, synths, etc.) in a multitude of modifications (speed, pitches, loops, harmonic and tonal variations), so that the 11 pieces from CD 1 and the 16 pieces from CD 2 each represent a closely interwoven overall composition.

Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected practitioners of radical music of our day. He was the founding member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and ran the legendary experimental label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today's experimental music scene. Previous releases have seen him collaborate with such well known and diverse artists such as Merzbow, Andrew Chalk, Jim O'Rourke, Achim Wollscheid, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Kouhei Matsunaga and Bruce Russell.

C.D.

RLW - (Reue?) excerpt

Colonia Dignidad was the settlement of a German evangelical sect.

After being prosecuted for child abuse in Germany, the group fled to Chile in 1961. Like similar religious sects, it was characterized by the outward appearance of a unified, godly community with well-tempered cultural activities and social welfare, but inwardly and in its environment by oppression, sexual abuse, and exploitation. In the 1970s, it unquestioningly inserted itself into Pinochet's regime of terror, aiding in the imprisonment and torture of political prisoners, weapons production, etc. Since the end of the 1980s, there has been a legal reappraisal of the C.D.'s crimes in Chile.

Its successor organization makes a living from tourism.

The C.D. project uses, on the one hand, a series of documentary recordings of contemporary witnesses, and on the other, a set of melodic improvisations (MIDI files), improvised in the spirit of the impressions of terror, tension, claustrophobia and fear associated with the Colonia. CD 2 (Knochenstückchen) directly reflects this atmosphere. CD 1 (Reue?) on the other hand, is characterized by the contradictory breadth of the statements found after the dissolution of the sect: Denial of atrocities to glorification of the C.D. by leaders who returned to Germany against the professed traumas of formerly abused inmates and exploited community workers.

For this purpose, the eyewitness recordings were sound-modified to a considerable extent. The MIDI files were played back with a variety of virtual instruments (piano, guitar, sax, turntable, lung machine, barrel organ, synths, etc.) in a multitude of modifications (speed, pitches, loops, harmonic and tonal variations), so that the 11 pieces from CD 1 and the 16 pieces from CD 2 each represent a closely interwoven overall composition.

Ralf Wehowsky is one of the most respected practitioners of radical music of our day. He was the founding member of the seminal German group P16.D4 and ran the legendary experimental label Selektion whose ground-breaking releases influenced many working in today's experimental music scene. Previous releases have seen him collaborate with such well known and diverse artists such as Merzbow, Andrew Chalk, Jim O'Rourke, Achim Wollscheid, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Kouhei Matsunaga and Bruce Russell. 

Design - Maja Larsson

RLW - (Knochenstückchen) excerpt

“Free the organ from its dependence on the church and remove it from its sacred immobility.”
“…a phenomenological approach that involves experiencing the limits of sound objects.”  - Pancrace Manifesto

“The talented Pancrace ensemble reminds me of David Munrow and the Early Music Consort.” - Charles Curtis

Music for spatialized midi controlled pipe organ “Organous”, Silbermann pipe organ (1778), Voices, Bird Calls, Baroque Violin, Rattles, Ventilators, Whistles, Uilleann Pipes, Gaïda, Sheng, Rhombus, Pouet-Pouet, Pi Synth, Kastle Synth and AM radio. 
Pancrace is an ensemble comprising French, British and Austrian performers. 

The members being Prune Bécheau, Arden Day, Julien Desailly, Léo Maurel and Jan Vysocky. 

Pancrace has “a unique, fully formed vision that combines improvisation, composition, eclectic instrumentation and a church’s massive pipe organ” (Sarah Hennies).

Pancrace’s latest double LP “Papotier” is the third panel of a tryptic after “Pancrace” (2017) and “Fluid Hammer” (2019). The ensemble knew at some point from their previous LP they would have to go back to church and repent confronting a Silbermann 18th century baroque organ with their custom made modular midi pipe organ : the “Organous”. 

