★Edições Cn
Halki pilvien
"Halki pilvien - transl. Trough the clouds - brings exactly what one expects from the clouds. It is a collection of soft and gentle movements, as playful as a ‘Jan Anderzén type of music’ is always. A collection of patterns that solidify for just a brief moment in time, before sublimating in the back of the mind. This album is in constant motion. Push play. A warped piano and cartoonish SFX’s might foretell a hyperreal approach to music. Yet while the champion of hyperrealism, Noah Creshevsky, d…
Takeaway Loops
*125 copies limited edition* Gavin Vanaelst runs the space Aboli Bibelot in Antwerp where exhibitions and musical performances can happen side to side with dealings in centuries-old furniture and unique pieces of folk art or volkskunst. Gavin makes music under the aliases DJ Charme, Kassett and So Sorry. This is the first album under his birth name. Takeaway Loops cycles back to the days when Gavin was working as a courier for Takeaway. Takeaway is a food delivery company. Their couriers - ehm, …
The Pels Organ and Hemony Carillon
A double CD with location recordings - recorded by Christophe Albertijn - of organ and carillon music plus a 32 page booklet of/for the unveiling of Katharina AW, a relational artwork by Joris Martens.
Saab Fanfare
In October 2022 Musica Impulscentrum invited Amber Meulenijzer to make a composition in collaboration with the local fanfare bands of Pelt, a small municipality in the green east of Belgium. These fanfare bands are deeply rooted in Belgian culture. Even in the tiniest villages one finds at least one or several of these ensembles. The result of this confluence: a procession, a slow paced moving composition for brass instruments, performed both live and played back through twelve speakers mounted …
Siamese Dream (Team)
** Edition of 300 ** "Jeugdbrand is the voice (Dennis Tyfus) and the beat (Jeroen Stevens) of Antwerp. They perform a sparkling drama, a theatrical tragedy, marinated in our classic Antwerp anarchic sense of humor. Recorded at Joris Caluwaerts’ Finster Studios - a landmark in Belgian music. The music of Jeugdbrand reminds me a bit of the music of the late Ghédalia Tazartès - especially when it comes to reinterpreting and combining musical idioms - but trying to put a direct reference on this alb…
Ys
Florence Cats is a poet, visual artist, sound composer, performer and acupuncturist. Born in Vilvoorde in 1985, she is currently living and working where Brussels meets the Sonian forest. Ys is a generous debut. A genuine personal statement. It's raw and courageous. Sunken Cathedral is Florence interpreting Claude Debussy’s La Cathédrale Engloutie (trans. the Sunken Cathedral). The track reminds me of one of those fabled Charles Ives home recordings. Recording himself on Speak-O-Phone - an old b…
Música Azul
*Limited edition of 150 copies.* Música Azul is a gulfstream of melodies originally written for Spencer Clark’s Avatar Blue exposition at Het Bos in Antwerp, march 2019. I got the original melody lines from a photoshop mock-up in which Spencer showed his ideas for the expo. I then performed the piece - partly improvised - on the opening night as to activate the several artworks that were displayed in the installation. Afterwards I edited and reworked the composition for optimal home listening.
Riding Fences
*Limited edition of 300 copies.* Matthew Sage’s (Cached Media, Fuubutsushi) and Lieven Martens (Edições CN, Dolphins Into The Future) make a Western album together. Sage: “I have always found the idea of whatever "Western" means in America to be very elusive. It feels like a fantasy that we keep trying to relive by retelling exaggerated stories. An echo of an echo of an echo...” Martens: “In Belgium, "Western" entered the minds through movies, television series, theme parks, magazines. (…) the o…
Min'yō b/w All Okinawa
Tip! *Limited edition of 70 copies, only a few available courtesy of Edições CN* To celebrate Edições CN’s almost 10 years of existence. To celebrate a friendship. And to celebrate catalogue number 37: here’s the mysterious Numpty with a selection of min’yō and Ryukyu folk music.
Impressões De Uma Ilha (Unguja)
*250 copies limited edition* A site-specific recording sporting a straightforward approach that i’ve grown to love in the works of Gonçalo Cardoso. An album of modern day exotica, a genre i usually pretty much dislike, yet Cardoso steers his vehicle easily aside the trapdoors and potholes. Combining found sounds, sparse playing and field recordings he creates a world that both invokes Treasure Island, and An Essay On Exoticism. Indeed questions are raised. But especially certain emotions are sha…
World Speaks
** Edition of 300 ** World Speaks by Piotr Kurek. It consists of seven vivid paintings. We are greeted by processed voices. A bit later we listen to a fine reed solo, while an organist performs a meditative melody. Hints of a human presence, but World Speaks sounds uninhabited. Instead we enter a glassy reality where the simulation is at play. And where nothing seems what it is: are we witness to the choreography – or the rocky seashore?
