Archet motorisé -

occhi a mandorla

JFM - Changing Colours

Audible: Dan Hayhurst
Visible: Reuben Sutherland
Mastering: Andreas Lubich [LUPO]

Psyché Tropes / LTR Records 2024

Sculpture’s new album Max Ax is the product of constant recombination of wildcard sonic and visual elements into new forms in performance. Catching a live AV set by the duo is to enter a maximal portal into their visionary aesthetic, as Sutherland's kaleidoscopic visual turntablism and Hayhurst's analogue/digital hybrid of electronic pop and experimental splatter combine in free associations and unstable reactions.

Max Ax is the capture of one possible frame in this ongoing sequence, but it is also Sculpture’s most direct and focused transmission yet.

Sculpture’s music may be compulsively metamorphic but a consistent intent and stylistic confidence connects these eleven compositions. Hayhurst’s signature junk pop gnarl is present, a chewed tape melodic sensibility holding the assembly together while surfing chaos. Tape loop psychedelia, overdriven techno, cassette deck melancholia and disintegrating chamber pop combine with a moire of varispeed electronics and percussion.

The resulting first thought best thought dynamism is sometimes ferocious, sometimes joyous, trashy ecstatic or strange, but always singular.

Sutherland's artwork playfully references recurrent motifs in the duo's work. The opaque corporate/ scientific department with its maze of abandoned zones visualises environment as pattern, threatening containment while inviting exploration. The visual language of product design and commercial exploitation is subverted in absurdist combinations of the organic and synthetic, banal and fantastic, geometric and cartoonish. Cryptic devices for calculation, summoning or nonsense are simultaneously futuristic and medieval. The facility has been compromised in some unknown event and strange code has broken through.

Max Ax marks a first collaboration between LTR Records and Psyché Tropes. Available on deluxe double gatefold 10” zoetrope disc and download. The album is available direct from LTR Records and Psyché Tropes, as well as from select record stores, online and via all streaming services.

Double 10" Zoetrope

Max Ax

Midweek Smile

Bruce Cockburn's 'lovers in a dangerous time' reimagined & recorded live to cassette using a sampler & FX. Live at Mighty Niagara Film Festival - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jil-8nsgQY

'Fragile Bodies'

This is track "close ab" from the tiles teils cassette. 
Released October 10 2024

The cassette was published as part of the same titled 6-channel sound installation that was presented earlier in 2023 at Museum Schloss Fellenberg Merzig.

It features the sound of broken and cut tiles from the Merzig based tile factory Villeroy & Boch Fliesen GmbH. The factory, wich was directly opposite the Museum, has now, in 2024, moved its tile production entirely to Turkey.

However, the fossilized sounds of a few selected V&B tiles remain somewhere here... in Merzig, in Berlin, on magnetic tape, digitally, www, memorized.

In the former sound installation and now on this cassette, you can hear the tiles assambled to a three-storey ceramophone... humming a farewell song to their origins with the voices and sounds that might be very well known to the 200 former V&B workers.

[ Find here: Ceramophone percussion, tiles scratching, performance documents, analogue synths, text to speech poems, exploratory handling of ceramics and mics, etc. ]

~
credits
released October 10, 2024

C-26 ferro-tape cassette
Kraftpaper slipcase
Stamp printed cover
Hand numbered

Ceramophone, recordings and mix: Peter Strickmann
Text to speech: NaturalReader
Mastering: Leo Kwandt
Dubbing: Shell Tapes
Graphics and Layout: Peter Strickmann
Font: Silka, by atipo

Comissioned by SaarART 2023
Presented as 6-channel sound installation at Museum Schloss Fellenberg, Merzig in June - September 2023

Most of the tiles used for the Ceramophone were kindly provided by Villeroy & Boch Fliesen GmbH

Peter Strickmann - tiles teils (A4)

Faustus

Vegetal hold up. A horse will carry me back, where he's expected.

First broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, 12 Sep 2025.

211: Lloyds

Full tracklist: https://bleep.com/bleep-mix-309-wevie-stonder

Earlier in 2025, Wevie Stonder returned to Skam with their first album in 16 years, and such an occasion requires further celebration, no? Sure Beats Living delivers more of the collective’s signature cheekiness, and this mix for Bleep unravels all of the wildly eclectic sounds and styles that have powered over two decades of iconoclasm.

This is probably the only mix you’ll find that travels from drill and bass to Ecuadorian synth cumbia to 40s jazz. Constant stylistic U-turns are the name of the game, and as the group recontextualise tracks with comedic skits and spoken word pieces, you never know which little sonic nugget is going to be the jumping off point for a completely opposite yet cleverly connected world of sound. Wevie Stonder’s own strange crossing between avant experimentation and punkish irreverence sits between the jangling bass guitar of Gary Le Strange, whose reclusive hikikomori-induced paranoia is delivered in an ironic nasally britpop voice, and the wonky synth funk of Devonwho with lush crisp beats and thrumming jazzy keys.

Bucolic Moog wash and lounge piano tiptoe beneath a Radiophonic Workshop-esque segment testing out the possibilities of synthesisers; “Finally, an example of rhythmic electronic music,” says the posh presenter, introducing a full and proper rinsing with some classic Squarepusher chops. Amen breaks are chucked in the shredder and glued back together with thick jungle bass, then dissipate into Hiroshi Yoshimura’s birdsong bliss. With these disparate tracklist transitions, each track in itself brings together unlikely combinations: further melodrama from Gary Le Strange pairs southern crooning with jaunty harpsichord, bass punches and cascading pianos flow between J Dilla’s slow hip hop hits, and Polibio Mayorga merges accordion and cowbells with the theatrics of expressively vintage synth sounds, brass and electronics trading lines on ‘Muñequita Blanca’.

Bleep Mix #309 - Wevie Stonder

"Arcane 7 : 2020 CD³ vs Starlink " de Léa Roger
Parce que Là Venir.e pense que l'ambiance c'est important, parce que Là Venir.e aime la musique des anges et les cris sauvages, parce que Là Venir.e écoute le grondement des machines et la course des astres, pour son premier numéro Là Venir.e a demandé à Léa Roger, de Félon et Osilasi, de composer une hymne au Chariot, une hymne cosmique, qui t'invite à la lutte, au soulèvement, à marcher toujours devant.

Arcane 7 : 2020 CD3 vs Starlink par Léa Roger

Audiovisual duo Sculpture mix animation, video art and unstable sonics to uniquely synaesthetic effect.

Max Ax

SCULPTURE