Touch Newsletter #215

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #215. Releasing this week is “Shadow Position”, a 4-track vinyl album and download from Strafe F.R. The duo are from Düsseldorf, Germany and have been releasing albums through Touch on and off since 1986… Their previous release, “The Bird was Stolen”, was released by us on CD in 2018 and could be filed under Experimental, Sound Collage, Abstract, Sound Art.

Published on 16.11.19, a new episode of TouchRadio by Aino Tytti, titled “Slicing the Troposphere”, is now broadcasting – a composition of field recordings taken at various wind turbine farms over the last year.

Strafe F.R.
“Shadow Position”
Tone 68

Vinyl LP + digital. Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft.

Tracklist:
A1: Nachtmaschine
A2: Every Day XXL
B1: Shadow Position
B2: Isabella B.

There are 4 tracks, 4 different windows to look out from our studio in Düsseldorf into the street and their different layers of sound.

4 horizons, 4 spy holes in the door, 4 eyes and 4 shopping windows. 4 landscapes.

Witness the electric city and the power house. Strafe F.R. is sitting inside the fuse box. The electric chirp of the night. The socket in which we sleep. The dog comes, in order to devour Strafe F.R. First he eats the rebellion and next he bites the Strafe.

The house and the body, both are earthed and the veins are vibrating. Between the 3rd and the 4th hour of the morning we enter the realm of insomnia. You fly by not using an airplane.

An old woman is cleaning the door bells with her own spittle. The old man is distilling schnaps in his back garden. The swimmers are gliding through the day on top of a greasy film. The reception is a flare into seconds until it fades away into noise again. The kettle drum gives the rhythm of breathing, the bass determines the time. You stumble forward, forward into the next day.

From our window we see a public building where there exists a toilet, its porcelain shows the most beautiful craquele fissures. There is an historic poster of Lenin. It is fixed on a garden fence in the landscape and the stinging nettles grow over it softly swinging in the wind.

There are shadows but there is also brightness, this means there are complementary colours and contrasts, movements and reflection until there is stillness. We see the back-breeding of cattle in the Neanderthal age and at the same time we look into the large heating room of an art museum, where we observe tubes and their upstream pressure regulators.

All sounds and music instruments recorded by Strafe F.R. – Bernd Kastner, Siegfried M. Syniuga. “Shadow Position” was mixed by Rasmus Zschoch. “Nachtmaschine”, “Every Day XXL” and “Isabella B.” were mixed by Strafe F.R. at Strafe studio in 2019 / Düsseldorf. Thanks to Detlef Klepsch for additional technical support. Female vocal by Anna Nettra.

Buy Strafe F.R. “Shadow Position” through our distributor, Kudos
Videos for all four tracks have been uploaded to Touch’s YouTube channel
Find their other releases on the new Strafe F.R. Bandcamp page

Aino Tytti
“Slicing the Troposphere”
TouchRadio 149

Published on 16.11.19, a new episode of TouchRadio is now broadcasting.

This is a composition of field recordings taken at various wind turbine farms over the last year. They are recordings taken as part of a sound project I’m working on which looks at infrastructure; a sonic exploration into the unseen mechanics which underpin our daily lives: Power, transport, sewer systems, communications and supply logistics.

The recordings presented here are in a fairly raw state and will be developed and augmented within the wider body of work. However, I think they hold different value in their ‘solo’ and raw form – and may be of particular interest to listeners of TouchRadio.

The modern wind turbine is an awe inspiring machine – gracefully benign from two miles away, yet from within their shadow they assault an image of improbable violence on the senses. Designed to perform modern day alchemy through a screamed slicing of the troposphere, they detune the very skies which hang overhead and broadcast infrasonic resonances into the ground which i was able to record through a geophone from over half a mile away. Within the setting of “nature”, these machines are the very definition of unnatural; up close, their rotating violations of nature’s laws feel viscerally threatening.

But then these locations too are, by necessity, raw and unforgiving environments. Bleak moorland at raised altitude or wide unsheltered flatlands; horizon to horizon, exposed, desolate, dystopian. The wind howls across these plains, transforming the totally inert into the wildly volatile at an instant; bracken, heather, gorse, singing fence wires dissecting arbitrary shingle boundaries for mile upon mile.

The source material was recorded in multichannel spatial format using various ambisonic and stereo air mics, geophone and contact microphones matrixed to 5 channel surround. The composition was mixed in Ambisonic multichannel and is presented in three formats for listening:

1. Stereo mix for speakers
2. Binaural surround mix for headphones
3. Ambisonic B-format for decoding to a multi-speaker array

Equipment:
Sonosax SX R4+
Ambeo / DPA 4060 / MK-416 / Telinga Mk2
JRF contact mics matrixed to 5ch / JRF prototype geophone

Thanks to Jez Riley French for the geophone loan, Rudi at Helix Branch and Emily Mary Barnett for her photography/patience.

Subscribe to the TouchPod podcast of TouchRadio at Apple Podcasts
Stream “Slicing the Troposphere” on touchradio.org.uk

Joséphine Michel, Mika Vainio
“The Heat Equation”
CODEX 2

100pp book + CD
Buy “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

Book contents: 69 photos, a portrait of Mika Vainio by Joséphine Michel and an introductory essay by Jeremy Millar. Art direction: Jon Wozencroft.

CD features a recording of Mika Vainio live at Contra Pop, Ramsgate, 16 August 2016. Mastered by Russell Haswell.

“The Heat Equation” is a 100pp book + CD showcasing a new photographic work by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio’s final performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for his proposed 2017 solo CD for Touch.

Following their previous collaboration on “Halfway to White” (Touch # FOLIO 001, 2015), Michel and Vainio had been planning a second production, and in March 2017, Michel visited Vainio in Oslo to show him the first examples of the photographs she had been taking for this purpose. Included in the book, as a postcard insert, is Michel’s tender portrait of Mika Vainio taken at this meeting.

Shortly before Mika’s untimely death in April 2017, the project took an unexpected turn. The recordings for the new album for Touch were nearing completion but his sequencer broke down and the project needed to be restarted. The collaboration turned into a complementary exploration between Michel’s both quasi-scientific and lyrical photographs, a perception of a world on the edge of discovery – whether it be born of physics, medicine or space travel – and the legacy of Vainio’s musical vision, with its vast imaginary of matter, and its tension between heat and icy precision.

The photographs and the music interact through a variety of climates, where the microcosm and the macrocosm, the animate and the inanimate, the telluric and the cosmic coexist – and sometimes fuse.

In August 2016 Vainio performed a blinding set at the Contra Pop festival in Ramsgate, which was recorded off the desk for the purposes of the festival’s annual compilation CD. With Contra Pop on hiatus in 2017, it wasn’t until June 2018 that the festival organisers contacted Touch to introduce the idea of a compilation. At which point, as if miraculously, Vainio’s counterpoint to Michel’s work rematerialised in the form of this live festival recording. Mastered by Russell Haswell, Mika Vainio’s new music is the equal of anything he released in his lifetime.

Bound in a linen cover with foil blocking, Michel’s photography is expertly printed on 200gsm Arctic Silk. The Heat Equation is released in an edition of 750 copies, accompanied by an introductory text by artist Jeremy Millar, “The Devouring Drop”, art directed by Jon Wozencroft and the latest development in Touch’s new series of “ear books”.

Buy “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

NB: we request that buyers outside Europe please buy their copies from forcedexposure.com (North America) or kudosrecords.co.uk (elsewhere).

Guerrilla Audio

Guerrilla Audio is a new series of audio raids by Simon Fisher Turner.

guer·ril·la
ɡəˈrilə/
noun
noun: guerilla
a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces.

Each audio edit will be posted for 14 days and then removed from the site, although the information about each guerrilla activity will be archived, but without the audio. There will be two postings per month with the first (also featuring Klara Lewis & Rainier Lericolais) on 1st August 2015, so please check in regularly to listen to the latest offering. We are well into the 3rd year and have just posted episode 104…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com

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