Shelter Press is happy to announce the release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit’s latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by - and dedicated to - the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer.

Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s.

In the piece, Ankersmit explores different “modes” of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up loud, the material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener’s head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as “ear tones”.

The title is a reference to Amacher’s essay “Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography”, and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. “Ear tone” stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener’s head reveals changes.

For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion.

The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher.

This is a digital-only release (CD and download) because the “ear tone” material can’t be adequately transferred to vinyl.

Please play loud and use speakers, not headphones. 
credits
releases March 19, 2021

Music: Thomas Ankersmit
Mastering: Kassian Troyer
Design: Bartolomé Sanson
Interview editing: Michelle Arrouas

THOMAS ANKERSMIT 'Perceptual Geography' (EXCERPT) (SP130)

● CD01_SPLIT : Humbros / R​.​I​.​P. ●

❊ Composé et mixé par Humbros
❊ Masterisé par Ernest Bergez (Sourdure)
❊ Artwork par Josué Confort ©
❊ Sortie le 9 juillet 2021
❊ Cassette, 80 exemplaires, papier recyclé

→ champdoner.bandcamp.com/album/cd01-split-humbros-r-i-p

Sumac

A1 - Humbros - Sumac

Playing music at the ocean, an infinite mirror curls upward towards you. Picturesque and perverse, cracked enamel castings sit in lazy but unsettled sands. Something is just right, having once stirred beneath the surface it now hovers misting at eye level. You can put your hand through it; pushing humidity around like a furry catkins flake in a tepid wind.

BAD LSD TRIPS is a collaboration between artists Domingo Castillo and doris dana. Working through the process of developing sounds during the pandemic, the duo amassed large swaths of recordings on a weekly basis from 2020 and 2021 in Miami, Florida. The debut recording of "bad LSD trips" for the ENXPL series is documentation of improvising and honing a sonic vocabulary that is rooted in the tradition of early industrial, dark ambient and tape music. The backdrop of the recorded effort is a geographical conundrum of a city worn threadbare by candied advertising, tourism, and aesthetics. BAD LSD TRIPS inverts the spectacle of their locale with psychedelic meditations searching for, and occasionally digging inside of, a place of ease.

BAD LSD TRIPS is a collaboration between artists Domingo Castillo and doris dana. Working through the process of developing sounds during the pandemic, the duo amassed large swaths of recordings on a weekly basis from 2020 and 2021 in Miami, Florida.


Limited 125 copies
Copper foil print on recycled paper
Recycled cassette shells and cases 
credits
releases March 29, 2022

Recorded by Domingo Castillo and doris dana
LAZY HIDEAWAY contains elements of Zabelle Panosian - Groung
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Source material for design from 'Smiley Face Om'
Design by RJM Vanderheyden

BAD LSD TRIPS

HARD COPY PURCHA$E

ENXPL12 - BAD LSD TRIPS - A1. CONSCIOUSNESS BURNOUT

Broshuda's impressive output of releases and original production pieces for radio, appearing on imprints and platforms such as Haunter Records, NoCorner, Soda Gong and NTS reaches a new apex with 𝑨𝒅𝒖𝒎𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐.

Two live performances between 2019-2022 were re-constructed and edited in studio, creating a meticulous snapshot of the artist´s current sound and practice.

𝑨𝒅𝒖𝒎𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐 glistens, sputters, and undulates for more than an hour of stream of consciousness electronics, showcasing a unique palette of intricately textured excursions touching on hypnagogic synth music, skeletal dub fragments, blistering noise and gloomy minimal composition along the way.

With nearly a decade of studio and live experience, Broshuda's pacing on the release is impeccable, guiding the listener through caverns of psychoacoustic wonders and technicolor swathes of ineffable modal shifts.

𝑨𝒅𝒖𝒎𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒕𝒊𝒐 is a gem of a document, capturing an exceptional period of work for a key figure haunting the furthest fringes of contemporary electronic music.

Enmossed

Adumbratio Side A Excerpt

homeless AI

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

Dr One - 18:05:2024, 12.56

Mark Fell / Will Guthrie - BERLIN - edit

Ultrafog - 'How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer'
Format: 12", Digital
Release Date: October 26th
Distribution: Rubadub
Artwork: Shy

PURCHASE:
https://www.rubadub.co.uk/records/how-those-fires-burned-that-are-no-longer
https://motionward.bandcamp.com/album/ultrafog-how-those-fires-burned-that-are-no-longer

After two cassette releases for the likes of Tokyo's Solitude Solutions and Barcelona's Angoisse, Motion Ward is delighted to present the debut of Kouhei Fukuzumi's Ultrafog project on the vinyl format. "How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer" weaves through sliding metal timbres, textured air abstractions and wistful mallet sequences. This record, like all of Kouhei's work, is a take on sound as a representation of memory. Light and translucent, each song aims for a temporal snapshot that will inevitably fade into the well of thoughts and experience.

https://soundcloud.com/ultrafog

www.motionward.com

MW004: Ultrafog, 'How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer'

Artist: Haji K.
Title: A White-Tinted Sky (Black Against An Orange Line)
Format: 12 inch vinyl (incl. download)
Release date: 25th of March 2020
Cat no: DPR003
Edition: 200 
⇣⇣⇣
https://daisart.bandcamp.com/album/black-against-an-orange-line

Haji K. — A White-Tinted Sky

Taken from @nueen EP APPX​:​03 Form, out February 1, 2021, via APPX: (@appendixfiles)

Read: http://bit.ly/3a5Xbr8
Pre-order: http://bit.ly/36anBHe

Written & Produced by Nacho Blanco Pezzati

Digital art by Amos Turner & Ike Zwanikken

Mastered by Ike Zwanikken

Released by:
APPX: (Appendix.files) subsidiary of INDEX:Records (@indexrecords)

Maths Balance Volumes - Stay

Penultimate Press

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