After nearly 18 months of lockdown the quintet finally met in Bouxwiller Alsace a few miles away from Dangolsheim where Pancrace first formed in 2015. During a residency Pancrace had full access to the Protestant church with its humongous Silbermann pipe organ famous for its “human voice” stop. Ironically the album title “Papotier” came up before the covid era. Ironic because a “papotier” is a mask or to be very specific a grotesque face carved in wood, initially rigged to the lower part of the organ casing. There are only very few of these fancy oddities left in France and around the world. 

After months of feeling gagged during lockdown having a “papotier” as an amulet was somewhat liberating and greatly contributed to opening up the Pancrace sessions to the exploration of human voice. Relearning how to breathe, listening to the human membrane, questioning the nature of air all within the confined space of a 14th century church were the essential acts that compose the pieces. One can consider this album as a phenomenological investigation into voice articulation trying to emulate the birth of a vocable like von Kempelen's speaking machine who also used rudimentary organ modules to mimic human babbling. Essentially understanding what a mouth is to us to the point where, when all the pipes are blowing, they make a hell of a noise.

Cybermann

Le Papotier

Melville

Farben

Papotier

Pancrace - Abat-Voix

Dan Melchior has a wild history, brain and catalogue. Penultimate Press is honoured to add to it. The former and later that is. This is Melchior's first piano recording. “I used my girlfriend Jessica's piano and got a fairly cheap mic from the guitar centre that could just be plugged onto the end of a guitar cable.” The reverb is natural, as the piano sits in a large, mostly empty room. Hill Country Piano is the result of a human music box mind brimming with many a corner somehow aligning with chambers still being told. Melchior does not play the piano in any formal way, as you can probably tell. He played and recorded the piano, with simple repetitive parts, whilst listening to previous recordings on headphones. Then the magic happens. The gentle introduction of a banjo on Sparrow Song paints the reality of an America now lost. The percussion on the self-titled track unravels a psychedelic gamelan piano duo residing in the now. It didn't start out that way,it never does, but this slow burning trip around a mind/world happened to come into formulation just as an interest in Pascal Comelade was coming into play. All original piano was recorded in Austin. 4U.

Dan Melchior is from London, England. He has lived in various cities in the USA for the last 24 years.

Melchior’s resume is as unique as it is exciting and diverse. Having cut his teeth in the land of garage rock as a collaborator with Billy Childish and Holly Golightly his vision takes sharp twists landing on Graham Lambkin’s strange and beautiful experimental label Kye with two records which broke not only the mould of himself but that of the song itself.

Melchoir is a musician with a voluminous discography which embraces many different forms of expression, from song based rock to pure textural explorations. His music has evolved significantly, to become a distant entity from some of his earlier blues-based work, showing a definite influence of more experimental bands such as The Homosexuals and The Fall, and some absurdist elements which have led to comparisons to compatriot exponents of that genre, Vivian Stanshall and Syd Barrett.

Always experimenting with form in an original manner avoiding any inherent genre anchor. Blues is referenced and extended, musique concrete is found embedded in the song.

Melchior has collaborated with artists as diverse as Billy Childish, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Letha Rodman Melchior and the LAFMS outfit Dinosaurs With Horns. Just as diverse are the record labels he has been associated with, including Sympathy for the record industry, Siltbreeze, Kye, Ultra Eczema, Chocolate Monk, Ever/Never, Feeding Tube and Penultimate Press, and more.

Melchior supports himself in recent years as a portrait artist, while pursuing various divergent paths, both artistically and musically.

Hill Country Piano

Dan Melchior - The Body

Taken from the album 1/2 on Penultimate Press

Léo Hoffsaes is a Paris-based composer working mainly with electric guitar, string instruments, and field recordings.

On this record for Penultimate Press, Hoffsaes is focused exclusively on electric guitar and ways to record it; blending back and forth the physical sound of a supercardioid mic placed just above the strings with a more distant, colder, raw resonance of the plugged guitar. The sound shifts between these two perspectives and is also à l’image du core motif, a slow, deliberate two-note progression (sometimes three), oscillating and moving through the pieces like weary feet struggling with mud, like the push and pull of 1 and 2 in ½. Hoffsaes also made a trombone piece that follows that similar system of composition. The pieces are composed with a custom guitar tuning. The tuning includes intervals that approximate simple harmonic ratios and others that follow non-rational frequency relationships.

