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Anna Peaker - it would be in a dream

Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

Vanessa Amara returns with a new full length for Posh Isolation. Fonetica Amara is an adventurous and uncompromising addition to the body of work that is Vanessa Amara. New music from a truly singular voice in Scandinavian experimental music.

“‘Poses’ was in some weird way a return to form for us, being our first structured work since ‘You’re Welcome Here’. It was also the first music Sebastián and I worked on together after I had moved to Ireland. I don’t think we really knew how to go about having a long distance relationship, separated from the practice we had built in Copenhagen.
I only had my computer to work with and without access to the internet I was stuck with sampling from my digital collection of music. ‘Poses’ is almost solely made using the DAW; Logics pitch shifter plug-in and a quite limited source of samples. But it was inspiring to work with music like this. Having a clear compositional focus on orchestrating and organising rather than squeezing out notes from today’s mood. So without thinking much about it we’ve continued to work like this. We were working on ‘Fonetica Amara’ from October 2020 - December 2021.

I’m sitting here writing this because Posh Isolation don’t know what to think of ‘Fonetica Amara’ and have - on a friendly note - compared it to when Darkthrone released ‘Panzerfaust’.

I guess their point being a departure from trying to be genuine about making music, successfully perceived as being bulletproof serious. I want to believe there’s more nuance to seriousness and I wonder if Darkthrone wasn’t being humorous in their earlier material. The most recent Matrix film moved me to shed some secret tears. Surprisingly so. I’ve wondered why.
I recently made my first friend after moving to Ireland almost 4 years ago. I was volunteering during the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and Kevin Terry, who’s a brilliant composer based in Cork City, was down here with a couple of compositions. One night at the pub I was going on about the beauty of humour in music for a good while and Kevin summed it up perfectly by calling it self-awareness. It was that playful self-awareness that got to me while watching The Matrix: Resurrection.

Since ‘You’re Welcome Here’ we’ve been deviating from a path we might previously have started out on. More than anything we try to change, because we can’t let go of that feeling of not understanding, not knowing, not recognising.
We wish to stay curious about our voice, to not become specific, avoid exercising some kind of “disciplinary correctness” and to “want more questions than answers” (Jack Halberstam’s: The Queer Art of Failure).”

-Birk Gjerlufsen Nielsen, 2022

Posh Isolation 271

Fonetica Amara

Pescado

Vanessa Amara - Pescado

Disruptive Muzak Clip (out now on Death of Rave)

Home Away From Home (Andy Stott Refix)

Arthur Russell - Home Away From Home (Andy Stott Refix)

"How To Swallow A Sword"

4. HOW TO SWALLOW A SWORD

First release from CAF? with the work of Flammkuch, ARIS 1201, Tissu, FSS, lks, Morizio Lemano, 909 Hz, Mystic V, lks & Tissu.

IR-90

Tissu - how many guns do you own

Kali Malone’s “Organ Dirges 2016 - 2017" is a collection of isorhythmic canons following the tradition of pipe organ requiems found in early modern music. Malone’s purified organ dirges echo embodied recollections of the piercing numbness of those battled encounters when the armours were stripped down, left with nothing other than will power, yet still standing upright as the columns of Sounion. The soothing and perceptive harmonies resonate to a presence that leans elegantly towards a courageous aftermath and a gleaming salutation. While the dirges themselves have minimal melodic and rhythmic variation, they appear in constant cyclical motion, revealing their refracted selves in a coherent yet unpredictable manner; like a rotating wheel where all spokes are perceptible but at any given moment in a different place.

Kali Malone (b. 1994, Colorado) is an American artist living and working in Stockholm, Sweden since 2012. Her solo works implement unique tuning systems in minimalist form for analog and digital synthesis often combined with acoustic instrumentation - such as pipe organ, string and wind instruments, lute and gong. Malone’s 2017 debut LP “Velocity of Sleep” was released on her own label XKatedral following tape releases put out by Ascetic House, Bleak Environment and Total Black. She is active in the groups Sorrowing Christ, Swap Babies, Upper Glossa with Caterina Barbieri. Her sophomore LP “Cast of Mind” is due spring 2018.

http://shop.ascetic.house

ASCETIC HOUSE
201∞

Kali Malone "Locus Of Repetition"

Buy / Listen: www.janushoved.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-vague

Tettix Hexer - Visible Winds Of Spring

ZERO IS MORE THAN NOTHING - VARIOUS ARTISTS
@ecstaticrecordings @angeloharmsworth

https://ecstaticrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/zero-is-more-than-nothing

Felisha Ledesma & Angelo Harmsworth - PDA (ECSTATIC 057)

Taken from the album Caterina Barbieri - Fantas Variations released as 2LP and Digital

Disruptive Muzak Clip (out now on Death of Rave)

sam kidel

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