A bunch of sounds I have been bustling around these last months. Now they are digital available from my bandcamp.

Artwork by Iñigo Villafranca Apesteguia
Mastered by Shy

The Desert Cannot Chill Out

James Hoff - Inverted Birds and Other Sirens 
Label: PAN
Cat.No. PAN 133
Format: Digital
Release Date: 5 August 2022
Purchase: PAN.lnk.to/InvertedBirdsandOtherSirens

James Hoff’s Inverted Birds and Other Sirens was composed after a visit to Chernobyl in 2018. Both works utilize GPS signals recorded within the zone of exclusion as well as orchestral arrangements for woodwinds, brass, and strings. The first piece was the soundtrack for HOBO UFO (v. Chernobyl), an audio-visual work based on a hacked version of Google Street View that PAN released in 2019. The second track is new to this release. 

Chernobyl holds a unique cultural and political position and Hoff’s initial visit was prompted by the site’s complicated ideological function for the west and the slippage between its unimaginable horrors and its recreation and fabrication within popular imagination by the entertainment industry. However, when Hoff was in Pripyat and the exclusion zone he found himself more affected by its ghosts than by the site itself. This realization was profound and prompted him to compose works that were emotionally driven rather than overly conceptually. 

While there, he recorded GPS signals that surrounded the overgrown landscape, the concrete sarcophagus, and the dark tourist attractions that remain after the catastrophe. Once back in his studio in Brooklyn, he deconstructed these recordings, pulling them apart and layering them with conventional chamber instruments in an effort to create a timbre that reflected the complex emotional layers of the exclusion zone and the people who had lived there. The result is a music that moves, as the artist has characterized it, like “melodies walking through a melting landscape.” 

Of course, much has changed since Hoff’s initial visit. The work is now being released in a radically different political context as the horrors of a real-time war are waged around it. Despite this, Hoff feels that the emotional underpinnings of the recordings resonate with our times, or at least his conception of it.

Produced and written by James Hoff
Master by Josh Bonati

James Hoff - Other Sirens (PAN 133)

The London-born and based artist Beatrice Dillon first came to our attention with her Folkways 2 release on Will Bankhead’s buy-on-sight label The Trilogy Tapes. As well as that project, she has released an impressive number of works ranging from experimental solo and collaborative compositions, musical pieces for art installations as well as soundtracking films. Her mix for the consistently brilliant Blowing Up The Workshop series is a great example of her unique and broad tastes, and we cannot recommend Beatrice’s shows on Resonance FM highly enough. We had the pleasure of speaking with Beatrice over email about her musical background, past, current and future projects, her music-making process and creating compositions for different contexts. She also provided us with our 99th Truancy Volume, a mix of typically wide-ranging and fascinating sounds that provides a taste for her impeccable crate-digging and selection skills.

Read more: http://truantsblog.com/2014/truancy-volume-99-beatrice-dillon

Photo: Anne Tetzlaff

Truancy Volume 99: Beatrice Dillon

Three years ago we started publishing mixes online on wichelroede.net. As we like to work on ways to connect music with design, last year (2015) we began developing our first physical product. The result is this mixtape, a collaboration between Beatrice Dillon, Ben UFO, and wichelroede. Initial released in February of this year, the tape immediately was sold out. After a second run in April, together with the artists we’ve now decided to release both mixes online as stream and free download.

Side A is a mix by Beatrice, side B is a mix by Ben. The London residents recorded two forty-five (times two equals ninety) minute mixes which are beautifully complimentary while still surprising. Both mixes consist of an outstanding selection ranging between electronics, dub, reggae, jazz, ambient, techno, and house. The ‘sleeve’ and on body-print of the cassette tape is designed by Fallon.

We only have a handful left of this release in our webshop. These are the final copies! Get yours via https://shop.wichelroede.net/collections/tapes. 

BGM

Wu Zeng