Temps Lilbre

Purchase at Bandcamp

Léo Hoffsaes - Temps Libre

Taken from the album Rabbit Eclipse (PP19) CD/LP

http://penultimate-press.blogspot.co.uk

Rabbit Eclipse is the second full-length recording from the legendary Księżyc following on from their self titled debut from 1996. 

The Moon never went away. 

The 2013 the Penultimate Press re-issue of Księżyc’s timeless debut exposed the band to a large new audience resulting in a return to live performance and the subsequent development of new material.

Rabbit Eclipse was recorded in Warsaw throughout May to September 2015 within the idyllic Palladian palace Królikarnia (The Rabbit House).  All original members gathered to conjure the peculiar hybrid of the the ancient and the contemporary unique to the band. 

With more expanded forms, Rabbit Eclipse presents a rich and subtle environment of beguiling narratives hanging in suspended tension.  This opens up an entire new phase in the cycle of the band where an enchanting discrete musical continuum of rich and subtle sound excursions are enveloped in a mysterious melancholia.

Rabbit Eclipse is another exemplary presentation from one of Poland’s most idiosyncratic and respected outfits. 

Line up: 

Agata Harz - vocals, objects
Katarzyna Smoluk-Moczydłowska - vocals, keyboards, objects
Lechosław Polak - accordion, keyboards, synthesizers
Remigiusz Mazur Hanaj - tapes, hurdy-gurdy, violin
Robert Niziński - clarinet, keyboards, objects
Paweł Romańczuk - Fidel, Stössel-Laute, objects 

Track listing:

1. Kapkowa
2. Mglista
3. Flażoletowa
4. Walczyk III
5. Syreny  


Księżyc - Mglista

Joe McPhee: B-flat and E-flat alto clarinet, Roland MC202 Micro Composer synthesizer
 
Bryan Eubanks: Open-circuit electronics (sinetones)
 
 
 
What constitutes an unidentified sighting, the rarely heard ‘alien’ clarinet playing of Joe McPhee and the ineffable electronics of Bryan Eubanks? Penultimate Press is extremely proud to produce My Undocumented Alien Clarinet: a strange sensual addition to the ever inquisitive McPhee canon. My Undocumented Alien Clarinet is a beguiling document of a performance held at Alternative Books, Kingston, NY, Sunday, August 6, 2006 under the auspices of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation’s New Vanguard Series. My Undocumented Alien Clarinet captures a unique intimate improvisation exploring the outer reaches of the form. 
 
Joe McPhee, (b.1939 USA) is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, conceptualist and theoretician. He has collaborated with Pauline Oliveros, Graham Lambkin, Peter Brotzmann, Evan Parker, Raymond Boni among many others. With a career spanning nearly 50 years and over 100 recordings, he continues to tour internationally, forge new connections and reach for music’s outer limits.
 
.. His magical take on avant-garde sax remains one of the wonders of the scene. He still has one of the most beautiful tones on the planet, even when he’s reaching for jazz’s outer limits." - Time Out NY
 
Bryan Eubanks (b. 1977, USA) is a musician composing electronic and acoustic works for small ensembles, solo instruments, and custom generative software; improvising in collaboration; and working with acoustic holography, a stereophonic recording and diffusion technique.
 
Artwork by Jerry Starpoli
Liner notes by Joe McPhee 
In memory of Jerry Starpoli 
 
http://www.penultimatepress.com

Joe McPhee and Bryan Eubanks - My Undocumented Alien Clarinet (excerpt)

Op.192 UMWÄLZUNG - fluxorum organum 1990 EURASIENSTAB ist immernoch ANGELPUNKT is a previously unissued work by Henning Christiansen from 1990. 

Around the  formation of the European Union Henning approached his original Eurasienstab organ recordings from 1968 as a platform to remold a vast amount of audio he made over the subsequent years 

This 2CD release comprises two different mixes of UMWÄLZUNG that were made for Werner Durand in 1990 to be used as backing tapes for a performance at Ballhaus Naunynstrasse in February 1990.

