Vinyl & digital album: kmruahossan.bandcamp.com/album/limen

Released on April 29th, 2022

Last year, Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU) and French digital alchemist Niamké Désiré (aka Aho Ssan) were invited by Berlin Atonal to collaborate on a project for the festival's Metabolic Rift edition.

The duo had already been working together, but the offer provided the momentum to shift the conversation into another gear. Initially, they looked for thematic connections within their individual practices that might match Kamaru's meditative soundscapes with Désiré's crumbling cyberpunk expressionism, and surprisingly for two artists renowned for their grasp of minimalism, it was the opposite that drew their attention. Watching the world shift as it reacted to the spiraling pandemic, Kamaru and Désiré were moved to experiment with volume, physicality, and intense emotionality.

“I never made something so extreme," Désiré says of the duo's first recording, 2021's 'Ruined Abstractions', an extended composition that matches dense, powerful low-end drones with fractal digital fuzz and smokestack bruit. It set the mood for a back-and-forth that resulted in their seismic debut full-length, "Limen", described by the two acclaimed artists as an attempt to scrutinize the yin and yang of destruction and creation.

Cacophonous, concrete crunches fanfare the album's opening piece 'Resurgence' - the result of their Berlin Atonal commission - but the track refuses to languish in wrecking ball devastation. Instead, powerful synthesized harmonies ring from beneath the rubble, before stifling everything in a humid fuzz of dense, emotionally-charged cinematic electronics.

Influenced by the prescient post-apocalyptic mood of Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" and the mythological phoenix, an immortal bird said to be reborn from the ashes of its dying predecessor, "Limen" is an album that sonically snapshots the anxious, floral beauty of an explosion or the colorful intensity of a raging fire. It's rooted in concepts of duality - the idea something unsettling can be viewed from a different angle and re-interpreted.

On the album's epic, 21-minute centerpiece 'Ruined Abstraction I + II', swirling electromagnetic interference paints a haunted parallel vista that dissolves slowly into subtle, orchestral tones and booming, widescreen thuds.

Almost angelic closing track 'Rebirth' meanwhile is the most unashamedly beautiful composition Kamaru and Désiré have written together, but its choral bliss is doused in petroleum noise and saturated distortion.

"Limen" is an album that seeks to lift a veil of silence from the world, replacing it with maximalist bombast and vivid passion. It's a dynamic piece of work that finds its creators pushing themselves to the limits, deconstructing history as it detonates around us.

All tracks written and produced by Joseph Kamaru
and Niamké Désiré; mastered by Joker

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2022

subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

Vinyl & digital album

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Ruined Abstractions

Nerve Net

Juju Space Jazz

The intricate sonic activity behind 'Live at default' testifies to Francesco Corvi's recent post-acousmatic practice. Intense multi-layered textures and rich synthetic soundscapes are fused with micro-sounds. Highly detailed digital noise is made warm and enchanting by the live performance and ambience recordings, and reaches its best character on magnetic tape.

"In my practice software is not conceived as an instrument, neither as a virtual agent, but rather as a dynamic network of interconnected components that exhibit emergent properties by monitoring their own behavior, adapt to changes and alter their own structure. Immersed in this ecosystem of sonic processes, I shape the unfolding of the performance by modifying the software on stage and responding to its behavior. This peculiar form of improvisation possesses a unique performative idiom that cannot be reduced to bodily gestures or human intentions, as the sonic activity itself becomes the medium for conveying the liveness of the performance. This release focuses on how such a feeling of liveness might be translated into a record, placing particular attention on the capturing of the acoustic space of the concert hall and the additional layer of meaning it creates."

Francesco Corvi (aka nesso) is a performer, composer, and multimedia artist. He works with custom digital technologies including live coding environments, adaptive systems, and spatial audio engines,
creating shows at the intersection of computer music, new media art, and deconstructed club. He released music on Superpang, Kaer'Uiks, Genot Centre, HEEL.ZONE, Mossa records, Riforma.

released December 15, 2023

Music composed and performed by Francesco Corvi, live recorded 16.03.2023 at default #3 in Den Haag
Mastered by Francesco Corvi
Artwork by Ran
Cover silkprinted at Papier Gâchette, Strasbourg

Live at default

Live at default (excerpt)

CD available directly from Important Records - imprec.com 

Strange Times is a virtuosic realization of contemporary
electroacoustic soundscapes composed and performed by Stephen
Ruppenthal and Gary R. Weisberg. With masterful employment of electroacoustic techniques and tools, including the original 70's Buchla Music Easel Ruppenthal used in the Electric Weasel Ensemble, these two artist create an essential, psychedelic, electro-acoustic experience.

