Monthly Archives: March 2017

Touch Radio 128 | Geneva Skeen & Sarah Rara

23.03.17 – Geneva Skeen & Sarah Rara – Live in Los Angeles – 37:03 – 320 kbps

Live at Human Resources, Los Angeles, February 18, 2017

1. Geneva Skeen – Pop Song 16:48
2. Sarah Rara – Separating the Air 20:12 – Projected Text

For the closing of Yann Novak’s exhibition Repose, Novak invited Geneva Skeen and Sarah Rara to perform inside/alongside his installation. Each artist’s performance was accompanied by the sound of Novak’s installation demonstrated here via a room-recording from the event.

Skeen’s Pop Song is a temporal response to Novak’s drone work, and a cultural response to our times. In harmonizing with Novak’s loop – divided into 3-4 minute segments (the average acceptable length of a pop song) – Skeen’s Pop Song acknowledges that populist times call for populist measures, but refuses populist comfort, acceptance, and pale standards of beauty as means of resistance.

Rara’s Separating the Air: games of listening and learning between voice and computer at the boundary between music and speech. Each part is a device to punctuate silence, divide time, move the air.

Photo: Christopher Wormald

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soundcloud.com/geneeeeves
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Guerrilla 40

March 15th 2017 – Guerrilla 40

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Touch is 35 Today

Today, 11th March, is the official 35th anniversary of the founding of Touch in 1982…

First contact with New Order after their concert at the Newcastle Mayfair on 11th March 1982…

You can follow our progress year by year here…

…found in a Chicago warehouse…

Getxo
CD – 6 tracks – 48:12
[Released in 2001 on Sigma Editions]

Now available in the TouchShop

Track Listing;

1. Versa
2. Pinxit
3. A.C.U.
4. #6
5. Getxo
6. Tanka

With this new work, entitled Getxo, the Parlane sensibility is recognizable: an interest in sublimity, minor keys and mesmerizing repetition. Track one, for example with its simple repeated four note phrase, is like melancholy carnival music devoid of sentimentality. The repetition in this track mimics mechanical reproduction in that the quality degenerates over the course of the track, ending in an enveloping, ever stronger fuzz.

In comparison to #1-4, Getxo is lighter, looser, takes itself less seriously. However, at the same time its tracks are more varied, intricate, difficult and internally more complex, moving between density and thinness. The relationship between the six tracks is also more complex, with the tracks existing as pairs (1&6, 2&5, 3&4) in terms of structure, source material and method.

Since making #1-4 Parlane has shifted from relatively lo-fi techniques of construction to the digital realm of computer music and this shift in technology is reflected in the intricacy of the tracks and the quality of the sounds. #1-4’s dark and urgent rumblings have been superceded by crispness and clarity.

Getxo is part of the evolved and evolving Parlane aesthetic, very knowledgeable, drawing on a wide range of influences, and innately musical, seductive and affecting, full of quiet and not so quiet catches and hooks, so easy that the difficulty is camoflagued. [Anna Sanderson/Adrian Leverkühn, 2002]

Reviews:

Boomkat (UK):

“The tenth sigma release comes four years after sigma, 001: Parlane’s #1-4. Getxo, shows the recognizable Parlane sensibility; an interest in sublimity, minor keys and mesmerizing repetition. versa, with its simple repeated four note phrase, degenerates over the course of the track, ending in an enveloping, ever stronger fuzz. elements of wolfgang voigt’s majestic Gas project are strong, as is the influence felt from recent work with the mighty fennesz. Getxo is lighter, looser, takes itself less seriously. Since making #1-4 Parlane has shifted from relatively lo-fi techniques of construction to the digital realm of computer music and this shift in technology is reflected in the intricacy and quality of the sounds. #1-4’s dark and urgent rumblings have been superceded by crispness and clarity. the bell-like tones sustain in a beautiful way in pinxit and are then completely dissembled for the title track. The climate at the moment is perfect for the evolved and evolving Parlane aesthetic. seductive and affecting, full of quiet and not quiet catches and hooks, so easy that the difficulty is camouflaged. Excellent release.”

incursion.org (USA):

“On Getxo, Parlane… [creates] warm sonics rich with dense walls of static and the cadence of hypnotic waves, that move from the minimal to the complex. Rhythmic elements are always present but never taking on conventional structures… This is some beautiful, warm and complex music with a phenomenal attention to detail and an intoxicating effect… It’s an excellent release and highly recommended.” [Richard di Santo]

 

All Music Guide (USA):

Released 3 years after #104, Getxo updates Rosy Parlane’s sound, so to speak. In the intervening years, the once drummer and now sound artist moved far away from his noise rock beginnings, and ever closer to the European school of experimental electronica. The six pieces included here, all highly textural and ambient, illustrates how much the genre leaps across borders and continents – New Zealand and Austria have never been so close. Parlane pays close attention to details. When the structure of a piece remains too obvious (the crescendo in “Versa,” for example, ending with the only Merzbow-esque ripples of noise heard on this disc), he raises the stakes with mesmerizing cycles of sounds. The only subpar track is “Pinxit.” Based on a keyboard chord sequence, it quickly becomes repetitive and overlong. On the other hand, the closing “Tanka” is a beautiful piece. At its core, the loop of an organ chord seems to run through a Leslie speaker. The overtones are magnificently detailed and augmented by light glitch electronics to create a great ambient piece. References to Fennesz and Farmers’ Manual are in order, but for the most part Getxo has a more human feel than their music. It’s hard to explain why (maybe the music doesn’t fully rely on computers, maybe the surgical gestures are not so clinical), but a similar impression comes from the works of Australian guitarist Oren Ambarchi. [François Couture]

Touch Recipe Book

Rosy Parlane has contributed to Touch’s online recipe book:

Non-Kneaded Bread

1 loaf

1 + 1/2 tsp dry yeast
150 mls warm water
1 tblsp honey

Combine and set aside in warm place

1 cup spelt (or wheat) flour
2 cups wholemeal spelt flour
1/4 cup wheat germ or buckwheat flour
1/3 cup bran
1/4 cup kibbled spelt (or whole oats or whole wheat)
2 tsp salt
1/2 cup ground flax seeds
1/2 cup sunflower (or pumpkin) seeds

Combine dry ingredients

Add to water mixture 300mls warm water and 1 tblspn cider vinegar. Pour into dry ingredients and mix until just combined.

Put into greased and floured loaf tin.

Sprinkle with sesame seeds, and leave to rise for one hour

Bake at 180 degrees for 45-50 mins until hollow-sounding when tapped on the top.

Slice and eat with lots of butter.

Upcoming events

Joachim Nordwall play Bocian Records event in Warsaw, Poland

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JN DJ set at Höga Nord

March 4th 2017. Höga Nord, Gothenburg, Sweden.

JN play 7″s to celebrate one year of Höga Nord Café in Gothenburg.

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JN solo in Poland

April 8th 2017 at Centrum Sztuki Współczesne

JN will play a solo concert at Centrum Sztuki Współczesne as part of a Bocian Records evening there. Other acts performing are Dror Feiler, Norberg Möslang and Anton Lukoszevieze.

csw.art.pl

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Joachim Nordwall attacks Rottweiler.

April 29th 2017. Rottweiler Club, Gothenburg, Sweden.

JN play a solo concert at underground techno club Rottweiler back to back with live sets by Dungeon Acid, Russell Haswell and others.

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Saturn And The Sun land at Norbergfestival 2017

July 27-29 2017. Norbergfestival, Sweden.

JN in duo w Henrik Rylander perform a drone set in Mimlerlaven as part of an iDEAL program also featuring Christine Ödlund and Ectoplasm Girls.

norbergfestival.com

Robert Crouch and Yann Novak Live in Los Angeles | Saturday 4th March 2017

March 4, 2017, 7-9pm
Performances begins at 7:30pm

The Fellows of Contemporary Art
970 N. Broadway, Suite 208
Los Angeles, CA 90012
FREE

The Future Eve, curated by VOLUME member Jared Baxter, explores the relationship between technology and the body and features video, sculpture, drawing, installation and sound by 5 California-based artists:

Robert Crouch – forthcoming album ‘Sublunar’ will be featured
Nicole Phungrasamee Fein
Karen Lofgren
Yann Novak
Dean Smith

The Future Eve is the title of a science fiction novel from 1886 by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. Credited with popularizing the term “android,” its protagonist is a fictionalized Thomas Alva Edison, hailed in a short foreword as the discoverer of “among others, the Telephone, the Phonograph, the Microphone, and those admirable electric light bulbs which have now spread across the earth’s surface.”

The exhibition engages this dual legacy of Villiers’ novel, at once ahead of its time and deeply regressive. On the one hand, The Future Eve’s idealistic, if ideologically tainted, portrayal of the integration of man and machine is contrasted to the present climate, in which authors like economist Robert Gordon have argued that we have entered an era of permanently reduced technological advancement compared to the hundred-year period beginning in 1870. On the other, the sexism latent in the android narrative, highlighted by the example of Villiers’ Edison, is examined in terms of what it can reveal about broader cultural narratives surrounding technology and its relationship to nature, in particular through the latter’s omnipresent synecdoche, the body.

Guerrilla 39

osciloscope

March 1st 2017 – Guerrilla 39

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