UMWÄLZUNG is unique in Henning’s output as it resides in a more contemporary landscape positioning itself more as a ‘mix’ than a stand alone recording. One which retains the skewered sensibility that only Henning could conjure. 

The two hour long versions of UMWÄLZUNG are haunted with tape hiss, weird interference and a deeply melancholic aura that moves from the original Eurasienstab organ recordings through to the somewhat hysterical 180 Hammer Blows Against War Monkeys resulting in an epic and hypnotic excursion. 

As unusual and inspired as the best of Henning’s works Penultimate Press, in full cooperation with the Henning Christiansen estate, is extremely proud to release this 2CD in a mini album gatefold sleeve in an edition of 500 copies.

http://www.penultimatepress.com

Henning Christiansen - Op.192 GRUNDBAND Umwälzung (excerpt)

Melbourne based artist Arek Gulbenkoglu presents his second full length album for Penultimate Press.

Following on from the 2017 release Three days afterwards, A gift like a hollow vessel sees a sharper scalpel at play resulting in a more nuanced release which unfolds a curious journey of suburban psychedelia.

Material source from voice and body sounds, recording of non-musical processes, actions and events, breath, tapes of animal sounds slowed and sped up, processed field recordings, electronics, percussion, tape delay, sample of old folkways records and Esperanto text to voice translations.

A gift like a hollow vessel is striking and intimate musique concrete. A work of confounding beauty as created by one of the most unique voices operating in orbit of psychedelic music as it appears today.

Artwork by Matthew Revert. Limited Edition of 250 copies.

A gift like a hollow vessel

Arek Gulbenkoglu - A gift like a hollow vessel (excerpt)

Taken from the LP 'Moss Trumpet' (PP38)

Having released four full length albums framed around more ‘‘song’ orientated spheres, Melbourne artist Francis Plagne has concurrently moved around collaborative endeavours with Andrew Chalk, Joe Talia and Crys Cole. He was also a part of that Food Court record released on Graham Lambkin’s Kye label in 2014. Which brings us to Moss Trumpet. Plagne’s first solo album which exclusively orbits a more abstract domain.

Taking inspiration from Costin Miereanu’s Luna Cinese this gentle curiosity records the private use of flute, harmonium, keyboards, microphones, organ, paper, percussion, recorder, synthesizer, tapes, tuba, voice, whistle and zither. Like Miereanu’s master stroke these recordings were then collated in semi-random layers creating shifting beds of subtle startling sound.

Moss Trumpet is a timeless affair, warm and woozy as if it is drifting over two sides where each could be either, where the audio perpetually falls in on itself creating a bed of sound inexplicably eschewing standard movement and progression as it unfolds out and around the listener.

Artwork by John Nixon and Maja Larsson.  Limited edition of 250 copies.

Moss Trumpet

Francis Plagne - Moss Trumpet (excerpt)

Sholto Dobie is an artist and performer born in Edinburgh and living in London. His solo output is marked by live performances that are characteristically delicate, evocative and absurd. He uses his own instruments, crudely assembled from materials such as reeds, whistles, bin bags, fans and air compressors, alongside loose performative structures, to respond to places and situations. He plays in Al Fresco (with Lia Mazzari & Tom White) and regularly collaborates with Ben Pritchard, he has also worked with Ashley Paul. He continues to run the event series Muckle Mouth which he founded in 2014.

Mark Harwood is a musician and performer born in Ferntree Gully and living in London. His output veers towards uncanny audio both delicate and unsettling whilst his performances rely on teasing out and playing with the mood embedded within any given environment and audience situation. He has collaborated with Graham Lambkin, Aine O’Dwyer, Timo Van Luijk and MP Hopkins and runs the Penultimate Press label which brings forth this very release.

The Blue Horse is a beautiful strange journey through a landscape where little is familiar but all are welcome. Made from predominantly acoustic sources, The Blue Horse gracefully hisses, puffs, wheezes, whirls, and clunks it’s way through a series of distinct musical and non musical environments. Sounding both at times like a dark and stormy night… and “an elephant trying to get laid”, the ambiguous style of The Blue Horse conceals the artists’ unsettling, fantastical and quietly humorous sensibility.

