ålrca

Order: shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/pilled…ple-of-doves

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Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves is the debut full-length by PDP III, who fell into alignment in December of 2018 amid a handful of immersive and improvisatory recording sessions held at Gary’s Electric Studio in Brooklyn, New York. The trio is a collaboration between composer/producer Britton Powell and two Berlin-based artists, the British composer/cellist Lucy Railton and the electronic artist Brian Leeds (Huerco S).

At the outset of these sessions Powell presented a series of compositional sketches anchored around multi-tracked electronics and acoustic percussion. These concepts were then used as the framework for collective improvisation, with the musicians working on instinct and layering as many as eight separate takes across a track. A portion of the record also reflects moments that are purely spontaneous – in-the-moment invention with Railton on electronics and cello and Powell and Leeds working on laptop computers.

The composition process involved little in the way of overt instruction, instead favoring discussion on more abstract notions of feel and energy. As a result, the final product was a bit surprising to all involved. “I don’t think the three of us had any idea how heavy and physical this thing was going to feel,” reflects Powell.

Subsequently reduced, edited, and collaged by Powell over the next two years, Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves presents a succession of alien moods. Gauzy textures are buoyed by extreme low end pressure. Serene industrial hum illuminates the rhythmic beating of waveforms. The sounds frequently evoke opposing emotions -- tenderness and anxiety, claustrophobia and transcendence.

The record culminates in 20-minute closer “49 Days,” where gradually unfurling textures for cello and electronics mirror the overtones of a ringing gong. It’s unsettling, but deeply meditative. A map of liminal space. Music to get lost to. “One thing that’s important in relation to my work with music is to access a place outside of physical space,” says Powell. “To pursue music as a tool to reach a place outside of physical existence.”

“There's something really simple, innocent, and timeless about working with acoustic percussion instruments,” explains Powell. “I think that they allow for a very true examination of sound. It feels vulnerable and really powerful at the same time.

Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves

49 Days

PDP III '49 Days' (SP125)

TR160 - Joachim Nordwall - 'FORMS OF ECSTASY'

Taken from the album 'Piano Muisc 1-7' released as LP, CD and digital.


Editions Mego is proud to welcome Powell to its roster with a bizarre and strangely emotive new LP of synthetic computer works entitled Piano Music 1-7.

Via his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis. 

As an extension of this intense period of work/research/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work. 

Piano Music 1-7, subtitled ‘Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics’, consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, ’In writing electronic music,’ Robin Mackay once wrote, ‘you also have to direct the invention of new tools.’

At times the piano skips gleefully over shadowing synthesis, whilst at others the synthetic sheets swarm and envelope the keys. The interplay between the two create a fantastical alternate reality, a cosmic machine in which time is eroded, shrunk and expanded, like a wax upon which operations and relations are inscribed or engraved. Many of the pieces express a playfulness or optimism verging on vitalism, as bundles of piano notes dance and interpolate with a never-repeating range of electronic gestures. The feel is of a brightly coloured flower-bed in various stage of bloom. This interplay of the [artifical] acoustic and the electronic builds on the pioneering processes developed by David Behrman in works such as Leapday Night, and Piano Music 1-7 could also be posited as a modern take on Conlon Nancarrow’s investigations for player piano. Similarly, the razor-sharp sonic properties and unfolding of non-human events recall the computer works of Xenakis and the surgical precision of Mego mainstay Florian Hecker.

Recorded in late 2020, these new Powell works propose not just a bold and bright vision of electronic music but serve also as a map with which, for 35 minutes at least, we can navigate our way out of the current milieu. As the artist himself remarks in the sleeve-notes, ‘. . . What emerged from this fog or soup [for me] were ideas and processes that felt affirmative and life giving — sensations I had always hoped to convey in my music. Perhaps the optimism or positivity I felt at these musical events unfolding, these clusters and knots tumbling in different directions across time, can also be felt by you.’

Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics

Composed and recorded by Powell, 2020
Mixed by Powell and Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, London
Mastered by Russell Haswell

Art direction by Guy Featherstone
Photography by John Cronin

Powell 'Piano Music #1' (EMEGO 301)

https://bank.bandcamp.com/album/salpinx

BNK-011
Wetware - Salpinx
Track - Fuck Them All

Free track

Salpinx

Fuck Them All

Wetware - Fuck Them All (BNK-011)

Multivitamin

Appears on Physically Sick 2, released March 6, 2018

Physically Sick 2 is a charity compilation by Allergy Season and Discwoman curated by Umfang, Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, and Physical Therapy. 100% percent of profits from the compilation will go to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund. Out Tuesday March 6th, 2018 and available exclusively through Bandcamp.

https://physicallysick2.bandcamp.com/

Terracotta [Allergy Season]

• poems written and read by Nat Marcus
https://www.instagram.com/nymphnet/
https://www.instagram.com/tabloidpress/
https://tabloidpress.net/

• sound by Alexandra Zakharenko
http://zakharenko.es/

Poems By Nat

Vaagner and Vienna Press presents (A Declaration)⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Amethyst⁣⁣
Beton Tåge⁣⁣
Burning Pyre⁣⁣
Body of Intrigue⁣⁣
Canadian Rifles⁣⁣
Civilistjävel!⁣⁣
Ceramic Flowers ⁣⁣
Fortunes Brine⁣⁣
Isorinne⁣⁣
J. Carter⁣⁣
Korea Undok Group⁣⁣
Lisa Lerkenfeldt⁣⁣
Moss Harvest⁣⁣
O. Vaupel ⁣⁣
Rosewater⁣⁣
Սայաթ-Նովա 
Sorim Byeon ⁣⁣
Summer Rites⁣⁣
⁣⁣
–––––––––––––––––⁣⁣
⁣
Available 1.12.19.⁣

Summer Rites _ Jeux

Chacun / Ensemble/ Maintenant / Hier / Toujours

01 - @LARAAJI - Change
02 - Low (@low-103894) - Lullaby
03 - Alain Kremski - Musiques Rituelles pour Cloches et Gongs: Prières et méditation secrètes
04 - Pharoah - Sanders Colors
05 - Eli Keszler (@elikeszler) - Fashion of Echo
06 - Palace Music (@palacemusic-music) - How I enjoy the Light
07 - Tirzah (@tirzahmusic)- Affection
08 - Terry Riley (@terry-riley-official) - Songs for 10 voices and 2 prophets
09 - Félicia Atkinson (@fefeatkinson) & Jefre Cantu Ledesma (@jefre-cantu-ledesma)- And The Flowers have time for me
10 - Dominique A (@dominique-a-official)- Sous la neige
11 - Beverly Glen Copeland (@user-171843105)- Ever New

⇢ Lifetime #02 | INNER SUN - Félicia Atkinson

Exercising abstention and reduction, the musical duo of Jin Mustafa and Robin Smeds Mattila – Karabasan Drane – finds collaborative purpose in aesthetic refinement. Their debut album Crystalline State (EN X PL, 2020) purposefully conceives a sharp and distinct sonic world, a collage of shaded dreams and imaginations in xeroxed high-contrast.

With little or no haste, the music of Karabasan Drane maintains an eerie urgency. The reason might be found innately: it was all written for upcoming live performances. What began in rehearsed live compositions for sparse electronics has now come together on record, documenting material for live performances of the past half-decade. Notable occurrences include Norbergfestival in Sweden and Herrensauna in Berlin.

Jin Mustafa is a DJ, electronic musician and visual artist based in Stockholm. Her work is of shifting media, often taking form in moving images, sculptures and sound. She is interested in notions of liminality and technology, and the relationships of personal and collective memory.

Robin Smeds Mattila is an electronic musician and graphic artist based in Stockholm. Under the guise of Human Rays, his musical works carry remnants of techno culture and ambient memorabilia, clothed in coarse patches of textural noise and drone.

"Crystalline State" marks a new path of collaboration between Glyn Maier and Nick Klein. Having previously released collaborative recorded Klein/Lack efforts , they now focus both of their label practices to produce the tape series "EN X PL". 
credits
releases June 1, 2020

All music Karabasan Drane
Mastered by Nathan Taylor

psychicliberation.net

ENXPL01 - KARABASAN DRANE - A3. CHARMER

Taken from album 'Forma' released as LP and Digital

Lucy Railton 'Forma' (excerpt) (SPGRM 002)

nueen - Iris

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

A Year Closer

Purchase

Maths Balance Volumes - Dark Sky

From 'Magelungsverket', to be released 22nd of January 2021.
https://www.self-titledmag.com/linus-hillborg-magelungsverket-album/

Linus Hillborg - Vårbergsobservatoriet

atba

The most daring, audacious and amazing record label on the planet - Le Monde

Maths Balance Volumes - Dark Sky

Penultimate Press

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