Monthly Archives: November 2008

“The Sinking of the Titanic” in Mojo’s Top 50 of 2008

The Sinking of the Titanic by Gavin Bryars | Philip Jeck | Alter Ego [Touch Tone 34] has made Mojo’s Top 50 albums of 2008 list.

Mojo write: “Bryars’ 1969 modern classic refurbished by UK turntable artist Philip Jeck and Italian ensemble Alter Ego. They lent eerie atmosphere to Bryars’ ethereal orchestrations. based on the hymn Autumn, as rendered by the ship’s string ensemble as the liner sank.”
The Sinking of the Titanic, recorded at the 49th International Festival of Contemporary Music at The Venice Biennale on 1st October 2005 at the Teatro Maliban, is available in the TouchShop.

Tokafi interviews Christian Fennesz

Tokafi’s Tobias Fischer has interviewed Christian Fennesz about his new album, “Black Sea”.

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Touch Takes a Breather…

Touch and Elgaland-Vargaland are working at Les Borealis Festival in Caen from Monday 24th November until Thursday 27th November inclusive.

[During this period you can still place orders at the TouchShop but please note your order will not be processed until Friday 28th November.]

Touch Live at The Roundhouse | 16th May 2009

Touch presents, as part of The Short Circuit Festival:

Philip Jeck and the Gavin Bryars Ensemble – The Sinking of the Titanic
Biosphere
Hildur Gudnadóttir & BJNilsen

The Roundhouse
Chalk Farm Road
London NW1 8EH

TO:76 – Fennesz “Black Sea” [CD]

CD – 8 tracks – 52mins
[also available on vinyl LP and as a CD/LP bundle.]

Track list:

1. Black Sea
2. The Colour of Three
3. Perfume for Winter
4. Grey Scale
5. Glide
6. Glass Ceiling
7. Vacuum
8. Saffron Revolution

Christian Fennesz used acoustic and electric guitars, synths, electronics, lloopp and computers

All tracks composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Christian Fennesz at Amann Studios, Vienna and C-street, Paris except “The Colour of Three” by Christian Fennesz & Anthony Pateras and “Glide” which was composed and performed by Rosy Parlane & Christian Fennesz (recorded live in Paris and then edited and mixed at Amman Studios).
Black Sea is Fennesz’s 4th solo album for touch and his first since Venice in 2004.

“Black Sea is the much-anticipated new album from Christian Fennesz, his first since “Venice” [Touch # TO:53, 2004], about which US magazine Stylus wrote:

“Fennesz does with sound what Stan Brakhage did with film, altering its very fabric and texture, employing disorder and error as forms of communication and expression. He forces you to learn a different method of perception and interpretation, to look beneath the chaos that seems to govern the movements of life and find the patterns beneath.” [Nick Southall]

Fennesz’s career has come a long way since “Instrument”, his debut for Mego in 1995, and his first solo album “Hotel Paral.lel which followed in 1998. “Endless Summer” [Mego, 2001] brought him to a much wider audience and “Venice” underlined his mastery of melody and dissonance. His songs usually embody the skilful application and manipulation of dense sonic textures with a genuine feel for the live, and real-time.

Black Sea features guitars that rarely sound like guitars; the instrument is transformed into an orchestra. Fennesz lists the elements used to make the compositions: “Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, electronics, computers and live-improvising software lloopp.”
On ‘Glide’, Fennesz duets with Rosy Parlane (NZ) [www.rosyparlane.com], whose work is also released on Touch. Fennesz also teams up with eMego artist Anthony Pateras’s (AUS) [http://www.anthonypateras.com], whose prepared piano features on “The Colour of Three”. Fennesz pushes his work into a more classical domain, preferring the slow reveal to Venice’s and Endless Summer’s more song-based structures.

Jon Wozencroft’s artwork makes visible this carefully hidden world resting beneath the surface of “the first impression”. A series of shots, taken in quick succession as the tide recedes, reveals a world of specific activity only visible at a particular time and place, histories appearing and disappearing.

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TO:76LP – Fennesz “Black Sea” [vinyl LP]

LP – 6 tracks – 40:28

[also available on CD and as a CD/LP bundle.]

Track Listing:

Side One:
1. Black Sea
2. Perfume for Winter
3. Grey Scale

Side Two:
4. Glide
5. Glass Ceiling
6. Saffron Revolution

Christian Fennesz used acoustic and electric guitars, synths, electronics, lloopp and computers

All tracks composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Christian Fennesz at Amann Studios, Vienna and C-street, Paris except “The Colour of Three” by Christian Fennesz & Anthony Pateras and “Glide” which was composed and performed by Rosy Parlane & Christian Fennesz (recorded live in Paris and then edited and mixed at Amman Studios).
Black Sea is Fennesz’s 4th solo album for touch and his first since Venice in 2004.