Whilst The Blue Horse lacks any obvious precursors, it’s elemental and environmental leanings potentially tread a path initially mapped out by Moniek Darge and Godfried-Willem Raes in the works coming out of the Logos Foundation in Ghent, Belgium in the mid 80’s.

The Blue Horse is the debut recording from Sholto Dobie and Mark Harwood and features a guest appearance from cellist Judith Hamann.

““People say he looks blue under the moon”, is what Mhairi told me when I asked her about it.

I was walking along the roadside with my partner in the Cabrach, one of the most remote areas in northern Scotland. At a bend in the road, something directed my attention towards the hill and when I looked up I could make out a silvery-blue creature, moving slowly and gracefully, obscured by the trees. It wasn’t clear at first, but I soon clocked that it was a horse and I took a picture of it. Earlier in the day I came across a fairy ring of field blewits, mushrooms otherwise known as blue-legs, so I knew something was up.

By the time it was dark (around 4pm in November) we were the only customers in the Grouse Inn, a long-standing middle-of-nowhere tea room and whisky bar, beautifully cared for by Wilma McBain and her daughter Mhairi. Noticing the leather harnesses on display I asked Mhairi about the horse we’d seen earlier in the woods. I was somewhat enchanted just talking about it, and she wasn’t surprised.

Later in the evening, we ended up behind the bar in the refrigeration room (where Mhairi paints), she showed us her painting of the blue horse.

I didn’t sleep much that night.” – Sholto Dobie, 2019

The Blue Horse

Sholto Dobie & Mark Harwood III

Penultimate Press is pleased to present A Sunset for Walter, the first duo release from long-time collaborators Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras. Having worked together in a number of different collaborative contexts over the years, the pair used Pateras’ 2018 residency at Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart as an opportunity to develop a major durational work for Steinway piano and multiple Revox tape machines. Presenting four excerpts from a three-hour concert, the LP’s opening moments immediately establish its distinctive sound-world: an austere sequence of octaves slowly sounded by the piano gradually develops into passages of fragmentary lyricism as Noetinger’s tape manipulations dilate the sonic space with rumbling sub-bass, distant echoes, and hints of uncanny backmasking.
 
A Sunset for Walter was conceived as a loose tribute to the piano works of Walter Marchetti, particularly the slowed-down subaquatic expanse of Nel Mari Del Sud. As Marchetti described his own work, A Sunset for Walter is ‘music without beginning, or end, or development’, where the lack of obvious structural divisions creates something like an endless present. But where the monochrome surface of Marchetti’s work – in its willingness to descend, in his own words  to the ‘pits of aesthetic poverty’ – often approaches total stasis, A Sunset for Walter is calmly immovable in its overall texture but perpetually changing in detail, as the performers respond intuitively to each other, their instruments, and the environment. Noetinger’s tape manipulations range from nearly imperceptible shadowing of the live piano to anarchic bursts of rewinding tape, floating wisps of feedback, and dreamlike concrète interjections of children’s voices and splashing water. Pateras’ piano performance moves from single pitches left hanging over a backdrop of silence to almost Messiaen-esque sequences of complex chords and arpeggios, all sounded within a temporal framework that seems to follow internal rhythms of breath and bodily movements.
 
Caught in this hall of mirrors, the listener is often unable to distinguish the live piano from its tape-manipulated reflection. Like the sunset of the title, here outlines blur into a crepuscular haze, as fleeting effects of light and shade catch our attention just as they disappear.

A Sunset for Walter

Jérôme Noetinger and Anthony Pateras - 19h39 / 19H46

Fluid Hammer

Pancrace - CSO

'Dumb Answer to Miracles' is the first official publication of writings by Graham Lambkin. Previously 20 copies of a signed private edition entitled 'Tomb of Speed' were circulated amongst friends, collegues and mail order customers. This collection gathers all the 'Tomb of Speed' writings, a handful of Lambkin's lyrics he wrote for the band Shadow Ring and many unpublished works. 

