Based on Franco Battiato's L'Egitto Prima Della Sabbia

L'Egitto dopo La Cicala

dreaming upstream

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)

After nearly a decade of building his sonic practice between numerous releases on labels such as L.I.E.S., Viewlexx, Alter, and iDEAL, and curating his own eclectic imprint Psychic Liberation, Nick Klein delivers a long-form masterwork via 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕. Some previously-released tracks hinted at Klein's interest in the durational aspects of performance and listening, but after nearly three years of recording, 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕 fully conceptualizes those proclivities.

Traversing diverse timbres and structures over 90 minutes across four tracks, Klein draws upon his cross-disciplinary experience in the totemic physicality of sculpture and installation. Beginning with intense waves of modulating oscillators, creating a vista of ghostly interferences and superpositions, Klein seamlessly transitions to a looping vocal, ascending the listener to higher planes - pure mana for the ears. Side B opens with a more muted excursion, excavating somber glassy canyons before ending with concrete-esque tape manipulations, and finally, several minutes of silence.

Klein also delves deeply into the personal, dedicating the album to "all the friends lost caught up slippin out." A direct line is drawn between the despair of late-stage capitalism and the allure of "slippin out", especially for those most susceptible. As loss impacts his patchwork of networks and community, @nick-klein reflects on who is left to share with. 𝑺𝒍𝒊𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏 𝑶𝒖𝒕 is the documentation of that study.

releases November 17, 2022

audio finalized by Glyn Maier

Slippin Out

Nick Klein - Slippin Out (ENMX-18)

“For Wind Poetry” will be released on November 18th

https://vaagner.bandcamp.com/album/for-wind-poetry-2

Wind Poetry

VAK 62 | yolabmi - Nowhere

Glyn Maier - Erosion Trace (Track 1)

KASSEL JAEGER 'Shift In Dreams' (SP144)

From the album 'Shift In Dreams', out on Feb. 24, 2023 on Shelter Press
Order: https://kasseljaeger.bandcamp.com/album/shifted-in-dreams

Music composed and performed by François J. Bonnet
Artwork by Eléonore Huisse
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi

Shifted In Dreams

KASSEL JAEGER 'Shifted In Dreams' (SP144)

Archaic Vaults is pleased to present the first vinyl album for the label, cataloguing ten tracks from ten artists spanning the globe. This curation brings together a multiplicity of genres within the label’s ongoing thematic output - durational ambience, field recordings, oversaturated improvisations and spatialised synthetic loops among them. A diverse cohort of familiar and new collaborators alike.

Edition of 300. Design by Severin Black.

https://archaicvaults.bandcamp.com/album/continuing-a-worn-out-tradition-iii

Continuing A Worn Out Tradition III

A4. Chantal Michelle 'Borghese Gardens September' [AV011]

:zoviet*france: - Montag

Recorded live at Wave Gotik Treffen, Volkspalast Kantine, Leipzig, 29 May 2023

zf20230705aif

Released as a free download (AIFF 16/44.1) 5 July 2023

© 2023 copyright control

Montag

🌀 Heavy Music for Manifestation 528Hz Ride the Healing Waves 🎶💥

'Rounded' from 'Wound Without A Tear' by Kazumichi Grime

https://daisart.bandcamp.com/album/wound-without-a-tear

"Wound Without A Tear is a compilation of “Australian” Ambient and Experimental Music; an area so often overlooked and misunderstood because it does not easily fall into historical context. However, the fifteen years (1993-2008) the collection cites–a period of early 90s post-rave ethereality defined by pleasure-centred spaces (chill-out rooms) and the personal computer’s emergence as a popular tool for file-sharing and secondary-living in the 00s–is befitting of closer examination.

The recordings were sourced from artists, labels, corrupted disk drives, CD-Rs, the WWW and archives of Melbourne’s 3RRR community radio station.

During the 1990s, as new technologies emerged and mass digital culture flourished, artists explored the emergent possibilities of the Internet with a utopian fervour, viewing the web and its plethora of images and information as a site of boundless potential. In the 2000s, file sharing connected people around the world directly to one another, and this incorporation of online experience into material objects, meant there was an increasingly porous border between the online and offline worlds–if there remained a border, at all."

Wound Without A Tear

Kazumichi Grime, 'Rounded'

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.

KASSEL JAEGER 'Shifted In Dreams' (SP144)

SHELTER PRESS

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