Far far away in the infamous Saint-Etienne Kingdom live and breath Anouar Redjem Cheibane, Guillaume Lamorte & Jacques Satre. The three members of Le Marais surfaced from the gloomy waters of 2020 fall to gather balearic, folk, new age and ambient trance inspirations over an amazing eponymous LP on French Besoins Premiers.

Following the label taste in flowery, poetic music (with Organizatsiya's 'Strane Leoni', Lenny Frings' 'Ontological Outlines' or Modeux des Cieux's 'Constant Run'...), the trio definitely defined its own touch with this 11-track release, made of dreamy synths, autotuned lyrism & spoken words, tremendous electric guitar leads and nebulous sounds, set against an ogre-and-fairy-tales medieval background.

300-vinyl edition to be released during the summer:
https://besoinspremiers.bandcamp.com/album/le-marais

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FEEL THE SPIRIT
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℘ཞɛɱıɛཞɛ ≈ Le Marais - Drain The Swamp [Besoins Premiers]

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)

Ka Baird & Pekka Airaksinen - Syzygy (For Pekka) 
Listen / Buy: https://smarturl.it/frkwys17
 
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©2021 RVNG Intl. // https://www.igetrvng.com

FRKWYS Vol. 17: Hungry Shells

Syzygy (For Pekka)

Ka Baird & Pekka Airaksinen - Syzygy (For Pekka)

Satomimagae - Dango (Colloid Version)
Learn more: https://smarturl.it/rvngnl89

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Lyrics

うなばらまであと少し 
うなばらまであと少しだけ　
行こう (着こう)
落ちて (うなばらまで)
転がり落ちて (弾むステップ)
落ちていくステップ (弾むステップ)
いびつなステップで (落ちていくステップ)
行こう

転がり落ちて
いびつなステップで
転がり落ちて
いびつなステップで
うなばらまであと少しだけ (行こう)


Almost there to the ocean
Almost there to the ocean
Let’s go (Let's be there)

Falling (Toward the ocean)
Rolling down (Bouncy steps)
Steps of falling (Bouncy steps)
With the awkward steps (Steps of falling)
Let’s go

Rolling down
With the awkward steps
Rolling down
With the awkward steps
Almost there to the ocean (Let’s go)

Colloid

Dango (Colloid Version)

Satomimagae - Dango (Colloid Version)

We’ve reached book IV in Rupert Clervaux’s series of “Zibaldone” audio diaries, at which point we find him telling a different kind of story. 

“The first three all had very specific themes, while this one feels a little bit looser and doesn’t have just one thematic thrust,” he tells me, which maybe explains why listening feels a bit like annotating. I’m underlining, emphasizing, drawing arrows from here to there, highlighting symbols and noting motifs, realising, questioning, eureka-ing. An impressionistic meaning’s been encoded in and we’re lucky to be given the space to play that most poetic and boundless of all mental games: narrativization. 

There are no wrong answers, but Rupert offers some clues either way. If there’s any cipher here it’s “something like a meditation on the concept of ‘depth’––in all its connotative forms.” Think below the surface, (the) underground, yawning oceans, being ‘down in the dirt’, soil, roots, rootlessness, pulling at the dregs, collapse, profundity, stable and unstable horizons, distance, perspective, intuition, not to mention relative opposites: to be shallow, to be above, to be beyond. 

It’s got me thinking of Bresson’s “Bring things together that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.” His: “Dig deep where you are. Don't slip off elsewhere.” Rupert has realized these—two favourite goals of mine!—here. 

This is music that catches you at your own periphery, gives pause, has you offering a little “huh” to, asking “I wonder why” to. Again, it’s got me musing on another mindworm, this time from New York publisher and multi-sensory reading room Dispersed Holdings: “Feeling-making-knowing feedback loop; cartography of feeling; water as text, read to know the land beneath and around it, and body as reader.” 

Is it ok to offer up these other contexts out of context? I think so, because Zibaldone IV articulates a similarly swirly tone. Like, we’ve got Rebecca Solnit talking through Kropotkin’s “Mutual Aid” and later calling out to Michael Ruppert a ways away, and “Easy Rider” is playing in the wings. We’ve got Susan Sontag magically contextualizing Mariah Carey with poet Thylias Moss triangulating in order to sketch out (Rupert again) “something a little more interesting than wilful eclecticism or that laboured and patronising kind of pop-savvy.” 

Are we following? Whether yes or no Vanessa Bedoret follows on with a performance of a performance of Moss’s 'Water Road’: to be once or twice removed, via strange transitions, purposeful confusions, and, suddenly, seagulls. We’re on a boat with Ingeborg Bachmann—and how I wish I could actually be! But maybe thanks to this music I can as literature, films, friends, lethargy, coincidences, little mental links, eternal wormholes, lingering notions come together to imagine something better. 

Text by Natalia Panzer 
npanzer.com 

Artwork by Coline Cornélis 

Music by Rupert Clervaux 

with 
Vanessa Bedoret: voice and violin on Thylias Moss #2 
Eben Bull: trumpet and electronics on Mutual Aid and Departure from England 
Isis O’Regan; voice on Departure from England 
Nick Taylor: electronics on Chthonic ’97 
Ben Vince: saxophone and electronics on Chatsworth ’17 

Artwork by Coline Cornélis 

Warm thanks to James Marrs, as always, and Natalia Panzer 

Vanessa recreates and reads an excerpt from ‘Water Road’ by Thylias Moss. Isis reads ‘Departure from England’ by Ingeborg Bachmann (translated by Peter Filkins). This record is dedicated to both poets––with great respect and deep admiration.

02. Simple Food For Our Simple Taste

https://www.nts.live/shows/early-bird-show-maria-somerville/episodes/early-bird-show-maria-somerville-14th-march-2022

THE EARLY BIRD SHOW W/ MARIA SOMERVILLE 140322

so close (1968)

ZI.1 - 'Imitazione' (reading by Mara Cimatoribus)*
ZI.2 - Titled
ZI.3 - 'Menschenbeifall' (reading by Anne Tetzlaff)
ZI.4 - Ulyssean Time
ZI.5 - 'Imitaciones' (reading by Rupert Clervaux)**

Available as a 12" with a foldout poster by Coline Cornélis,
and as a download.

Rupert Clervaux: drums, percussion, vibraphone, piano, synthesizers and samplers, 
with Stephen Warrington: piano on ‘Imitazione’, and Eben Bull: saxophone on ‘Titled’.

Artwork by Coline Cornélis.

*translation by Jonathan Galassi
**translation by Jason Weiss

Zibaldone I of CVX

Fahmi Mursyid - Lautan

A track from the album Thought Texture out now on Constellation Tatsu.

Opaline - Inside Sky

"Melancholic Thugism", as Naomie Klaus would say. NTOAB Jeez offers you a small glimpse of the mental cockpit of this bruxelles based musician. Making the home boys climb in 2 seconds their empty body on the jump seat, Naomi keeps digging deep her path into the graveyard of our past.

Follow the artist --> https://soundcloud.com/lee-emy