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First single from Vanessa Amara "Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback" Out May 28th as Posh Isolation 249

The beguiling yet inviting music of Vanessa Amara has long presented studies and invocations of ambient music and experimental sound practices with a graceful relief. Their  latest album, 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback,' is a collection of unedited live recordings from 2016-2020. It charts a formal path for creation, and in doing so manufactures their most dazzlingly beautiful album to date.

Vanessa Amara is a duo from Copenhagen. More recently they've forged links to Coomkeen, Ireland. Together, Birk Gjerlufsen and Sebastián Santillana have released a small plenty of recordings, with their 2016 album 'You're Welcome Here' bringing them into a critical orbit with contemporary experimental music and earning them much-deserved recognition. A cluster of releases followed that took their intricately rendered worlds into new constellations and alignments with the suite of instruments that they recurrently call upon. Last year's 'Leopards' and 'Poses' introduced a daring alacrity to the dreamy forms one may associate with Vanessa Amara, suggesting a wealth of silhouettes and wicked suns.

'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' hints at a similar mischief through its inventive formal strategy, accompanying ideas, and charged theatre, yet it pursues the melancholic kernel at the heart of the project more intently than any previous release.

The album's title is descriptive of the album's process. Utilising an arrangement of microphones, speakers, and tape machines, Vanessa Amara created a system that allowed them to work with acoustic feedback. In the group's own words, "We don’t have a studio or a piano, so instead we work briefly in other peoples' homes or in any room made available to us. Each of these rooms, what is within them and how the instruments resonate there, is what generates the sound." With piano, accordion, pipe organ, carillon, and bells, this system generates an exquisite space of delicately placed harmonics and sweet ricochets.

The track 'Accordion' captures a passing all-terrain vehicle from inside a church—it's these kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that are found at the edges of the album, refracting the heart-aching meditations and formal constraints with a novel spontaneity. However, at the core of the album's making is feedback. As Vanessa Amara explain, "The autonomy of the feedback is critical as it demands an improvisational relationship to the shaping of sound. We wish to trigger a capacity for refusal of perfection forcing awareness. Our hope is that the transparency that we believe improvisation holds a capacity for can at once connect and nourish solidarity, provoking movement as well as continuity in and between our, as well as our audience's, collective and individual labour in life."

The resulting shapes and figments rustle a new wonderous bearing, making 'Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback' an elegant transformation in the project's evolution.

Posh Isolation 249 
Mastered by John Hannon

Tracklist
1. Bells 01:11 
2. Piano & Accordion I 07:35 
3. Accordion 06:52 
4. Piano & Two Tape Loops 05:47 
5. Pipe Organ 07:22 
6. Piano & Accordion II 02:19 
7. Cembalo & Carillon 05:27 
8. Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops 05:32

Music for Acoustic Instruments & Feedback

Vanessa Amara - Piano, Bells & Two Reversed Tape Loops

Ziúr - Antifate
Format: LP / DL
Cat.No. PAN 120
Release Date: 7 May 2021
Purchase: pan.lnk.to/Antifate

Ziúr’s music has always been difficult to classify. A longtime fixture in Berlin’s nightlife, the musician, producer and DJ has cut through decades of threads to arrive on a sound that accurately represents her journey. She’s sung, played guitar and drums and reduced club music to a burning cinder; with “Antifate”, her third album under the Ziúr moniker, she approaches electronic music without any preciousness or reverence to genre.
2019’s acclaimed “ATØ” re-introduced songs to her canon, contorting her vocals over an undulating electronic backdrop. On “Antifate”, she takes this idea further, pushing abstracted pop forms into mists of digital euphoria and extracting unexpected instrumental flourishes from collapsing clouds of distorted rhythm. Electronic instrumentation is melted into acoustic sounds and vice-versa, creating a breathing organic universe that’s entirely Ziúr’s.

“Antifate” is an abstract reference to the mythical land of Cockaigne, a utopia where wine flows freely and houses are made of cake, that provided escapist fantasy for medieval peasants. As the space between our private worlds widens, this fantasy becomes alluring once more - a place where we feel free, with the people who allow us that freedom. With this in mind, Ziúr crafts a soundtrack that’s fantastical and magical, hinged on the idea of closeness and connection at a time when distance is mandatory.

Ghostly voices echo wordlessly over clattering beats and dubwise bass on opener ‘Alive, Unless?’, while the album’s title track sings a more epic fanfare, with a chorus of voices echoing into glittering synthesizer pearls and volcanic kicks. “Antifate” is almost even theatrical at times, something never more evident than on the Talk Talk-esque ‘Fringe Casual’ with its dreamy piano and plucked bass and on closing track ‘The Carry’, where flute is introduced into Ziúr’s rapidly expanding narrative.

It’s tempting to say that this is the album Ziúr has been destined to make, but “Antifate” rejects this concept. Rather, this is the album that Ziúr needed to make now, surrounded by the people that have been able to offer her the place to do it. In mapping out her mythical paradise, Ziúr has produced an album that is deeply tender and inescapably human. It’s an album about freedom, and she has never sounded so free.
The album is mixed by James Ginzburg & mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by Stefan Fähler.

@ziurinhell

Antifate

Ziúr - Alive, Unless? (PAN 120)

Claviceps Purpurea by jjjacob (@jjjacob). Taken from evo natura (@evo-natura) new V/A, out November 5, 2021.

