Lake From The Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang.

Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque, an artist residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record’s title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by ‘the passing of shadow through a fixed space’. The movement of light across these two flat surfaces, lake and window, finds its sonic equivalent in these eleven pieces, in which fragments and particles of sound – highly amplified crunches, synthesized squawks and pings, harp notes – ripple across the length of each track. Fixed sets of elements define each piece, often moulded into ephemeral ensembles in which individual voices consistently fade away and reappear.

Rushford’s performances on various keyboards provide the unstable, wavering foundations of many of these pieces, with microtonal tunings adding a woozy, seasick edge to his stately, often stunningly beautiful playing. Each side of the LP ends with an extended keyboard work: the first for groaning, sighing church organ, the second for a psychedelic cloud of detuned synthesizer tones in which harmonic fragments sink into their own melancholic recollection. Elsewhere the record makes use of elements as varied as microtonal harp, skittering drum machines and synthetic marimba, establishing a sound palette remarkable for its breadth, as well as its sparkling, glittering quality. Where many of Rushford’s solo projects have taken the form of long works with a sombre cast, Lake From The Louvers is strikingly bright and accessible, a series of sonic glimpses in which, like a late Monet, the shimmer of light undoes the distinction between image and reflection, foreground and background, surface and depth.

Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, cut at D+M. Printed artwork on inner and outer sleeves by Valle Medina and Benjamin Reynolds (Pa.LaC.E).
Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Released in collababoration with La Becque Editions.

JAMES RUSHFORD 'U+25CF' (SP131)

"Hlapov", the latest full-length release by Italian musician Grotta Veterano, is a work of patiently arranged, layered beauty. Presented as four movements of a single suite, "Hlapov" offers a sense of great cohesive narrative, supported by its slow buildups and gravitating drones, blending in elements of choral music and expanding, organic rhythms. Ultimately it is music of quasi-sacred contemplation, a meditative journey of profound scale - a precious ornament.

Your eyes are but two pools of infinite emerald green.

EN22

All music performed, recorded and arranged by Grotta Veterano, 2021

Hlapov

Grotta Veterano - MOV II

Arturas Bumšteinas
So-called Space
Sloow Tapes- CS 30

Continuum-collage piece by Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas created in 2015 from incidental music sampled from various Lithuanian radio drama's from the 1950's to 2000's. A strange heady brew which juxtaposes music, sound effects, rudiments of vocal expression and various acoustic instruments among others in a compelling cut-up, reminding at times of People Like Us or Dirk Schaeffer's recent work for Peter Tscherkassky's movies. Edition of 70 copies.

Arturas Bumšteinas

Extract from 'Image Langage' (SP140)
Out June, 24th 2022 on 2xLPs, CD, digital download.

Order: https://feliciaatkinson.bandcamp.com/album/image-langage

—
Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast.

Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life.

At times listening to Image Language is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound.

Image Language is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments.

Image Language is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity.

— Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Image Language

Becoming a stone

FELICIA ATKINSON 'Becoming a Stone' (SP140)

The cormorant in the forest;
The cherry blossoms
Along the evening path.

Tan Taigi was a haiku poet of the Edo period. He was a wanderer for most of his life and admired by Yosa Buson for his ability to transcend his eclectic and unconventional lifestyle with sublime poetry.

haiku by Tan Taigi

The cormorant in the forest (naviarhaiku539)

Sthlm Drone Society I is the beginning of a new XKatedral tape series featuring generative music originally presented inside the Mimer mining facility in Norberg, Sweden by the collective Sthlm Drone Society. This first edition is a split release by Mats Erlandsson and Maria W Horn utilising bowed piano strings, metal plates, phase modulated sine waves and field recordings of the reverberating mine itself.

Edition of 100
C60 XK07
2016

Minutiae

American avant-electronic musician and essayist Bret Schneider holds no institutional allegiance to one artistic medium. His background encompasses a wide range of work experiences and reveals a man who is connected to the world around him in complex, alienated ways. His thoughts on music and philosophy are intertwined into a billowing exposition. But when exploring the dark recesses of his more aural works, there is an inherent flexibility. Phasing percussive elements and frayed droning lines all lead to a perpetually shifting feeling for an aural uncanny. As fractured as his music can be, there is a dim spark of rumination that threads through his synthetic machinations.

On his latest release, “Xilinx,” Schneider taps into a primordial electronic noise—the kind that rests just on your periphery, unwinding itself to reveal myriad sordid circuits and disjointed projections. These tracks maintain a wired mania, expressing an unsettling undercurrent of ragged repetition and warbling drones. There’s an unexpected elasticity to Schneider’s cabled rhythms, and they often shift across several temporal lines before turning inward, struggling to illuminate an intimate dissonance or imagine a multi-chambered core. Displaying a raw and unusually concise knowledge of how these sounds might fit together, “Xilinx” is part zoetrope, part post-industrial dreamscape. It is an inquiry into the idea of internal movement, a contorted experiment in musical patterning, and an experiment in self-replication.

Xilinx

Bret Schneider - VaVE1

4-track guitar music, consists of an array of pieces for electric guitar augmented by computer and a 4-track tape machine. The music is primarily composed using melodic motifs and canonical structures in which a set of pitches are transposed in octaves and delayed, creating an ever-evolving cyclical polyphony. After the initial recording, the music was re-amplified in the former machine hall of Ställbergs Gruva - a disbanded Swedish iron mine. Now all of the operational machinery is long gone, leaving a large empty hall made of concrete, tile and ice. 

XK13

Mats Erlandsson - A holographic sky

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie
from the album "Quellgeister#3-Bussd" expected October 2019.

Composed, performed and produced by Stefan Fraunberger. 
Recorded in September 2016 except B3 and B4 in September 2018 in the fortified church of Bussd. Bellows pumped / interpreted by Johanna Magdalena Guggenberger except on track B3 and B4 by Nicolai Guta.
Mastered by Neel at Enisslab Studio, Rome
Cover Artwork by George Sowden - Designed by M-L-XL
Supported by SKE / Austro Mechana

doser034LP - Morphine Records 2019
All rights reserved to the respective owners.

Stefan Fraunberger's Quellgeister#3 Bussd is Recorded entirely on an abandoned church's organ in the village of Bussd, Romania, the album is the third installment of the series by Austrian artist and composer Stefan Fraunberger. His research on the influence of nature on culture touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience as evidenced in his Quellgeister research. The album is an archeological sonic research on the deteriorating Organ discovered in the saxon church in Transylvania.

Stefan Fraunberger - Elegie (doser034LP preview)

Take from the album 'Reactions' released as 2LP and Download

Reactions

First Tone 'Reiterations' (SP 049)

Taken from the album 'De Natura Sonorum' released as 2LP
Premiered at the Salle Wagram in Paris on 3rd June 1975.

Mats Erlandsson - A holographic sky

XKatedral

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