"Sounds drifting or hiding in the area in which I live. A vacant lot, a port at midnight, broken furniture, childhood toys, voices of machines. Overlooked, abandoned and malfunctioning sounds. Sometimes I record them, sometimes I miss them. 2014-2018, Nagasaki, Japan."
Order here: https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/cirrus

Shuta Hiraki - 絹雲 Cirrus (Excerpt)

"Craco is a small town in southern Italy, completely abandoned after a landslide in 1963. Since then, plants and animals slowly started to take over the ruins, creating a suspended atmosphere magnified by distant echoes coming from rural production and imaginary voices."
Order here: https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/hearing-voices

Nicola Di Croce - Hearing Voices (Excerpt)

Early spring on the volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece: Bees swarm over almond trees on the caldera's edge. On the fertile crater soil, livestock graze. Mud pits burble and sulfur vents puff out thick vapor clouds. Solitary men ring the bells, call to their animals, and sing to themselves. Scops owls and bats call into the night.
Order here: https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/underdrift

Alyssa Moxley - Underdrift (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/vertical-studies-archival-spirals

"We draw lines through our archive of experiments, performances and improvisations in Nikel, Sint Jansklooster, Fjell, Bakkehavn, Østensjøvannet and Mandø. We imagine our bodies equipped with long feelers, antennas reaching far beyond the ground and through the planetary boundary layer up to the outer atmosphere." 

Vertical Studies is a collaboration between Norway based artists Signe Lidén and Espen Sommer Eide. They involve with specific places and rhythms through field recording, instrument building and an experimental approach to local and embodied knowledge.

Signe Lidén & Espen Sommer Eide (Vertical Studies) – Archival Spirals (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/vaste

Amplifications of the cold and silent winter in Finland through bowed objects and provoked accidents. The material of ‹ Vaste › (roughly meaning ‹ response ›) was recorded from 2019 to 2020 on the south coast, reaching from windy islands to motionless cities. 

Rasmus Östling is a Turku-based artist who combines various sound sources in his work. He aims to bring field recordings, synthetic sound and feedback together, creating collage-esque compositions and holding on to the critical elements of musique concrète.

Rasmus Östling – Vaste (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/hornstrandir

A field recording collage staging sounds collected in July 2019 while hiking across Hornstrandir, Iceland. Accompanied by Gregor Holzinger. Voices by pipits, uria, gulls, auks, shanks, terns, plovers, fulmars, redwings and arctic foxes. 

Abby Lee Tee is a musician, dj and sound designer, based in Linz, Austria. He is known for incorporating widespread musical and non-musical influences in sound, an unmistakable narrational instinct, and a passion for obscure field recordings. | www.abbyleetee.com 

Side A: Meadow Pipit, Black-legged Kittiwake, Thick-billed Murre, Common Murre, Razorbill, Common Redshank, Artic Fox, Arctic Tern, European Golden Plover 
Side B: Meadow Pipit, Black-legged Kittiwake, Northern Fulmar, Redwing 

Mixed and mastered by Christian Ghahremanian 

Thanks to Patrick Franke for the bird identification

Abby Lee Tee - Hornstrandir (Excerpt)

Based on recordings along river tributaries and flooded forests across Amanã and Mamirauá in central Amazônia, "strange strangers" invites us to listen to -within- a singular world of vitality, cultivating encounters with other beings (life-forms, terrestrial matters, sounds) and with our being as an other. 

pablo sanz' practice is an open-ended investigation of listening and more-than-human vitality, focusing on the limits of perception and attention and encouraging sensory ecological awareness. His work includes site-specific and public art projects, spatial audio installations, immersive multichannel concerts in the dark, and pieces for headphone listening. 
pablosanz.info

Mastered by Ludwig Berger

pablo sanz: strange strangers (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/radura

Sonic research in two residual places linking poetry, soundscape and architecture. ‘Femminile Plurale’ takes us through a former greenhouse, an irrigation tank and a bunker in Liguria. ‘RADURA’ rewrites the space of an urban clearing in Berlin through a participative performance. 

