Narration: Kali Malone
Music: Kassel Jaeger
Additional Hidden « Uminari Voice »: Eiko Ishibashi
Audio Essay commissioned by V/A - Pro Helvetia

François J. Bonnet - Skyquakes

From the LP Pieces Of Driftwood, released 7 October 2022 on Disciples
https://disciples.ffm.to/piecesofdriftwood

Maxine Funke - South Dunedin

Purchase: bit.ly/3QrFcz1
Catalog #: GN69
August 19, 2022
CASS+DIGI

Born in Baghdad, raised in Tasmania, and now based in Barcelona, Dania Shihab moves between cultures and continents with an amorphous creative vision directly tied to her transient existence. As founder of experimental outpost Paralaxe Editions, Dania divides her time between Spain and the remote corners of Australia, where she works as an emergency doctor. Now, Dania presents her solo debut 'Voz,' which finds her rediscovering her voice as a primary instrument. 

The title “Voz”—Spanish for “voice” and signaling to her transnational experiences between Spain and Australia for the last decade—is especially fitting, as Dania grew up in a household where singing was culturally frowned upon. “I used to record myself privately by dubbing my vocals onto tapes in my bedroom and lied about joining the school choir. A lot of what I did musically was done in secret. For that, I have a difficult relationship with my voice,” Dania explains. And although not all the songs have vocals, the tracks here show Dania’s voice in an undeniably self-reflective, introspective, and cathartic light.

Created using a smattering of looped-and-layered vocals, instrumental samples, modular synthesis, cassette tapes, and piano, 'Voz' is an entrapped exploration of harmonics and tonality, weaving together manipulated vocal fragments, processed field recordings, and meditative atmospheres.
 
Dania sets the scene with the melancholic majesty of “I Lied,” a solitary chorus of lifted and lilted vocals and peripheral drones wafting through the air. “Aleph” floats in an ascending, slow-motion sprawl of synth tones, distant pianos, and kaleidoscopic lyrical abstractions. The low-fi churn of “Fire Dash” offers a vibrant milieu of witching hour merriment; a sinister snapshot that searches in the shadows to find even odder beauty. 
 
“Whale Song” departs the well-trodden path and ventures into a thick brush of humid ambiance like a sweltering aural travelog of some uncharted place. The backward drift of “An Individual” levitates in a bubbly fog of heavenly harmonics, while “The Other Thing Is” awakens in a calm, piano-drenched state of hustle and bustle. “Anomaly” closes 'Voz' in a grandiose din of ethereal melody and glorious devastation.

Dania - "Fire Dash"

Mattias Petersson, Triangular Progressions, LP
Release date - 24 February 2023
Catalogue nr. - HG2202
Format - Vinyl / digital

hallowground.bandcamp.com

Tracklist:
1. Triangular Progressions I – V     (20:07)
2. Triangular Progressions VI – IX     (16:10)

Credits:
Composed, mixed and recorded by Mattias Petersson (2019–2021)
Mastered by Andreas Lupo Lubich
Artwork by Laurin Huber 

///
Mattias Petersson debuts on the Swiss label Hallow Ground with »Triangular Progressions,« a suite in nine parts written entirely in the SuperCollider environment using additive synthesis. The starting point for the evocative piece is a magic number triangle that Petersson invented during his early composition studies and which has been an obsession of the artist for over twenty years, previously forming the foundation of many other of his works. By exploring the harmonic progressions found hiding within the triangle, »Triangular Progressions« at once emits a sense of introspective calm that fosters deep listening and evokes a whole spectrum of emotions, mediating between the abstract and the visceral.

The Stockholm-based Petersson, also known under the moniker Codespira1 and for his long-term collaboration with violinist George Kentros as There Are No More Four Seasons, has been active as a composer of computer music as well as an artist in the realms of live coding and modular synthesis for over two decades. Originally trained as a classical pianist, he also holds a diploma in electro-acoustic composition from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where he currently works as an associate professor. Besides his activities as a musician and teacher, Petersson is pursuing a PhD in composition at the Luleå University of Technology. Researching modular systems comprising both human and non-human modules, he is part of the GEMM))) Gesture Embodiment and Machines in Music cluster.

»Triangular Progressions« can be considered a perfect synthesis of Petersson’s academic interests and aesthetic ideas, combining a mathematical approach with artistic rigour. The magic number triangle highlights the beauty of symmetrical properties. By exploring its idiosyncrasies, the composer manages to translate them into engaging sounds. The lush melodies and harmonies of the music at times call to mind the intimate organ and drone works by label mates Kali Malone and Maria W Horn while also maintaining a unique signature sound. The addition of pure sinusoidal waves enables a deep listening exploration of the counterpoint between melodic and harmonic rhythms, chord structures and spectral harmonies that Petersson extrapolates from those magic numbers.

Triangular Progressions

MATTIAS PETERSSON - Triangular Progressions I – V (edit) (HG2202)

https://2022.radiophrenia.scot/artist/manja-ristic/

In January 2020 I found myself in Ljubljana exploring abandoned spaces as a continuation of my obsession with listening to the Third Landscape – Gilles Clément’s concept which considers, among other things, abandoned urban landscapes or those which suffered an explicit human intervention as places good for thriving bio-diversities which are building the genetic reservoirs that an overall Ecosystem is dependant on. I instantly got hooked by the largest city project – The Sport Park Stožice. It was supposed to include sport facilities and a vast commercial area but only the public part was built, the arena and the stadium. Eighty thousand square meters of the shopping centre remained unfinished.