Graham Lambkin 'Dumb Answer to Miracles' (excerpt) Book + CD (PP1)

Taken from The Henning Christiansen Archive release HC3 Opus 201 L´ESSERE UMANO ERRABANDO LA VOCA ERRABANDO LP

The third release on The Henning Christiansen archive label features a previousely unreleased work from 1991. The Wandering Human Being - The Wandering Voice, as the title suggest is a piece for voice and featurues Carlo Quartucci, Carla Tatò, Ursula Reuter Christiansen and Henning Christiansen. 

Ursula and Henning met the couple Carlo Quartucci and Carla Tatò through the curator Johannes Gachnang on a visit to Genazzano in Italy 1983 and became close friends, collaborating on a variety of projects, most notably on Carlo and Carla’s epic adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist's play Penthesilea (forthcoming on The Henning Christiansen archive). 

The Wandering Human Being - The Wandering Voice came about from a conversation between the four of them whilst on a beach on the island of Møn in the eastern sea in Denmark, looking south. Here they all laughed at the realisation that on the other ide of Europe in this direction was Sicily where Carlo and Carla lived. The island Sicily, The island Møn. As Henning says “The human-being was wandering from sea to sea”. Henning saw no difference in their way over life ‘over there’ and mused on the means of which we cross over oceans and move around facilitating awareness of the same family of human being. People from islands meet people from islands and they can all look across vast waters and laugh together. 

Human-basic-technology

This conversation and collective realisation of the simplicity of it all lead to this work which is one of the finest in Henning’s vast catalogue. L´essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a mantra for four voices, the sound of the ocean, a pvc tube, effects and wind instument. The piece moves in an organic hypnotic fashion lulling and rolling, ebbing and flowing over the two sides of the record. Rudimentary phrases in various languages interlope and weave a mystical music, as primitive as it is ‘contemporary’. 

The Wind, The Stars, etc are repeated over in random untrained fashion. The two couples from different countries weave voices, words and language into a common sonic fabric which eradicates identity, the idea of ‘national’, the idea of country, the idea of difference.  

Unlike anything else in Henning’s output L´essere Umano Errabando La Voce Errabando is a calm and meditative work which rolls along two sides wrapping the listener in a random melancholic meditative mantra. Only Henning Christiansen could summon such haunting, beautiful, gothic music carved from political hope.

Henning Christiansen -  L´ESSERE UMANO ERRABANDO LA VOCA ERRABANDO excerpt

It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, or hidden away where nobody is supposed to find them. When things fall together—when the wooden creaks and radio hisses gather for a minute alongside bass lines and melancholy voice—there is a beauty that sounds like it was made by nobody and for nobody.

The city of Mankato, Minnesota has been the steady gathering point for the band since its beginnings. Mankato had always provided an ominous backdrop: built on stolen Dakota land, the city was the site of the largest mass execution in US history, when 38 Dakota prisoners were hanged on in 1862 in a straightforward act of genocide. But in their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture—only as ghosts or unliving effigies.

A Year Closer tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn’t working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in “Dark Skies.” We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in “We Had Time” or the romantic lament of “When I Drink.” In “Work Last Monday,” all of life passes with cold automatism in an “office apartment,” as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of “Over the Hill” isn’t apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a “man,” but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. “Angel of Mercy” tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world. 

But these are just the moments when A Year Closer speaks in words clear and audible enough to be understood. The giddy, agitated voice of “The Price” speaks only to itself in a private language, hidden away in a tin can somewhere. Musically, A Year Closer is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide. These are the moments that the listener of Maths Balance Volumes always knows are coming, waits for, and settles in temporarily for a moment of repose. Maybe this is the meaning of A Year Closer: while waiting for the worst, things come together, a “we” with no name but with a rhythm, a tenuous but definite harmony to share as the clock ticks. Even if, when the lights are turned on, it turns out nobody was there. - Paul Buchholz

Taken from PP48 A Year Closer LP coming soon

Penultimate Press

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks