★Entr'acte
Live At Maria Matos
The Swifter is a trio featuring Andrea Belfi (drums and percussion), BJ Nilsen (electronics) and Simon James Phillips (piano). Their eponymous debut LP was released by The Wormhole in 2012; a follow-up album is in preparation. On this occasion, The Swifter (joined by special guest David Maranha on organ) was recorded live at Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon, by Pedro Alçada on 2 February 2013.
Dark Camber
Dark Camber comprises four works composed between 2009 and 2012, using materials derived from a range of digital synthesis techniques (augmented with some electroacoustic treatments of concrète objects in a number of places to achieve more complex sonorities). While the influence of natural phenomena is often acknowledged in the behaviour and organisation of these materials, the focus of each work as a whole is on sound in the abstract — within an aesthetic/formal context — where interest might …
Music by the metre archive one
Yôko Higashi (1974, Yokohama, Japan) is a performer, vocalist, butoh dancer and choreographer based in Lyon, France. Her work has been widely played on French national radio, diffused at the GRM (Présences électronique, 2012), and commended at Metamorphose in Brussels in 2008.
Xeric
Xeric further explores a/rhythm, space, silence and the perception of pulse/percussive gestures first initiated with Glacial in 2012.
Crossarc chute
Crossarc Chute was inspired by my interest in the compositional strategies adopted for the early analogue electronics of the 1950s and ’60s, yet using digital processes and my own adaptations. Starting with pulse sounds, predefined filtering techniques and rules became the springboard from which I was able to generate many new sounds. These parameters formed a kind of system from which I could at times deviate.For one piece, Detail II, I separated the frequencybands of a group of sounds and then…
Technological music
An oblique response to various antecedents of pulse-based electronic music without recourse to drum machines or sequencing (or — in the case of the Four Investigations — synthesizers). Tools include oboe, English horn, analogue synthesis and malfunctioning electric organs and piano. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Gratitude also to Niko Wenner and Monica Scott. Dedicated to Michael Randers-Pehrson, Jeff Bollaro, and HK Kahng — stalwart comrades in my very earliest electronic music misadventures.
In emptiness there is truth (Call no man happy until he is dead)
A soundwork commissioned for the 2010 edition of the Ravello Festival, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, Stefania Miscetti and Gianluca Ranzi. Voice: Seijiro Murayama. Voice recording engineer and EQ: Stefano Pilia Original stereo mix: John Duncan. All other sounds, recording, editing and mixing by ALH.
“In relation to this soundwork, the extended overtones created by the clashing frequencies of the ‘ghost chorus’ could indeed be read as faint glimmerings of a sublime imperative. This imperative,…
Sleeper line
Sleeper line is a five-track EP constructed from the original components of a live set performed in December 2012. These components — manipulated found sounds — were recorded at various times and in various environments: Dungeness Power Station (2012), street recordings post-Notting Hill Carnival (2007), a prior live performance at the White Building in London (2012), and a cassette recording made in the cloakroom of the Metalheadz Sunday Sessions club night (1997). The cyclical process of merg…
Fleshpile sister
Fleshpile Thematic, released on The Tapeworm earlier this year, reconsidered as an album of dub versions. Smooth edges roughed out. Re-engineered space. All human vocals erased.
Body waves
On 22 February 2011, an earthquake measuring 6.3 on the Richter Scale hit Christchurch, which combined with a series of massive aftershocks destroyed huge swathes of the New Zealand city. At its epicentre in the port of Lyttelton, sound artist Jo Burzynska (Stanier Black-Five) grabbed a recording device as she ran from her home, leaving it running on her doorstep capturing the aftershocks that ricocheted though her house and the disaster unfolding on the street outside. This unique recording of …
Avast!