Strange Times is a hallucinatory journey into our epidemic-ridden
times through a collection of startling sonic landscapes. From epic
acoustic journeys into re-imagining myth to the phantasmal soundscape world of the Bardo, Strange Times is not for the innocent or delicate listener. Time turns elastic, and folds in on itself; you are approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The only way to make sense of any of it is to mentally rewind; speed up or slow down the voices in your head in random attempts to find your way through this electroacoustic aether. Strange Times explores the ability of sound to alter consciousness, creating sonic environments, mental and physical states where one can allow the experience of listening to become transformative.

Stephen Ruppenthal (Berkeley, 1949) San Francisco Bay Area new music trumpeter, electroacoustic and text-sound composer, Stephen studied electronic music and composition with composer Allen Strange, and ethnomusicology with Lou Harrison, and holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Contemporary Musicology, writing the first comprehensive treatise in English of Sound Poetry, “History of the Development and Techniques of Sound Poetry in the Twentieth Century in Western Cultures.” Stephen was a founding member, along with Don Buchla and Allen & Pat Strange, of the Electric Weasel Ensemble, and more recently, with Brian Belet and Pat Strange, of SoundProof, and is known internationally for his live electroacoustic performances, and writings on text-sound
composition. Stephen has been composing and performing electroacoustic works for Buchla instruments since 1971. Flamethrower, a 2017 CD of electroacoustic works for trumpet and flugelhorn, by Allen Strange, Brian Belet, Bruno Liberda, and Elainie Lillios, and performed by Stephen is currently available from Ravello Records. 

Gary R. Weisberg, composer-sound designer-digital audio artist was
born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY. At age 2, Gary was exposed by his mother to the music of Brahms, Khatchaturian and Rimsky-Korsakov. He also had a fascination with dinosaurs. He first picked up a musical instrument in 1972, playing free- jazz improvisation on flute and alto sax. Gary moved to San Francisco in 1976 and was involved in a loosely knit collective of jazz and experimental musicians and artists, operating a small performance space called The Blue Dolphin. He studied music, computer programming and electronics at San Francisco State University, graduating with a degree in Electronic Music Composition. He spent two years building a modular analog synthesizer, and began composing electronic music and text-sound compositions for art/ photography gallery openings. From 1986-1994, Gary maintained a MIDI project studio for the production of his own music, as well as sound and music for TV/Film/Video productions. Since 1994, Gary has been composing PC-based experimental electronic music, as well as pieces
for electronic and acoustic instruments, occasionally performing with other composers and collaborating with visual artists. He currently resides in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley.

1. Post - Apocalyptic Biscuit (Ruppenthal)

15/01 noods radio
pres. albanian's rrita jashari 

www.noodsradio.com/residents/furda

noods radio: furda / hermeneia invites rrita jashari

Sudden Afternoon w/ Saltpeter - 15/02/24

AKIRA

@2l3l
@violetinbound
@lukasipo
@avgtoucan
@a1sha0
@arcerion
@viznode

Originally made in 24 hours for artbyFORM's All Nighter 10

Lyrics (2L&L):

Basement motel
I'm out the precinct for now
I want a listening town
Don't want to listen
Don't want to listen
And when I move out loud
Make me move so alone
I frontrun for now, so I can
hold my love, my love, my love

Shell Formations

VAATICAN RECORDS

Grellgelb

... coins 
... foil 
... metal pan 
... cellophane 
... bubblewrap 
... noise

A collection of found sound objects originally explored in an hands-on creative workshop exploring sound, object and mark making. This workshop was a collaboration between sound artist Emma Margetson, The Barber Collective and The Barber Institute of Fine Arts Learning and Engagement Team. The recorded found sound objects from this workshop were repurposed for this eight-channel composition, Abstracted Objects.

Abstracted Objects [Binaural Version] [Excerpt]

Part of the piece - 2 Kinetic studies, made during the residency at the Spatial Sound Institute in Budapest in 2016: https://soundcloud.com/svetlanamaras/sets/2-kinetic-studies

Study no.1 is guided by the principle of symmetry. The central spot of the composition is in the middle of the room - half the way on both horizontal X- and Z-axis. Each object always moves through both halves of at least one of the X- or Z-planes. The element which is being doubled, is followed by the same-pace movement of the element on the opposite side of the axis, but the movement is being reversed: element no.6 positioned on Z-4 goes from X-5 to X+5 while at the same time in the same speed element no.7 at Z+4 goes from X+5 to X-5. 
There are three elements which are the musical nucleus of the composition (1, 2, 3). These sounds are airy (noisy) but they have a recognisable pitch and form a minor triad. All other elements are tuned to these three elements which define the tonal center of the piece. This kind of interpretation of the harmonic aspect of the composition, parallels the interpretation of ‘symmetrical’ in spatial domain. 

This is a stereo mixdown of the piece.

VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/210260544

Study No.1

Subtext Recordings is a Bristol founded / Berlin based label curated by James Ginzburg.