The 17th instalment of our WAS. Series is a contribution of the Berlin-based @lennartwiehe from Hannover who also is a resident DJ at club @komOOST. Some of his other pre-pandemic gigs include Berghain and Panoramabar and the Marcel Dettmann protegé also initiated the concept label @Kuratorium.

Lennart's words about this special mix: "Listening to club music made me more sentimental than anything else during the past winter but when spring slowly came to Berlin that changed, so this is when I recorded the mix. I felt like recording a mix that consisting of happy club memories which catches the vibe of my Panoramabar debut back in 2018. I was on late Sunday morning until afternoon, after Mark Knekelhuis and before Marcel Dettmann, who invited me there. Playing there after this day was still special but I never was as nervous as that first time there. Reminiscing during this dark winter it was kind of my go-to happy memory, standing there surrounded by friends and playing my favorite music.

I didn‘t want to play all the tracks everyone heard a 1000 times already so I tried to capture the vibe without actually playing tracks I can remember having played in a club before. To me it is a really happy hour of music :)"

WAS. Series #17 - Lennart Wiehe

Augmented field recording from the sonically perfumed entrance area of a balinese themed love hotel in the amusement district of Shinjuku, Tokyo. Steamy fountains and pseudo balinesean muzak in between artificial rock walls, further infused with fake(?) amphibians and slowed down aquatic garden ornaments.
Released as part of the compilation "possible moisture", forms of minutiae 2021 -> https://f-o-m.bandcamp.com/album/possible-moistures

🌺🌴🏵 Hotel Bali-An Resort Shinjuku Island Tokyo - Adult Only $63 ($̶2̶6̶5̶)💦🏨🌸

XLIII Lennart Wiehe
Respecting pandemic strictures, Robert Johnson Club hibernates since mid-march. Its iconic view from the balcony can now be seen on the Robert Johnson homepage in real-time, as long as the club remains closed. Each SEE YOU SOON Ambient Mix has been crafted with this feature in mind—the choice of mix, day or night time, is at your discretion.

"See You Soon" - Ambient Mix XLIII - Lennart Wiehe

Single and video by Heart Container. 111 BPM. Released in 05/2023. 
Video → http://heartcontainer.info/stay-soft
Website → https://www.heartcontainer.info
Heart Container is a project by Berlin based musician, sound- and graphic designer Christopher Schmidt.

STAY SOFT

Inspired by the big city, by places where one spent their youth, and by moments that left emotional traces – Samantha Bohatsch reflects in  5D (2022) on how both current and past social environments can shape the development of a person. Detached from time and space, Bohatsch allows various narrative threads to meet, oscillating between fusion and independence. These fragmented narratives evoke, in a familiar way, the voice messages we exchange daily on our smartphones. They capture intimate moments, offer glimpses into the inner self, and reveal information that would normally only be shared with our closest confidants. 

Text: Vivien Kämpf

in collaboration with saasfee*pavillon

Soundscape: soundcloud.com/alie_awa

everything from https://www.mediafire.com/folder/y11dd0f0vf5zd/acXiv not otherwise uploaded

ana caprix - Under Bare Ground...

If the photograph’s context is explained, fleshed beyond its rectangular peripheries, given depth of field, does it become more powerful, or does its poignancy and its romance fade with minor detail, thousands of little lights cast into the distance, distracting from its acuity? 

New Friend is a five-part radio documentary exploring the context behind a series of photographs taken by the artist and experimental filmmaker, Barbara Hammer (1939–2019). The photographs were taken over one weekend in August 1973, on Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, in the Salish Sea.

Thank you to all of those who shared their stories, memories, and voices for the purposes of this project. 

In this chapter, you heard the following voices (in order of appearance):
Barbara Hammer
Florrie Burke
Claire Cronia
Judith Lawrence
Scott Watson
Nym Hughes
Andrew Durbin
Rosemary Allenbach
Martha Ross
Derek Anderson
Elaine Savoie
The rocks, plants, trees, wind, and water of Hornby Island Ja-Dai-Aich.

Barbara Hammer and Terry Anderson, through their diary entries and written correspondence, are voiced by Martha Ross.

In this chapter, you hear excerpts from Barbara Hammer’s films X (1974), Double Strength (1978), and Tenderfictions (1996). You also hear excerpts from interviews with Barbara Hammer by Jeu de Palme, The Seventh Art, and Berkeley Art + Design.

Mixing and Mastering by Robert Steenkamer

Thank you to:

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
Barbara Hammer Estate
Hornby Island Community Archives
Cashmere Radio, Berlin
96.5 CHFR Hornby Island Community Radio
KOW, Berlin
Company Gallery, New York City
Rebecca Dunne
Emma Walter 
Emily Harrison
All beings, human and more-than-human, of Hornby Island, Ja-Dai-Aich, and its surrounding waters—where I am a part-time, uninvited guest on the unceded, traditional, and ancestral territory of the K'ómoks First Nation.

New Friend is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

by Bitsy Knox (2024).

New Friend, Chapter 1: The Archive

Recorded and mastered by Chris DeLaurenti, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop is a soundwalk documenting my journey through a tunnel intended to connect WNP-5 and WNP-3, two aborted nuclear power station cooling towers. The tunnel is now closed.

