Ambient Electro

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

L'Egitto dopo La Cicala

From Chie Otomi's Touch Again, available now on tape and digital:
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/touch-again

Chie Otomi - Floating Things

From Am Shhara's Shinsoko, available now for pre-order:
https://muzaneditions.bandcamp.com/album/shinsoko

Am Shhara - Ano

main theme for the documentary short "Fares", dir. Thora Lorentzen.
feat Christoph Berg on violin

Fares & Aziz

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Tristes Tropiques
Format: LP/DL
Label#: Faitiche14
Release date: November 11th

Faitiche welcomes back an old friend: Andrew Pekler was the musical director of the 2011 album Ursula Bogner – Sonne=Blackbox (faitiche05 lp/cd/book). Known for his albums on Senufo Editions, Entr’acte, Dekorder, Kranky and other labels, Andrew Pekler’s new work Tristes Tropiques is now released by Faitiche. Tristes Tropiques is an album of synthetic exotica, pseudo-ethnographic music and unreal field recordings.  

Find out more about Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques in the following interview:

Jan Jelinek: You’ve titled your album Tristes Tropiques – a reference to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ famous account of his travels among native peoples in the Mato Grosso. If I remember correctly, the book can be read in two ways: as an ethnographic study of indigenous Brazilian tribes, and as a critique of anthropological methods. What exactly about Tristes Tropiques inspired you? The melancholy travelogue, or the formation of a new, critical school of thought?

Andrew Pekler: Both. Lévi-Strauss’ constant reflection on the purpose of his work and the often melancholy tone of his writing constitute an internal tension which runs throughout the whole book. Tristes Tropiques is many things; autobiography, traveler’s tale, ethnographic report, philosophical treatise, colonial history. But ultimately, it’s the author’s attempt to synthesize meaning from fragments of his own and other cultures that resonated most strongly with me – and led me to a new perspective on how I hear and make music. 

JJ: Listening to Tristes Tropiques I noticed a certain oscillation between references, which is what I really like about it. Obviously, your music alludes to the beloved fairytale kitsch of exotica, but it also repeatedly shifts to a mode of ethno-poetic meditation music that seems to have no beginning or end. Where do you yourself locate the tracks gathered here? 

AP: As a listener and as a musician, exotica music of the 1950s and 60s has always been a constant reference point and inspiration. And perhaps my listening has been ‘ruined’ by exotica, but as I have dug deeper into ethnographic archives of ‘traditional’ music, I’ve come to the realization that all recordings that evoke, allude to, or ostensibly document other musical forms have a similar effect on my imagination: I am most intrigued when I perceive some coincidentally familiar element within the foreign (a tuned percussion recital from Malawi that immediately brings to mind Steve Reichian minimalism, or the Burundian female vocal duet that sounds uncannily like a cut-up tape experiment, etc.). I suppose this album is an attempt to recreate the same kind of listening experience as what I’ve described, just with the electronic means that I have at hand. 

JJ: I know that you perform Tristes Tropiques not only as music, and that there is visual and spatial aspect to the presentation. Can you reveal more about this?

AP: I made an accompanying video – mainly close-up footage, shot in Thailand, of various tropical flora. The video was recorded at very slow speed and this gives the plants, flowers, trees, bamboo, etc. the appearance of rather abstract objects. In live performance, this abstracting effect is further emphasized through real-time modulation of the colors, brightness and other parameters of the video image. There is also an installation version of the video that is meant to be projected on multiple screens / walls and with its own soundtrack of heavily manipulated field recordings captured in the same locations in the jungle.  

JJ: We can get an idea of what this looks like from the beautiful video stills on the back cover of the album.

Andrew Pekler: Theme From Tristes Tropiques / Avian Modulations / Life In The Canopy

Excerpt from a live performance at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg, Russia on April 1, 2018

Bororo – Live at Freeform 01 in St. Petersburg

A collage of sounds from http://www.andrewpekler.com/phantom-islands/ – an interactive website that charts the sounds and histories of islands that were once found on nautical maps but have since disappeared.

Phantom Islands are artifacts of the age of maritime discovery and colonial expansion. During centuries of ocean exploration these islands were sighted, charted, and described – but their existence was never ultimately verified. Poised between cartographic fact and maritime fiction, they haunted seafarers’ maps for hundreds of years, inspiring legends, fantasies, and counterfactual histories. Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas interprets these imaginations in the form of a map of speculative sounds from 27 phantom islands around the world.

Phantom Islands (Collage)

'Zinnen' from the upcoming Release 'Moto Perpetuo' on Marionette.

Video by Frode&Marcus: https://vimeo.com/315931008

Written and Produced by Benjamin Kilchhofer and Michael Anklin
Cat. no.: Marionette09
Format: 12” Vinyl (180g) + Digital
Release Date: March 2019

Moto Perpetuo

Zinnen

Bandcamp

Kilchhofer Anklin - Zinnen (Moto Perpetuo LP)

Artist: Andrew Pekler
Album: Sound From Phantom Islands
Label#: Faitiche20
Format: LP/DL

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Andrew Pekler: Sounds From Phantom Islands brings together ten tracks created over the last three years for the interactive website Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas. With his 2016 album Tristes Tropiques, Pekler created a highly unique cosmos of ethnographic sound speculations. Sounds From Phantom Islands continues and simultaneously expands this concept: finely elaborated chordal motifs float like fog over fictional maritime landscapes. A masterpiece of contemporary Exotica.