Read: https://bit.ly/2ZzwcTb
Pre-order: https://bit.ly/3nE8dLh

evo-lation two is evo-natura's second fundraising compilation and it's featuring Sangam, jjjacob, Lonneker, Ryouko, user-24012015, Celes and Montross.

The project focuses on field recording manipulation with the help of hardware and digital editing.

All the earnings will be donated to Eden Reforestation Projects (https://edenprojects.org/)

Artwork by Karina 
https://www.instagram.com/ekaterinashoots/

Mastered by Ioannis Nafpliotis, except Track 1 Mastered by Sangam

Released by evo-natura

Premiere: jjjacob - Claviceps Purpurea [evo-natura]

Unbless Me Now (Patience Pearl Remix)

Taken from LTECH008:

TCF -
415C47197F78E811FEEB7862288306EC4137FD4EC3DED8B

TCF - 54 C6 05 1C 13 CC 72 E9 CC DC 84 F2 A3 FF CC 38 1E 94 0D C0 50 5C 3E E8

Cascade Infinity is a work for Gezhung and Electronics . It was composed by Jo Thomas. Played live in Pontio by Luxi Tain on the 18.2.24

Cascade Infinity Jo Thomas Show Reel Extracts

From Boli Group "N.P.D.S" LP/DL 
Posh Isolation 208 
Out May 4th, 2018

"Via negativa, not a collection of skills but an eradication of (mental) blocks
Meme sonate, winter sun fails but 'spirits bright'
Matiné meditation
A picture of fresh moringa leaves
The sound of NSA listening in on your most intimate moments.
Early 21st Century Music”

Boli Group is a new ensemble spearheaded by Copenhagen based composer and producer Asger Hartvig. Responsible for some of the most fearless and intriguing works to come from the city in recent years, Hartvig is as imposing as he is mysterious, and his debut release for Posh Isolation makes no concessions.

Hartvig is perhaps best known for his work with the group Synd Og Skam. And though less known, Brynje 1&2 is just as exceptional. Taking both technology and classicism as allegories, each group charts routes in and out of pop music, somehow arriving at an observer's distance to the distinct stylistic choices in the process. The label Visage has published the best of this, and the logic has certainly been carried into 'Boli Group LP,' the latest offering from Hartvig and his distinguished ensemble of Nina Cristante, Holger Hartvig, Thea Thorborg, and Cæcilie Trier.

There is a nearly unendurable fragility to 'Boli Group LP.' It's as if Hartvig has let the complexities of his themes stand in mourning; his narrator taking a moment to themselves behind sunglasses, exhausted for the rose-tinted lens of the prepared script. The album is willingly dramatic, though it never plateaus into melancholia. Hartvig pirouettes at the edge with the sorrowful string arrangements and the pristine timbre of the piano, the immediacy of the acoustics always binding the listener tightly to the risk. Pastoral and meditative, the electronics don't tamper with the delicate fabric being woven. They always register as supportive and understated. The synthetic hum, occasionally yielding a doleful melody as it does, manages to imbue a naiveté to this contemporary and subtly idiosyncratic chamber music.

Though the track titles lead us on, in time the examination the album provokes is that of the tension in transparency. The album's secret, barely kept through the minimalism, is its distinct folk noir quality in holding it.

"boli group creating new chamber folklore embracing the playing of instruments, not the played, but that which is playing for the sake of future focus and edit into the very minerals of instrument, intuition, emotion, fragility underlying, the warning, always pulsating acts of drama, wet leaves, asphalt, pan to right, agriculture and electricity poles a container ship, lonely in horizon hoping for a clear thought, but everything existing as conspiracy the sound of a search, uncertain and always asking, for certainty is false, showing sceneries changing permanently and forever narrating, like a panorama of grey clouds, keeping humidity levels high, heating up before the release of water and lightning investigation for folk instruments. What are their songs and where will they go, over time, woven together like a piece of fabric created to stand against the lethal winds”

A1. Overture 04:36
A2. How To Play 03:12
A3. Monsanto Folk Song 02:46
A4. Toxica 03:15
A5. Moringa 03:15
A6. Garden Picture 02:28

B1. Tension In Three Stages (Drama) 06:28
B2. Tension In Three Stages (Country) 03:18
B3. Tension In Three Stages (Nautic) 05:39
B4. Summit 01:35

Posh Isolation 208

04 05 2018

Boli Group - Toxica

The Wheel of Time

Ange Halliwell - Summer Interlude - Petra Hermanova

This track is part of the Unsound 'Intermission' compilation:

www.unsoundfestival.bandcamp.com

During the second wave of the pandemic in Poland, in autumn, vocalists Agata Harz and Katarzyna Smoluk recorded improvised tracks based on an ancient Slavic spell, or ‘enchantment’, as they called it, the purpose of which is to call forth spring after a dark, terrifying wintertime. The vocal tracks lie at the heart of Tim Hecker’s composition, commissioned or Unsound's 'Intermission' album, to be released on March 5th, 2021.

Tim Hecker Agata Harz & Katarzyna Smoluk - Demeter & Johannes' Song Of Pandemia

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

Blutt

Patrick Belaga - Lilt (w/ Kai Kight) (PAN 117)

An amorphous global-minded festival and creative platform dealing with music, sound, words and related visual arts. Founded in Krakow in 2003, Unsound has taken place in 30 cities around the world.

Tim Hecker Agata Harz & Katarzyna Smoluk - Demeter & Johannes' Song Of Pandemia

Unsound

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