The entire album is an unedited, single-take field recording. Released by GD Stereo on compact disc, To the Cooling Tower, Satsop appeared as part of their Improvisational Architecture series in 2015. 

Designed to deliver water to cool the reactor core, the tunnel is long; it took me the length of the album, about 44 minutes, to enter and exit.

Much of the tunnel is a perfect tube, however the occasional turning passageway, pools of water, debris, and unexpected  vestibules contribute to the unusual acoustics heard in To the Cooling Tower, Satsop. Sounds near and far reverberate, smear, and echo.

My movement through this architecture co-composes the soundscape. Presence becomes performance: With eyes often shut, I walk through the tunnel. Performing blind belays most of the habits I have developed with other instruments and ideas as an improvisor. With no light, I cannot know how the tunnel - My instrument? My collaborator? - will change, or even where I and the passage ahead will go. 

Wanting a flashlight for a mere moment reminds me that darkness, nighttime, "the dark," shadows, and even the poetic adjective umbral deceptively connote mystery, the unknown, fear, the Other, menace, and evil, as if "to see is to know." To those who listen, darkness becomes a place of discovery, an aurally radiant invitation to re-listen and remap the world.

So I navigate (bypass, stumble over, probe, kick, step on, jab, echolocate) obstacles and small dangers with focused listening. My ears map the walls, the floor, the ceiling. I listen to the drones ahead and what flutters behind. Detecting changes in air pressure, my eardrums bend as oxygen thins. Sounds feel different inside and against me. This tunnel has an architectural, acoustic pulse.

To the Cooling Tower, Satsop embodies my notion of phonography: Vivid, possibly transformative field recordings made in unpredictable locations, amid accidents, and by often unorthodox means in tandem with an open embrace of the recordist's presence - all crucial components in the urgent quest towards new ways of listening.

- excerpted from my essay "A Length of Sound" slated for the book "Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power."  Skyward photo of WNP-5 at Satsop by Chris DeLaurenti.

GD Stereo

To The Cooling Tower, Satsop (excerpt)

For RA.1000, DJ Sprinkles' first mix in over a decade is a powerful meditation on the genocide in Gaza.

Dance music often relies on simple narratives: release, escape, unity. But those narratives can often feel inadequate, and even at times, hollow. Or, as Terre Thaemlitz might bluntly put it, just "shitty."

For her first mix in around 15 years, Terre Thaemlitz AKA DJ Sprinkles, challenges us to think differently. "I felt this 1000th podcast should reflect the moment in which it was made," she told us in her Q&A.

And what is this moment? Every day since Israel's 2023 assault on Gaza began, an average of 28 children have been killed. That's an entire classroom, every day, for over 600 days (at the time of writing). It's a staggering figure that only captures a fragment of the listless cruelty imposed on the strip.

Faced with such a genocide, what can music really do? How political can it truly be?  For their RA.1000, Thaemlitz gives us an unflinching rebuke to the idea that music should provide escapism. The mix weaves ambient fragments and jazz passages, woven around samples from Israeli media and the voices of outspoken Jewish critics like Gabor Maté and Norman Finkelstein. 

The result is not just a protest, but a document of our time. For Terre Thaemlitz, music is never just music. Her RA.1000 serves as a reminder that in an age of relentless suffering, the most political act is to reject the illusion of escape, and search for something greater.

Read the interview and find the tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1013. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at https://1000.ra.co

RA.1000 Terre Thaemlitz / DJ Sprinkles

Music for Prototypes. Prototypes is a multi-screen film installation by Berlin-based Irish artist Doireann O’Malley.

Prototypes I focuses on female to male gender transition and the intra-actions of bodies, objects and drives. It is set in The Interbau Project, a modernist architectural housing project built in Berlin in the height of the cold war.

More info: http://hughlane.ie/forthcoming/2029-doireann-omalley-prototypes

Music for Prototypes

http://souvenirjazz.com/

«Souvenir» is a mix series representing the repertoire of Soviet jazz performers. Series acquaints listeners with the legacy of all-original jazz bands which worked in USSR. Only on the verge of the sixties, Soviet musicians started to construct their own stylistic identity as a mean of alienating themselves from the American canon. Folklore sound and traditional instruments were crucial elements which helped musicians to forge and channel their uniqueness.

Third «Souvenir» represents one variation upon this unique sound, which is mostly quiet, tranquil and not organized around the rhythmic structures. It has been partly inspired by the «In A Silent Way», recorded by Miles Davis in 1969. This album is celebrated as one of his best releases, and K. Leander Williams from Time Out New York labeled it as the "proto-ambient masterpiece." Later on, in 2002, this album charted 20th position in the list of «25 Most Influential Ambient Albums of All Times».

Compilation of the mix required digging into the culture of southern Soviet republics and watching post-perestroika noir flicks, which were soundtracked with gems of Soviet jazz. In fact, the mix "weaves" together with an assertion of short excerpts, and only a couple of tracks are played in full. The sound matter is literally pulsating; this pattern governs the whole mix, and only by the end of it the theme reaches the climax.

Music for Prototypes

Wirefoxterrier

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