Name: Bendik Giske - Adjust (Total Freedom Remix) by Smalltown Supersound
Duration: 7 min 9 s
Description: Debut EP, "Adjust", by Bendik Giske. Out on Oct 26th via Smalltown Supersound

Pan Daijing - Jade 玉观音
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No. PAN 113
Release Date: 4 June 2021
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Jade

What if a song was not a culmination but a singe, an imprint, or a crater left in the wake of creative process? On her new record “Jade”, Pan Daijing composes at a different scale than that we’ve come to know. Since the release of her groundbreaking LP “Lack” in 2017, Daijing has expanded her operatic vision into a series of major commissioned exhibition-performances at institutions including the Tate Modern, Martin Gropius Bau, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Developed for full casts of opera singers and dancers, and reaching for an all-encompassing durational experience of intensity for both performer and audience, the development of these works was for Daijing as emotionally disarming as it was thrilling. In order to continue accessing her own limits, Daijing had to develop a place of sanctuary within her own practice.

Its nine tracks written and recorded over the last three years, “Jade” is the sound of solitary release and refuge, of creative self-sustenance. Written without the imperatives of direct address to performers or audience, “Jade” speaks inward, while inviting a kind of rhetorical listening. The artist draws on materials familiar from her previous work: namely, ascetic electronic textures that rumble and pierce, and voice bent in irreverent directions. In place of catharsis, however, her arrangements here linger in tension, extending curiosity towards the delicate void that nourishes extremes. They toy with the minor capacities of song: repetition, chant, observations that conclude without resolving.

“Jade” comes from a vulnerable place, tender as in an undressed wound caught in the midst of healing over. Vocals, mostly Daijing’s own, arrive as wordless sequences of notes soaring alongside a drone, or plain laughter, or in a few places spoken word. What is said or sung provides fragments of experience and reflection. In the process of piecing together these fragments, the listener is confronted with the tender parts of her own. “Solitude is like an immense lake you’re swimming through,” says Daijing of these songs. “Sometimes you dip your head in and sometimes you lift it above. On album centerpiece “Let,” she speaks to us over the sound of rippling water, returning between anxious scenes to a refrain: “I take my bath in the ocean.” We are not just consuming Daijing’s story; we are being invited to join her in the water.

The album is mixed and mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Pan Daijing, cinematography by Dzhovani & design by NMR.

@pan-daijing

Jade 玉观音

Pan Daijing - Dust 五月 (PAN 113)

〜 Taken from Debit's album 'The Long Count', out via Modern Love on Feb 18th 2022 〜

Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released EP “SYSTEM” harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. 

On “The Long Count”, the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane.

“The Long Count” is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments – whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets – using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music.

The ten tracks of ‘The Long Count’ form a ritual that’s a few footsteps out of time – neither a part of our present, nor the past. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance.

Beatriz’s soundscapes are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, and are as intentional, direct and meticulously crafted as the work of Deathprod or Thomas Köner. Her microtonal compositions are psychedelic to their core, shapeshifting through dimensions and painting complex mental images, while retaining a stylistic focus and lucidity that’s all too rare. Although “The Long Count” was nurtured by machines, human experience is coded into its DNA – an ancient-future heirloom that whispers through countless generations.

File under magick concrète.

All tracks written, produced & mixed by Delia Beatriz
Additional Machine Learning for Audio by Isomov
Mastering by Rashad Becker
Album Art Photography & Creative Direction by Debit
AI Album Art by Moisés Horta Valenzuela

The Long Count

Debit - 2nd Day

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

OL "Roaming" mixtape. All tracks were recorded during 2020-22.

- Airlines (departure)
- Kray
- Sedative Set
- No Love (interlude)
- Benz
- Footprint
- 1Bar (formyset mix)
- Wiz Harp 
- Airlines (arrival)

bc: https://olegbuyanov.bandcamp.com/album/roaming

Part of the funds raised will be transferred to the humanitarian needs of civilians in Ukraine: 
linktr.ee/pod.all 
linktr.ee/ivlevyorke?fbclid=PAAabUDJ_BqRkwvmYEeqpIXNoJQrIVO0KwhyOTL3zTPGR6bG6iDDLQZyRiWNY

Roaming

Hypercontrol: DIY meets digital chaos in an epic rebellion! With cutting-edge sound design and Memero's raw energy, smashing societal norms and amplifying the clash of values. Get ready, download, or buy a cassette!

Hypercontrol

Memero - Hypercontrol

For this compilation, original recordings and stems of “The Idealist”, a song on Soho Rezanejad’s recent full-length album Six Archetypes, were sent to friends and collaborators. What resulted are 25 wildly variant remixes by a community of artists.

The Idealist Compilation:
https://siliconerecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-idealist-compilation

The Idealist music video:
https://youtu.be/A8bn3zPrzrs

“The Idealist Compilation” by Various Artists was mastered by Miccel Mohr and released on Silicone Records, 2018.