Phantom islands are islands that appeared on historical maps but never actually existed. The status of these artefacts of European colonial expansion from the 15th to the 19th century oscillates between cartographic fact and maritime fiction. Sounds From Phantom Islands interprets and presents these imaginations as a quasi-ethnographic catalog of music and synthetic field recordings. The pieces on this album are based on recordings made for Phantom Islands - A Sonic Atlas, an online interactive map developed with cultural anthropologist Stefanie Kiwi Menrath.

Andrew Pekler: Description Of Rain (Over Frisland)

From the album Sounds From Phantom Islands

https://faitiche.de/products/sounds-from-phantom-islands

The Australian ship Southern Surveyor sails toward the Eastern Coral Sea in November 2012. The crew is nervous when approaching the coordinates of Sandy Island north-east of New Caledonia. Minuscule archipelagos and stone-hard chalk riffs are common in this area. Captain Fred Stein and marine geologist Maria Seton have ordered their crew on deck to scan the waves for dangerous riffs or seabed sightings. Some of the scientist on board follow the search on the computer screen – and are amused to live-track their ship as it crosses the black pixels on Google Maps labelled Sandy Island. The explorers have undiscovered an islet that has been on the maps since Captain Cook charted it on his second voyage as lying off the northern tip of New Caledonia. A British Admiralty chart of 1908 that includes Sandy Island warns: "Caution is necessary while navigating among the low lying islands of the Pacific Ocean. The general details have been collated from the voyages of various navigators extending over a long series of years. The relative position of many dangers may therefore not be exactly given."
 
First Appearance: Chart of discoveries made in the South Pacific Ocean by HMS Resolution under the command of Captain Cook. 1774, published 1776

Last Appearance: Google Earth 2012

Sounds From Phantom Islands

Buy on Bandcamp

Sunshower At Sandy Island

Extended arrangement of loops made for Dougherty Island at www.andrewpekler.com/phantom-islands

Dougherty Island - 120º W, 59º S
Captain Dougherty of the English whaling ship James Stewart, discovers the island in 1841 and describes it as 5–6 miles long with a high bluff to the northeast and a valley in the middle covered in snow. Dougherty's discovery is confirmed by English captains in 1859, and 1891. Sailing through the area during Shackleton's Antarctic expedition of 1908–1909, Captain Davis, Chief Officer of the Nimrod suggests that fog banks or icebergs had deceived Dougherty and his successors. Nonetheless, a license granting “exclusive rights to occupy the island for the purposes of removing guano and other fertilising substances” is issued to the Norwegian whaler HJ Bull by the British Government in 1913. 

First appearance: 
1892 British Admiralty Chart of the South Pacific

Last appearance: 
1910 Royal Geographic Society Chart of the voyage of the Nimrod

Dougherty Island

God !! Not sure what I was thinking.. but it obviously says something - and NO I do not 'do' anything .. just in case you were wondering :-)

Please comment !!

Dark as **** !!!

Eberhard

Artist: Frank Bretschneider
Album: abtasten_halten
Label#: faitiche21
Format: LP/DL
Release: Sept 18th 2020

Faitiche is delighted to present a new album by Frank Bretschneider. abtasten_halten was made as part of the raster.labor installation first presented at CTM Festival in 2019. It is perhaps the most radical work in Bretschneider’s distinctive oeuvre: abtasten_halten is a self-generating composition for synthesizer modules whose sole sound source is the movement of two VU meter needles. The resulting percussive sounds coalesce into rhythmic combinations – all random, without repetition. The album resembles a meditation on infinite rhythmic variation. abtasten_halten is Frank Bretschneider’s first release on Faitiche.

"One sound can give birth to thousands of tones through self-fertilization." Pierre Henry, 1982

Frank Bretschneider on abtasten_halten:
abtasten_halten (sample_hold) is a largely self-generating composition for a modular synthesizer system. Self-generating here means that as soon as a current flows, the various modules interact, but within limits set by the composer via the connections between the modules (patches): timing, tempo, timbres, dynamics. These conditions are kept variable to a certain extent or left to chance, so that the composition created is always similar but never the same. On the one hand, the use of random generators opens up possibilities that would not otherwise have been considered. On the other, it offers the fascination of the unfinished and the unique: totally unexpected musical events that you might hear only once.
abtasten_halten combines my preferences for percussive music in general and electronic music in particular. Largely avoiding repetitive structures, the piece is more like a free improvisation, quiet and diffuse, but also extremely dense, in ever-changing contrasts and transformations.
The tone generators are two modified VU meters whose needles, driven by trigger impulses, create a simple one-bar pattern by hitting against a metal spring that is connected to a piezo element (thanks to Gijs Gieskes / Gieskes.NL). The tempo is continuously varied over a period of about ten minutes by several mutually modulating LFOs, ranging from about 0.06 Hz up to the lower audio range of about 18Hz.
The percussive sounds thus obtained are then passed through low-pass filters with moderate resonance and random frequency modulation to additionally colour the sound. Further processing is then executed by an echo module whose tempo and repetitions are again determined by random parameters. Finally the audio signal is occasionally enriched with reverb to add more spaciousness to the sound.
The concept for the installation raster.labor was developed by Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider and David Letellier. Many thanks to raster - artistic platform.

On Frank Bretschneider:

Frank Bretschneider works as a musician, composer and video artist in Berlin, making mainly electronic work based on complex rhythmic structures and interlocking textures, whose many-layered sound is inspired by the experimental set-ups of modern physics, often supplemented by perfectly synchronized computer-generated visualizations. In 1986, he founded AG Geige, one of the most influential underground bands in East Germany. In 1996, he co-founded the label raster-noton and has since released many solo albums.

Ambient Electro

U-I