Name: Sofia Ozdravovna _ How a City Sings from November to November by Vienna Press
Duration: 7 min 45 s
Description: Taken from Keys to the Fields 27: Various Artists "The White Madonna"

Seven artists reckon with isolation and subsistence in Dragon’s Eye Recordings’ latest release, titled 'Touch'. Organized by Tomoko Hojo, the album collects six sound pieces by various artists who grapple with the restriction of physical contact through sound. Our ability to touch is a means of survival, an essential and intimate way of living and communing with others. So when it is taken away for the same reason we possess it—for the sake of staying safe—how can it be replaced? What can stand in? 

The pandemic claimed so much; and for a time, touch fell victim. In the album 'Touch', Alexandra Spense, KMRU, Viv Corringham, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto, Tomoko Hojo, and Melissa Pons prod at means of non-tactile touching. They explore spaces where touch is only a memory, a recording, something missing to find replacements. In assembling this six-piece collection, artist Tomoko Hojo recalls Yoko Ono’s 1964 event which invited attendees to “watch the sky and touch”. Over the course of 'Touch,' the listener is an attendee, witnessing sonic reconstructions of haptic happenings. In each of the album’s pieces, sound grazes unseen surfaces and traces invisible shapes with an absent finger.  

In “Communion”, Alexandra Spense recalls a space where tactility transformed into something more, an instance that dissolved the borders of the physical body to blend spirit with its surroundings. KMRU’s “its not a tangency” relies on repetition to feel the boundaries of its container. Almost like echolocation, the listener relies on distant children’s voices and the monotony of soft drones to situate oneself in an imagined space.  

“Imagine myself walking with you” engages with the physical intimacy created not through touch, but rather physical presence—the nearness of two bodies, the potentiality of tactility, the imprint conversations can leave long after they end. Viv Corringham digitally recreates her process of walking and talking with strangers, instead connecting with a friend online. In “Human Measures”, Myriam Van Imschoot and Federico Protto create an instrument which mimics what touch might sound like by simultaneously breathing into a circulatory system of tubes, wrapped into something like the symbol for infinity.   

In “fall asleep”, Tomoko Hojo conjures whispers, chants, and rings bells to touch the air.  From these sound waves of voice and instrument and element, intentional and drawn out, their dispersal can be felt. It’s when the waves enter the ear that we can hear them. But Hojo asks what happens to other waves that run into other parts of the body, unalive or unhearing.  

The absence of other bodies, the ultimate vehicles of touch, brought Melissa Pons inward with her piece “Three”. Through airy field recordings, scattered static, and gently howling drones, it’s as if Pons watches her emotions float off of her body like the minuscule flakes of skin that comprise dust.  

Each of these six pieces ask to expand outside of sound, to take physical shape, make gestures and wander. In their own unique ways, the artists of 'Touch' attempt to transmute sound into tactility, and they come as close as they can. Collectively, the sound pieces exist within the container of the compilation—an abstract notion that places collections of noise alongside one another. And so what is a compilation if not individual tracks rubbing up against one another, meshing, touching?

Touch

KMRU - Its not a tangency

Sand Circles - Continuity

24may5

Lace & Collar - Ecstacy

Maria W Horn - 'Kontrapoetik'
out October 19, 2018
Portals Editions / XKatedral
Buy: https://bit.ly/2nYaW3F

Kontrapoetik

Fides Minus

a few tracks taken from V/A - 'No Compass, Nearer or Further' CS [RULE-150] available @ www.strangerules.com

Eva Bowan - October

Taken from Keys to the Fields 27: Various Artists "The White Madonna"

Correct Line & Rosewater _ Into a Pale Melancholy

Sofia Ozdravovna _ How a City Sings from November to November

Track from NE62 Misantropen – Molltoner från Norrland 1 & 2
2x Cassette & Digital

Visual by A.L.

Pre-order: http://northernelectronics.bandcamp.com

Misantropen – Moll 4

The title track from a real artefact in time, Couronne de Merde's forthcoming EP 'Amazing Grace'. Released via soft verse 14/08/2020 on cassette and digitally.

Stream and download the full thing via Bandcamp - https://couronnedemerde.bandcamp.com/album/amazing-grace-2

Limited run of 20 Cassettes.
Some words from the artist follow - 

The main inspiration of this project is « Amazing Grace », a well-known Christian hymn written in 1772 by the Anglican clergyman and poet John Newton, and still vividly interpreted in the Anglo-Saxon world. The text has been arranged musically with several melodies through past centuries - the most famous one being composed by William Walker around 1835. 

This hymn evokes the remission of sins by faith in God and salvation by grace, themes linked to the personal experience of the writer, former slave ship worker and trader John Newton who became a slave in his turn for 3 years in West Africa. He had, during a violent storm at sea in 1748 while he was rescued from his enslavement, called out to God for mercy. This was the beginning of his spiritual conversion to Christianity. He considered himself later a repentant sinner saved by divine grace.

I composed the EP during Avril 2020 in Paris, during the confinement and the pandemic episode which is still affecting our world and societies. The growing loneliness of my daily life, the emotional and physical distanciation from those I love, combined with a heavy sense of a possible end of mankind, pushed me to read poetry speaking of grace, divine and religious conversions. I stumbled upon « Amazing Grace » on the internet, and behind my screen, felt the urge to compose something uplifting, full of hope and mercy for my specie. Reading the life of John Newton and his progressive repentance, I decided to build a project about the life of this man and my own need of spiritual elevation, facing the fear of death and the perpetual human hesitance between Vice and Vertu.

The beginning and the internationalization of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death and assassination of George Floyd in Houston, May the 25th, gave to the project a new sense - a new interpretation ; a tragic one for sure. More than two centuries later, racism, racial violence and discriminations linked to skin color are still vivid and effective all around the world.

Couronne de Merde - Amazing Grace

Track from the upcoming Miles Away (Milan W) one sided soundtrack 10" that comes with the catalog of Dennis Tyfus' Skins, Brains & Guts exhibition catalog

Sofia Ozdravovna _ How a City Sings from November to November

Vienna Press

Recent comments

Josef Gaard

There's too much

Anasisana

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