“At that time I was playing with various vocal banks I’ve…
Serrisme (Book + CD)
* Edition of 300 * Invited by the town of Hoeilaart and with the support of the Flemish Heritage Fund we create this special document: a CD and a 32 pages booklet. Through photography, text, music, and sound we log a unique and peculiar culture: the grape cultivation under glass in Hoeilaart, a small village just below Brussels. Step with us inside the greenhouse, inside the confined world of the greenhouse workers. Serrism is: a musical illustration - by Christina Vantzou, sound registration…
Kagiroi
I met Sugai Ken a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San…
10 Friendship Songs
** Edition of 200. Artist book + CD ** n the year 2018 visual artist Ken Verhoeven presented his Friendship Paintings, a collection best described as “deconstructed designs for friendship bracelets”, at Trampoline gallery in Antwerp. The subject: the friendship bracelet. A wristband infused with meaningful (?) symbols. Symbols crafted thread after thread. One pulls a string, and … friendship happens. Or … friendship is being manipulated by symbolism. Not unlike a fetish. Ken Verhoeven upcycled t…
Two Views of Amami Ōshima
**Edition of 300** In 1958 the painter Isson Tanaka (°22 July 1908 –*11 September 1977) moved to Amami Ōshima, an island in the Ryukyus. There, in self-chosen isolation, he committed himself exclusively to his art until his sudden passing in 1977. In 2018 Seiha Kurosawa, Kanako Azuma and Hideki Umezawa visited Amami Ōshima to create a video installation about Tanaka’s insular life. The work, entitled “Dokkyaku” (tr. The Lone Visitor), shifts between the texture and materiality of Tanaka’s painti…
Six Tableaux De Quelpaert
Limited edition of 300 copies. Jeju is a volcanic island in the East China Sea somewhere between Japan and Shanghai, south of the Korean peninsula. After a long period of being an autonomous and matriarchal society, it nowadays belongs to South Korea. Women play an important role on the island and enjoy a special status. This matriarchal tradition among other things manifestates in the culture of the legendary Haenyeo – female divers for shellfish, octopus, fish et al. Two years ago Setaik Yim i…
Italian Airs
When Simon Van Honacker (°1994, living in Ghent BE) approached me to do an intern with ECN he caught my intention with his plan to study Flemish Folklore, yet from a Deep Listening perspective. Imagine the sound of fanfares, people getting drunk during braderies (tr. street fairs), cover bands, the general buzzing atmosphere during reenactments, … All aligned as parts of an Organic Symphony for deep listening. I don’t consider pioneering, or the striving for the freshest new idea, as purely nece…
Insular Monographs
Two albums, slightly touched...
'Ke Ala Ke Kua': a flashback to july 2010, when I created this afterimage in the timespan of more or less one week. An afterimage of paying a visit to Joan Ocean’s hotspot, the Kealakekua Bay, and to islands of Hawai’i and Oahu. Miss Ocean wrote a few books about her hanging and having conversations with dolphins at Kealakekua, thus i couldn’t resist going over there and seeing what it’s all about.
'Canto Arquipélago': recorded under a volcano on a portable fourtr…
South from the Future
**Limited edition cassette. Risograph artwork** The debut album by C. Blumberg (living in Berlin DE) is a series of composite images. Anecdotes with distorted perspectives. Documents or maps - impressions...? However if you look a bit closer you see something very different, quite like a technologic fantasy.
The second track, 神奇森林上海 (tr. Shanghai Magical Forest), holds a certain key to enter the psyche of the album. Here Blumberg is inspired by a photo found on Flickr. The author of the photo ga…
Multi Natural
Multi Natural is a new example of Christina’s organic chamber music. We enter nine composed chambers. Nine rooms to inhabit, constructed out of elements that are slowly fusing. The album is a string of semi constant metamorphosis. A gesture appears, is elaborated upon—or is halted and replaced by a new gesture. Multi Natural has multi focal points, quite dissimilar to Christina’s other works that tend to have a more linear path.
Within this album lives a composer who is not afraid to let the con…