Vittoria Assembri is an architectural and sound researcher. Her practice explores the territories considered marginal, from an architectural and sound point of view. She focuses her research on the regeneration of urban spaces as the recovery of building heritage that pursues sustainable sociability and social diversity. She deepens on the notion of Third Landscape, as an oblique and unconventional condition, of abandoned spaces invested by spontaneous forms of other species. 
www.vittoriaassembri.com 

Gaia Ginevra Giorgi is a poet, sound artist, performer and researcher. She published “Manovre segrete” (Interno Poesia, 2017) and “L’animale nella fossa” (Miraggi Edizioni, 2021). Her research is oriented towards the generative possibilities of intercode poetry: she experiments with vocal soundscapes, and studies the relationships between text, voice, new electronic devices and architectural space, creating site-specific projects. 
www.instagram.com/gaiaginevragiorgi/ 

They are co-curators of 'Walk So Silently That the Bottoms of Your Feet Become Ears' (on Fango Radio), a collection of sound materials by artists who work with a site-specific approach. Archives of sound landscapes reflect on the theme of liminal enviroment, of waste, of residue: field recordings, interviews, vocal soundscapes, poems, sound installations, then in close relationship with the architectural space and its crossings (human and non-human). 
www.fangoradio.com/shows/158

Vittoria Assembri & Gaia Ginevra Giorgi: RADURA (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/therme-vals

In this sound study of a thermal bath in the Swiss alps, Kamimura researched the acoustics and materials of the Therme Vals inside and outside the building. The contact, underwater and airborne recordings reveal the musicality of Peter Zumthor’s architecture. In a mirrored sequence Jobin enhances the resonances and rhythms between stones, waters and mountains. 

France Jobin is a sound / installation / artist, composer and curator residing in Montreal, Canada. Her audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture”, revealing a minimalist approach to complex sound environments where analog and digital intersect. Many of her projects are inspired by theories related to topics such as vacuum decay, string theory and quantum entanglement. 
francejobin.com 

Drawing chiefly upon his field recordings, Kamimura experiments with methods that draw upon sight, hearing, and other senses to perceive different scenes. His extensive body of work includes sound installations, paintings, video works, sound performances, and audio works - unveiled in venues both within Japan and abroad. 
www.yoichikamimura.com

Yoichi Kamimura & France Jobin - Therme Vals (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/another-year

"snow in the P.M. all-night donut shop. stormy overnight, rain clearing. evening stroll. the edge of town. skipping stones. I’m still your friend. unhurried dark. the first sweater of the fall. a date at the aquarium. winter fields. a train out west." 

Katharina Schmidt is a musician based in Berlin. After years of playing drums and piano in various bands, her solo work is influenced by indie, experimental, and improvised music. She holds a master’s degree in Sound Studies from the Berlin University of the Arts and works with Cashmere Radio and SVS Radio. 
katharina-schmidt.net

Katharina Schmidt: Another Year (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/santa-vitae

Christmas morning, 2016. Santa Claus busking on the empty streets of Brighton city centre. Taxi drivers and recycling trucks navigate the near empty streets. Dog walkers, cyclists, the intermittent burst of passing youths. Santa presses methodically against the keys of a cheap plastic keyboard, its sound, emitting from small battery powered speakers, barely audible above the hub-bub of passing traffic. Years later, the associated recording is fed through a spectral resonator, subject to the same distortions and contortions of the mind, the poverty of human memory. 

Distant Animals is the artistic output of Daniel Alexander Hignell, a sound, video, and performance artist. His work focuses on the political and participatory resonance of creative acts within shared space, interrogating notions of autonomy, collaboration, and the tension between sense (what is perceived by the senses) and sense (what is made sensible by a community). 
www.distantanimals.com

Distant Animals - Santa Vitae (Excerpt)

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/different-tunings

An exploration of the materiality of sound without the intention of absolute tuning precision. Developed through the study of the table of musical proportions by the Indologist Alain Daniélou, a true ‹ anatomy of the octave ›. Recorded with a Korg PS-3200 and modular synthesizer. 

