A Year Ago

Artist: TOT ONYX
Title: SENNO I
Format: LP / digital
Catalog no: iDEAL203
Edition: 300 black vinyl copies w postcard inlay
Release: NOW

Things that don't exist, that don't seem to exist, or we don't believe exist, might be the only things that actually exist.
Things that i always believed that existed, seem to be an illusion.
And things that i always denied the existence of in the past, seem to be what shape reality and rule the world.
But what is reality? And what is illusion?
Is the reality i am seeing the same as yours?
Perhaps not.

”Senno I” is the solo debut album by Tot Onyx aka Tommi Tokyo, who has been a founding member of the Japanese performance art/live electronics duo group A since 2012. They incorporated the use of the body in their noise & poetry-performances and they made some resonating appearances at festivals like Berlin Atonal. Adept at bending expectations, both live and recorded, the band’s formative early work echoes the experiential vocabulary in which Tommi continues to develop today. A practice in the rejection of tradition and cliché, which in Greil Marcus's words, "Share the principles of negation, rebellion, destruction and détournement”.

Tommi Tokyo has worked in graphic design and photography and has worked for theatre and other forms of stage arts. Tot Onyx is her deeply personal project which shares the founding energies of group A, but is traveling deeper and elsewhere. This is a rich study of her interior life.

Tot Onyx - Voice Calling

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands
by James Hoff

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies.

Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world.

Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.”

Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream.

Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record.

Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind.

—

James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited and performed internationally. He co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books.

JAMES HOFF 'Everything You Want Less Time' (SP151)

from "Ideas Flotantes" released by Kraak and Nonlocal Research, november 2023.

https://kraak.bandcamp.com/album/ideas-flotantes

Uzumakia

COH - Fiat Sol (HG2477)

'Banshee' is an ear directed towards the edges of the old world, where these infinite fines terrae cut and fractalize into coasts, harbours, fjords, peninsulas and archipelagos. Drawing its raw material from recordings made in the Inner Hebrides, Banshee tightly weaves a fabric where the sonic avatars of fauna, flora and climate merge with the human presence, its tools and its culture. Thus, a small boat cleaving through a loch becomes the voice of the mountains and wilderness, and the howling of the wind on the moors becomes the lament of a Banshee, harbinger of death, messenger of the Other World.
 
The piece unfolds in seven interwoven moments:
 
I	Subharmonics (An Uaimh Bhinn)
II	Seabirds & fiddle (Rubha na h-Eist)
III	Impacts & Melancholy (Bodach an Stòrr)
IV	Spectre (Quiraing)
V	Cailleachan / Corryvreckan
VI	Distance (Loch Bracadail)
VII	Banshees

Francois J. Bonnet 'Banshee' (Excerpt)

Co-commissioned by Radio France and INA grm, Basse Brevis by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi was premiered at the Présences 2024 festival, which was dedicated to Steve Reich. Drawing on her own minimalist approach, Sarah Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to create music that is extremely precise, subtle and lively. But what is striking, and particularly evident in Basse Brevis, is that such an approach, both abstract and restrained, is nonetheless at times utterly poignant. The work combines moments of formal exploration with moments of pure emotion in a perfectly mastered fashion, creating a gentle tension as it swings between two modes of listening that navigate indecisively within both instrumental and concrete approaches, tracing, in parallel, a diagonal of sound that unfolds around perception, sensation and feeling. 

Sarah Davachi 'Basse Brevis' (Excerpt)

AliceisPermafrost::::
https://soundcloud.com/aliceispermafrost

AliceIsPermafrost & Senglar - Au Hasard (Encore)

© WOZPROD Collective, 2025, All Rights Reserved

Credits:
Music: Jan Janicki
Visuals: Jan Janicki

Hope

.abduction

From 'Anomi', to be released 30th of October 2020

Anomi

Sonja Tofik - All Errors Are Mine

HTTP://SHELTER-PRESS.COM
—
Shelter Press is a record label and publishing platform founded in 2012 by publisher Bartolomé Sanson and artist Félicia Atkinson building up dialogues between contemporary art, poetry and experimental music through printed publications and records.
Shelter Press is also carrying and collaborating on the releases of the Ideologic Organ, Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels.

Francois J. Bonnet 'Banshee' (Excerpt)

SHELTER PRESS

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