The Idealist Compilation

SKY H1 & Soho Rezanejad - The Idealist

Debut EP, "Adjust", by Bendik Giske. Out on Oct 26th via Smalltown Supersound

Bendik Giske - Adjust (Total Freedom Remix)

written, produced and recorded by Lyra Pramuk 
additional mixing and mastering by Ben Pramuk
artwork by Helin Sahin

Download:
https://lyrapramuk.bandcamp.com/album/scrytch

Scrytch

Carrier Bag Music is a new series of sonic fictions inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Reimagining the mixtape as container, medicine bundle and chronometer telling the time on another world, artists and producers explore Le Guin's articulations of holding, gathering and caring. With Laurel Halo, Elysia Crampton, Jenna Sutela and Victoria Sin.

Week Three: Jenna Sutela
 
The third episode of Carrier Bag Music by Jenna Sutela is a mixed bag of sounds and music by humans and non-humans. A proposal for interspecies symbiosis, this otherworldly mix gathers collaborators including slime mould, space bacteria, artificial intelligence and yeast cells.
 
“Mine is a mixed bag, containing original material from Many-Headed Reading (2016), Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language) (2017), Holobiont (2018), nimiia seance (2019) and nnother (2020), with Elvia Wilk, as well as some music from my desktop: Most Holy Redeemer by Ocarina Orchestra; Guts theme from Berserk by Susumu Hirasawa; Oração (Pense & Dance) by Lechuga Zafiro Ft. Linn da Quebrada; Finnish lullaby Nuku Nuku; Amniotic Life by Tomoko Sauvage; Exit by Bendik Giske; and Arca from @@@@@. Voices by Jessica Edwards, Clara Jo, Emily Jones, Ming Lin, Colin Self, and yeast cells sonified by Jim Gimzewski at 22, 26 and 30 Celsius.” — Jenna Sutela
 
“Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
 
“I evolved as a vessel for others to proliferate. Bacteria, babies. Germs, parasites. Both organic and synthetic. Love and want. Not merely eye to eye, but eye to mouth, mouth to ear.” — Jenna Sutela and Elvia Wilk: nnother, 2020
 
Jenna Sutela works with words, sounds, and other living media, such as Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria and the “many-headed” slime mold Physarum polycephalum. Her audiovisual pieces, sculptures, and performances seek to identify and react to precarious social and material moments, often in relation to technology. Sutela's work has been presented at museums and art contexts internationally, including Guggenheim Bilbao, Moderna Museet, and Serpentine Galleries. She is a Visiting Artist at The MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019-20.

Curated by Ignota in partnership with Camden Art Centre and Haus Kulturen der Welt. Carrier Bag Music is part of Carrier Bag Fictions, a project by HKW and Ignota.

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction is published by Ignota with an Introduction by Donna Haraway and Images by Lee Bul https://ignota.org/blogs/news/carrier-bag-music

Carrier Bag Music: Jenna Sutela

Teresa Winter - Emptiness Is Also An Excess [RAVE031]

Patrick Belaga - Blutt 
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No. PAN 117
Release Date: 2 April 2021
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Blutt

Conceived at the heel of Italy’s boot-shaped peninsula in Apulia, Patrick Belaga’s Blutt makes music for the unruly imagination. The title is an old German word for ‘naked’, ‘bare’, but it can also mean ‘blood’ when spelt blut. Take away another letter and it makes ‘butt’. None of these definitions and adaptations were what prompted the classically-trained composer and cellist to name his second album with a word simulating the sound of a punctured artery. That came later.

Blutt’s nine woozy compositions are inspired by a contemplative road trip with a friend, and the mysterious muffled music heard from an unidentified source. It was a combination of jazz and classical music that haunted Belaga’s wanderings through the Byzantine town Gallipoli, and soon infected his dreams of long-gone civilizations. This record is its outcome, where organic instrumentals and electronic production merge into a sound that’s both contemporary and ancient. Samples of mewing incantations and tape hiss sway atop the waltzing thud of piano chords on “Sigh”. Composite layers of Belaga’s cello play in downcast harmony on “Rust”. There’s a wistful sense for the romantic, in the eerie rhythm of a piece like “Momentum”. The quarter tones of an Eastern European and Middle Eastern folk scale probe a profound melancholy via Kai Knight’s violin. Its notes are haunted by a field recording of running water on “Unsoft”, echoes of panpipes and a Jew’s harp on opener “Lilt”.

As a consummate composer and performer known for his work with artists Wu Tsang, boychild, Josh Johnson and Asma Maroof, Belaga’s Blutt is itself marked by flawless collaborations. Vocalist and instrumentalist Jazmin Romero sings and composes the surreal melodies of “Grey Eye”. Multidisciplinary dance artist and producer Riley Watts contributes to the muted, motorik movement of “The Tunnel is a Tower”. Together, the record plays as a stunning soundtrack to the strangeness of sleeping, and the heartbreaking transience of time. Like an intense dream half-remembered, the emotions persist after waking but for the sharp machinations just outside of the mind’s reach. 
credits

The album is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Giovanni Forlino and design by Bill Kouligas & NMR. 

@patrickbelaga

Bendik Giske - Adjust (Total Freedom Remix)

Smalltown Supersound

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