José Luis Maire is a musicologist, music librarian and musician of experimental electronic music, working mainly with modular synthesizers, In his work, the study of acoustic phenomena and untempered proportions is central, as well as the use of the synthesizer as a reverberation and feedback instrument. 
www.jlmaire.com

José Luis Maire - Different tunings

Aquatic and synthesized life; distant voices; pure perception.

Seiji Takahashi: Cue(@seiji-takahashi)
Jonáš Gruska: Volanie (@jonas-gruska)
Otto Siddharta: Negendau 
Josiah Steinbrick: (Two Bonangs, Coated Spheres, Piano, Two Synthesizers, Natural Objects) (@leavingrecords)
Annea Lockwood: Water Gong 
Haruomi Hosono: バイバイ (Bye Bye)
Laraaji: I Am Ocean
Jon Hassell: Caracas Night September 11, 1975	
Hideo Osaka: Take No Odori
Andrew Pekler: Bororo (@pekler)
Annea Lockwood: Popina To Rasova
François Bayle: petite polyphonie
Noël Akchoté, Erik Minkkinen, Andrew Sharpley: Rien (@noelakchote-1)
Sontag Shogun: no.16 (Windmill) (@sontagshogun)
Joshua Bonnetta: Everything that was Ever Something
Geoffrey Landers: Minored Birds
Abby Lee Tee: Respository II (@abbyleetee)
Rubén D’Hers: Disipador de tension (@dhers)
Ludwig Berger: Cargo (@ludwigberger)
Mika Vainio: Tila
Frank Bretschneider, ralph streinbrüchel: spirale
Rafael Toral: The Stars (@rtoral)
Tom Arthurs, Isambard Khroustaliov: Can’t Unsee (@tomarthurs) (@isambardkhroustaliov)
Kenneth Kirschner: September 19, 1998 (@kennethkirschner)
Izabela Dłużyk: Dawn with the white storks
John Cage, Hildegard Kleeb: Prelude for a Meditation

Mix and photo by Ludwig Berger, November 2018
Graphic design by Nicolas Turki Duchesnay

Vertical Music

Vertical Mix 001: Aquatic and Synthesized Life

Track excerpt from "Bolero Transparente", Cassette, VM01.

Closing chords of potential songs one after the other, for acoustic guitar and a loudspeaker in a room. The pieces are constructed out of the transition from one open tuning to another and are inspired by Bolero songs from the 1970s. Recorded in the artist’s studio in Berlin. 

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/bolero-transparente-2

Casssete, 30 min. Mixed by Ludwig Berger. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Design by Nicolas Turki Duchesnay.

Rubén D'Hers - Bolero Transparente (Excerpt)

Inumaki tree (Podocarpus macrophyllus) recorded with a contact microphone during strong wind in the forest of Esuzaki Island, Wakayama, Japan on June 14, 2018, from 2 to 3 p.m. The unedited and unprocessed recording was reintroduced to the acoustics of the forest.

https://vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/inumaki-esuzaki

Cassette, 60 min. Design by Nicolas Turki Duchesnay.

Ludwig Berger - Tree Music (Excerpt)

Site-specific music from the instalments of ‹Sounding the City› in Montréal and São Miguel. The ongoing project captures urban environments and re-imagines their soundscapes through public installations and acoustic interventions. | soundingthecity.com

vertical-music.bandcamp.com/album/sound…ity-001-002

Cassette, 60 min. Mastered by James Plotkin. Design by Nicolas Turki Duchesnay.

Sounding the City 001-002

Jen Reimer & Max Stein - Sounding The City (Excerpt)

Presence of beings, places and things. 

Field recording and experimental music label curated by Ludwig Berger. Graphic design by Nicolas Turki Duchesnay.

Vertical Music

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