Avast! was created from field recordings made between 2009 and 2012 in Lyttelton, a volcanic harbour on the South Island of New Zealand. Sounds were captured at sites around the natural ampthitheatre of this extinct caldera: from abandoned wartime bunkers on the top of the crater rim to the port and its cacophony of cargo ships, tugs and workshops. The work is also haunted by the resonance of buildings such as the Timeball Station, which were destroyed when the town was at the epicentre of a maj…
Soul music
Soul Music consists of six pieces built from monotonous percussion and bent analogue synthesizers. Pulse is central to these works. Taking inspiration from acid house, primitive trance music and 1960s downtown NYC minimalism, Soul Music is music from the skull of Joachim Nordwall. This is his soul music, and its path is circular, rhythmical and intense. Joachim Nordwall runs the iDEAL Recordings label. He is a founder member of The Skull Defekts and also plays with Alvars Orkester and Oceans of …
Frequencies
Nicolas Bernier’s Frequencies (Synthetic Variations) is his first piece made entirely of synthetic sounds. Having evolved within the musique concrète and field recording traditions, Bernier wanted to break with habit — the result being 15 short movements of warped and crackling textures, vividly articulated sine waves and rhythmic bursts of pattern. The piece is designed to be listened to at random (the sound sample above is such a sequence), offering a new duration and dynamics with every heari…
Knot Invariants
Rotated and submerged. Drawn tight below the surface. Remnants of hair, string and wood.Tied across and back. Knot Invariants is Helena Gough’s third album. It was created using source material derived solely from recordings of cellists Anthea Caddy and Anton Lukoszevieze.
139
Six untitled pieces compiled from improvisations recorded 2–3 July 2011 at Utterpsalm studio. The sound sample is an unused excerpt from the second recording session which took place on 14–15 September 2011 at Mark Durgan’s studio in Bristol. Edited by Mark Durgan.
Bis als letzter der Zeugen das Ged�chtnis verstummt.
Sebastian Elikowski-Winkler studied composition with Friedrich Goldmann in Berlin, Marek Kopelent in Prague and Vladimir Tarnopolski in Moscow, and musicology, art history and architecture in Berlin. He is the recipient of several composition scholarships from institutions in Moscow, Paris and Venice. Berlin-based Ensemble Adapter interprets primarily new compositions across a wide range of contemporary music in a progressive, authentic and powerful style. Shelley Parker is a London-based artis…
Planes
Recorded on 11 May 1974 without interrupting the course of the music. Features two long brooding electronic pieces that reminds early Kluster, with doning voices add some uniqueness on first track, while the 2nd has some nice touch guitar amongst the usual dark electronic moods. Composed by Gregor Cürten & Anselm Rogmans.Initially released in 1974 as a private press LP, this is the first official reissue of Planes, produced in close collaboration with Gregor Cürten. Remastered from the original …
Postepeno
poSTepeno is inspired by a multi-part collage created circa 1890 by an anonymous schizophrenic patient (known only as Frau ST) at the Viennese Oberdöbling asylum. The compositions (for piano and sine tones) morph musicalthemes through continual microtonal modifications. Sine tones are unstable, but nevertheless they consistently keep their individual frequency direction (up or down). In the chordal sense, the distance between the tones is subject to alteration. In this way the harmonic indicatio…
Point Break
In 2010 electronic musician Esther Venrooy and drummer Lander Gyselinck were invited to collaborate with two Chinese musicians during the Shanghai World Expo. This event inspired Venrooy and Gyselinck to start their own collaboration which resulted in the creation of Point Break. Fascinated by speech patterns, film dialogues and cut-up techniques they explore the interaction between acoustic drums, electronics and digital processing.
Stasis
Zbeen is an electro-acoustic project by Gianluca Favaron and Ennio Mazzon. Zbeen’s improvisational approach is developed from the human-machine paradigm which is represented by the interaction with digital instruments specifically designed and developed for this project. K-Frame, Zbeen's debut EP, was released by Ripples in January 2012. Unlike K-Frame, which was developed as a sonic counter-part to the linear algebra concept of an ordered set of ‘k’ linearly-independent vectors, Stasis elabo…