As often, politics and economics are inseparable, and as corruptive mechanisms become more obvious, both reveal deep submergence into necropolitics. A capital cumulation on the detriment of basic social rights leading to a radical devaluation of a human life. To cut the story short, most of the “modern” societies “background” economics can be reduced to arms sales, drugs, and human trafficking routes. Beneath them are stock value of oil and lithium, gold and diamonds. 

“Please be careful, you’ll be trespassing”, said a dear friend.

The private partner in the public-private largest investment in Slovenia since the 1970s went bankrupt in 2012. 

There were irregularities in the expenditure of EU funds, the then-Mayor pleads not guilty in the latest lawsuit investigating the case. 

“There used to be a wonderful pond, and a hilly landscape… now it’s just concrete, wherever you look, there’s concrete.”

It was a crispy January morning, I wore my army boots. The site was enormous. Several concrete terraces were covered in various surfaces, reaching as far as the eye can see. I decided to just walk.

..... (see web link for full text).....

Every time you think “That is somewhere over there. Nothing has to happen”, a child that dreamed of freedom disappears.

The composition is made around an excerpt from my Stožice abandoned construction site field recording archive. Recorded in January 2020 during the reZone residency in Ljubljana.
Poetry excerpts from the collection Stories Untold.
Mastering by La Plant Studio Belgrade.

http://manjaristic.blogspot.com/

https://manjaristic.bandcamp.com/

https://sonicmatter.bandcamp.com/
photo: Nina Pernat

‘Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe’ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.

Manja Ristic - Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe

From the album Heave To on Sedimental records, released in 2006

Make The Land (Sedimental) Excerpt

"Black Truffle is pleased to announce Tender Membranes, the label’s first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti. Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, Ahti favours neither disjunctive collage nor monolithic consistency; rather, her work is composed of organically unfolding sequences of details and textures, which, as she says, ‘can stretch out or cut fast as long as they have a sense of inner stillness’, a sense that she connects to moments of heightened attention in everyday life.

Tender Membranes consists of four lengthy pieces, partly inspired by the image of the senses and mind as membranes allowing for the passage between inner and outer spaces, sensation and its causes, creating a world. Ahti’s unhurried pacing encourages this sense of listening as an opening or surrender to sound, which can often create the impression that the listener is moving through a space zooming in on details. The opening Shrine (Aether) exemplifies this aspect of Ahti’s approach: a bell clears the air with a single long tone, followed by the ambience of outdoor spaces, crackling electronics, an archival recording of a horsefly on a windowpane. Dozens of these moments, varying in length, density, and intensity, move past the listener’s attention, momentarily brought into focus then slipping away. Like those of the masters of the French musique concrète tradition, Ahti’s sounds are not often recognisable, though they might suggest proximity or distance, open environments or closed spaces, the urban or rural, day or night. In Ahti’s work, we do not encounter spectacular metamorphoses à la Parmegiani but rather a state of ambiguity where the listener is often unsure what is organic and what is inorganic, where the careful productions of the synthesizer might end and sounds discovered in the environment begin.

What Ahti calls her ‘poetic way of experiencing and organising the familiar and the unfamiliar’ is sustained throughout Tender Membranes, but each piece has its own character. On Dust / Light, human presence is more overt, as what appear to be whispers, singing, and distant speech thread between high frequencies, untraceable drips and pops, and metallic shimmers. In all this there is a melody that you can sing and to which you may dance makes more prominent use of musical instruments, gaining a sombre beauty from half-buried piano chords and organ tones. On the closing Oh Fragrant Witness, a delicate cloud of subtly bending pitches is repeatedly disrupted by a resounding, almost ominous mass of low tones, at once a strange detour from much of what has gone before and an almost classical finale. Arriving in a sleeve reproducing contemporary Finnish photographer Sini Pelkki’s fragmented visions of the everyday, Tender Membranes is a balm to reawaken tired ears."

Released September 29, 2023

Tender Membranes

Shrine (Aether)

Ielasi & Malatesta "Rudimenti" (Entr'Acte)

This CD features recordings of a now lost sculptural work that was originally commissioned in 2016 for Colour Out of Space festival. The work consists of over 100 empty computer cases, fitted with 16 customised and automated DVD drives. Between 2016 and 2018 it was exhibited in Brighton, Athens, Croydon, Oxford and Rennes, on each occasion being reconfigured into a new form. The most ambitious of these being at Detritus Festival in 2018, where a new and larger version of the work was constructed at the Onassis Cultural Centre from used computer sourced in the city. The work was sadly lost in transit between France and the UK, returning to the global trade in e-waste which its production initially sought to intervene in, so all that remains are these recordings. 

The CD is released in an edition of 150 in an oversized 7" sleeve accompanied by a 16 page risographed booklet featuring photographs and scans of the sculpture, essays by Danae Stefano and Stephen Cornford, and a letterpressed backpanel.

Stephen Cornford - Constant Linear Velocity [excerpt]

Taken from the album 'Microphone Permission' released as LP and digital.

Microphone Permission

Jasmine Guffond 'Forever Listening' (EMEGO 273)

an extract of ensemble piece Bakunawa for gong rods/ toypianos/ harp/ metal tubes/ bassdrum/ tom/ electronics... 
with Giovanni Di Domenico, Vera Cavallin, Joao Lobo, Mathieu Calleja, Christophe Albertijn and Pak Yan Lau.

Bakunawa - extract

Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – an exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcasting live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. The broadcast schedule will include live shows, pre-recorded features and a series of ‘live-to-air’performances. The majority of the programme will be made up from selections submitted to an international open call for sound and radio works.

Broadcasting across Glasgow on 87.9fm, and online at www.radiophrenia.scot 

Supported by Creative Scotland.

Manja Ristic - Nothing Has To Happen, Fortress Europe

Radiophrenia

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