“Black Sea is the much-anticipated new album from Christian Fennesz, his first since “Venice” [Touch # TO:53, 2004], about which US magazine Stylus wrote:

“Fennesz does with sound what Stan Brakhage did with film, altering its very fabric and texture, employing disorder and error as forms of communication and expression. He forces you to learn a different method of perception and interpretation, to look beneath the chaos that seems to govern the movements of life and find the patterns beneath.” [Nick Southall]

Fennesz’s career has come a long way since “Instrument”, his debut for Mego in 1995, and his first solo album “Hotel Paral.lel which followed in 1998. “Endless Summer” [Mego, 2001] brought him to a much wider audience and “Venice” underlined his mastery of melody and dissonance. His songs usually embody the skilful application and manipulation of dense sonic textures with a genuine feel for the live, and real-time.

Black Sea features guitars that rarely sound like guitars; the instrument is transformed into an orchestra. Fennesz lists the elements used to make the compositions: “Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, electronics, computers and live-improvising software lloopp.”
On ‘Glide’, Fennesz duets with Rosy Parlane (NZ) [www.rosyparlane.com], whose work is also released on Touch. Fennesz also teams up with eMego artist Anthony Pateras’s (AUS) [http://www.anthonypateras.com], whose prepared piano features on “The Colour of Three”. Fennesz pushes his work into a more classical domain, preferring the slow reveal to Venice’s and Endless Summer’s more song-based structures.

Jon Wozencroft’s artwork makes visible this carefully hidden world resting beneath the surface of “the first impression”. A series of shots, taken in quick succession as the tide recedes, reveals a world of specific activity only visible at a particular time and place, histories appearing and disappearing.

Continue reading

BBC TV – The Fallen – 15th November 2008

BBC 2 9pm 15th November 2008

The Fallen is BBC Two’s most ambitious single documentary ever… contains music by Oren Ambarchi, Biosphere, Fennesz, Ryoji Ikeda, Jacob Kirkegaard, BJNilsen, Rosy Parlane and others

This autumn BBC Two remembers every single serviceman and woman who has died while serving with the British Armed Forces in the current conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan, in an epic three-hour documentary.

The Fallen, from acclaimed filmmaker Morgan Matthews, spans the last seven years of conflict and will chronicle all those who have died, focusing in detail on the stories of a significant number of these.

With intimate testimonies from families and loved ones, combined with compelling archive, the film acknowledges these individuals’ sacrifices and the effects of grief on those who loved them.

Says Roly Keating, Controller BBC Two: “The Fallen remembers all of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for their country in the current Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts and we hope will go some way towards creating a televisual memorial.

“It’s a hugely moving and dignified account of what it means to lose someone you love to conflict and wholly worthy of the three hours of primetime television we will be dedicating to it.

“The Fallen reflects the scale and ambition of factual programmes on the channel this season: from a landmark series exploring the hidden world of the planet’s oceans to the painstaking piecing together of what really happened behind closed doors in WWII; from Simon Schama’s historical journey on the American election trail to Bruce Parry’s treacherous and fascinating journey down the Amazon; from Griff Rhys Jones’s startlingly honest look at anger to John Prescott’s personal exploration of Britain’s class system.
The Radio Times (Pick of the Day) writes:

“Harrowing doesn’t begin to describe Morgan Matthews’s extraordinary film. It sets itself a huge task: to commemorate every British serviceman who has died in the Afghanistan and Irag conflicts. It achieves this mostly by talking to surviving family members… The film is mostly about remembering, and the way grief can shred lives and families…”

TS08 – People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz “Withers in the Waking”

7″ vinyl only
Limited edition
Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft
Cut by Jason at Transition

Track list:

Side A: In the Waking 5:55 [Locked groove]
Side B: Withers in the Whist 4:27

The 8th in the series of Touch Sevens, and the first to introduce melodic narrative. Both songs are results of the WFMU podcast series “Codpaste”, in which Vicki & Ergo publicly composed a series of collage compositions, deconstructing their respective practices, and a live soundtrack to Christian Marclay’s “ScreenPlay”. The series and soundtrack resulted in the online only album “Rhapsody in Glue”, from which these two songs are alternative versions.

“Withers in the Whist” takes one of Vicki & Ergo’s current staple obsessions: the melody line of Prokofiev’s ‘Troika’ from the Lieutenant Kije soundtrack (originally used in V & E’s work during a particularly snowy sequence of the Marclay film). This treatment dispenses with sampling entirely, instead using instruments to create variations on Prokofiev’s deceptively simple melody-line, tied together with impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness lyrics. It is playing with Prokofiev like a bad child who loves it’s toys.

“In The Waking” began with Ergo replaying with multitracked guitars the main melodic motifs Vicki collaged in the composition “Carmic Waltz”, with Vicki then ornamenting the guitars with splashes of colour like a real painter of sound, all blended into a pot of carnival steam with Ergo’s wordplay. It is a fantasy for the dream the fairground has when the world is sleeping, but only takes place five minutes before the carousel wakes up

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