Lake From The Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang.

Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque, an artist residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record’s title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by ‘the passing of shadow through a fixed space’. The movement of light across these two flat surfaces, lake and window, finds its sonic equivalent in these eleven pieces, in which fragments and particles of sound – highly amplified crunches, synthesized squawks and pings, harp notes – ripple across the length of each track. Fixed sets of elements define each piece, often moulded into ephemeral ensembles in which individual voices consistently fade away and reappear.

Rushford’s performances on various keyboards provide the unstable, wavering foundations of many of these pieces, with microtonal tunings adding a woozy, seasick edge to his stately, often stunningly beautiful playing. Each side of the LP ends with an extended keyboard work: the first for groaning, sighing church organ, the second for a psychedelic cloud of detuned synthesizer tones in which harmonic fragments sink into their own melancholic recollection. Elsewhere the record makes use of elements as varied as microtonal harp, skittering drum machines and synthetic marimba, establishing a sound palette remarkable for its breadth, as well as its sparkling, glittering quality. Where many of Rushford’s solo projects have taken the form of long works with a sombre cast, Lake From The Louvers is strikingly bright and accessible, a series of sonic glimpses in which, like a late Monet, the shimmer of light undoes the distinction between image and reflection, foreground and background, surface and depth.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, cut at D+M. Printed artwork on inner and outer sleeves by Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E).
Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Released in collababoration with La Becque Editions.

JAMES RUSHFORD 'U+25CF' (SP131)

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)

Goddaughter - Goddaughter C38. Available Summer MMXXII
Echoes of music smeared with urban field recordings from NY's Weston Czerkies (Magnetic Coroner / Prime Ruin). Simply GORGEOUS! Limited to 80 copies with screen printed artwork.

Goddaughter - Goddaughter C38 (Excerpts)

Deluded way in woodlands
Thousands of oaks - grow hushed
Dangling
Fog gobbles stubborn barricades
Empty caves rumble through gaps

Breathing flesh
Burnt banyan

Remember again, who's dreaming?
Who served the night with closed eyes?

Where the waters seethe, traced the echoes running along the ridge. Grown into mounds - speck of dust, above and beneath, bent in their tensile way.

'Perspective' resembles graying daze for the tense lows, that holds subdued gentleness. Belfast based musician - Verge has brought his exalted grandeur to aural fluency in the vein of gauzy, filmy rumbles.

Perspective

Verge - Standing Water

Sound: Circular Ruins
Voice: Öxi Peng (@pennybirdie)

Shells That Glow Like 3mber

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)

AUDIO VISIT TAPE CARD 
Tokyo Sept 2017 C-12 
Praat5383

Xilo Obachia Que Tentenna

Serge & Mondriaan

K. Mulhern
Silt
CD (E241)

https://entracte.co.uk/projects/k-mulhern-e241/
Release date: 2 September 2019
•
K. Mulhern is a poet, filmmaker and sound artist based in NYC. 
Silt looks at the swath of human time, vantaged before history 
and after apocalypse. It is built from field recordings, synthetic 
sounds and lyric.

Mastered by Christophe Albertijn
Limited edition of 100 copies

Silt

K. Mulhern (E241; 2019)

Paralaxe Editions is based in Barcelona, and Ylia (a.k.a. Susana Hernández) has long been one of the city's most well-regarded musicians. A classically trained pianist who came of age DJing breakbeat raves in Andalucia, she easily maneuvers between disparate scenes and styles; she's as comfortable dropping electro and techno records as she is performing alongside experimental flamenco artist Niño de Elche (she's a member of his touring band).

Following her appearances on labels such as Lapsus and Hivern Discs, Dulce Rendición is Ylia's first full-length effort, a cinematic collection of meditative and richly melodic tracks that largely grew out of her intimate live sets. Weaving together analog synths, field recordings and fragments of her own voice, much of the music was directly inspired by her dreams—and more specifically, the seemingly impossible sights and sounds that populated them. Working to recreate their lingering silhouettes in the light of day, Ylia oscillated between moments of deep introspection and playful fantasy as she settled into the hazy space between sleep and consciousness.

Music by Ylia.
Mastered by Rupert Clervaux.
Artwork by Oficina de Disseny.
Printing by L'automatica, Barcelona.
Words by Shawn Reynaldo.

Dulce Rendición

YLIA - El Agua Original

From ANM047 "Climat Avenir", by Simon Chioini — CD Digipack

Climat avenir ; portrait of unexploited lands, of deserted spaces, of a corrosive and venomous flora. Irked protagonists, roaming livestock, their acidic cries.
Beauty of the blue-green lakes, of the scintillating stars under clouds of bronze. The earth's foundational movement.
Crashing ice. Solar winds.
This work cycle is an imagined world voided of any human presence, or succeeding it. It is a prismatic composition: a vibrant landscape, a topographic map, an exploded geode.
Macro. Micro.

Music composition and mastering by Simon Chioini.
Photography by Violeta Mayoral. Sculptures by Lara Fluxà. Art Direction and concept by Violeta Mayoral and Lara Fluxà.

Goddaughter - Goddaughter C38 (Excerpts)

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