Touch Newsletter #216

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #216. Laura Agnusdei is a classically trained electroacoustic composer and saxophone player from Bologna, Italy, who until recently was the saxophonist of Italian cult psych-rock band Julie’s Haircut. Her debut solo album, “Laurisilva”, is out now on The Wormhole. On 13 December, she will be playing the album with full live band at a special concert in Bologna.

15 Questions have interviewed both Laura Agnusdei and Tears|Ov, whose debut album “A Hopeless Place” was released earlier this month on The Wormhole.

Strafe F.R.’s new album “Shadow Position” has now been added to our Bandcamp along with their previous three releases for Touch – 2018’s “The Bird Was Stolen”, 1991’s “Lufthunger” and 1989’s “Vögel”.

Laura Agnusdei
“Laurisilva”
WHO#17

Vinyl LP in an edition of 300, and on digital services. Buy Laura Agnusdei “Laurisilva” on Bandcamp. Cut by Jason Goz at Transition Mastering Studios. Illustration: Laura Agnusdei.

Tracklist:
A1: Epiphyte Blues
A2: Lungs Dance
A3: Shaky Situation
B1: Laurisilva
B2: Jungle Shuffle
B3: Golden Kites

Laura Agnusdei is an electroacoustic composer and saxophone player from Bologna. Classically trained, she also holds a master’s degree in electronic music composition from The Institute of Sonology of The Hague. Until recently she was the saxophonist of Italian cult psych-rock band Julie’s Haircut.

“Laurisilva” is the scientific name for a kind of subtropical forest, charactarised by the presence of laurophyll, broadleaf tree species and high humidity. Laura Agnusdei borrowed this scientific term, which contains also the same Latin roots of her first name, to describe the personal musical ecosystem of her debut album. Its six tracks invite the listener to explore an imaginary landscape made from sounds growing and layering like biological organisms within a forest.

“Laurisilva” is a hybrid habitat, where the acoustic dimension of wind instruments – explored both in their melodic and timbral possibilities – meshes with polymorphic electronic sounds. The high biodiversity of the record takes inspirations from Jon Hassell, Charles Mingus, Björk and Terry Riley as well as the “Fifth World Music” of Italian label Artetetra. It also reflects Laura’s eclectic experience as a saxophone player and composer, ranging from psych to marching bands, from acousmatic composition to free improvisation.

While her saxophone is often the leading voice of the work, it occasionally shares the stage with the trumpet of contemporary music player Elisabeth Lusche, the swinging reeds of Italian jazz musician Giacomo Bertocchi and the ancient flutes of early music expert Thomas Reyna.

Buy Laura Agnusdei “Laurisilva” on Bandcamp

Tears|Ov
“A Hopeless Place”
WHO#14

Gatefold LP in an edition of 200, and on digital services. Buy Tears|Ov “A Hopeless Place” on Bandcamp. Mastered and cut by Jason Goz at Transition Mastering Studios. Artwork: Deborah Wale. Photography: Wolfgang Tillmans.

Tracklist:
A1: A Hopeless Place
A2: I Stand On The Cable
A3: All Else Is Bondage (For A.)
A4: Dancing Without
B1: Trapdoor Ant
B2: Overstimulated Arcade Rat
B3: Family Feudal
B4: A Hopeless Place

Founded in 2015, Tears|Ov are sound artist/self-taught musician Lori E Allen, classically trained cellist/mixed media artist Katie Spafford and illustrator/prison psychotherapist Deborah Wale. The trio first collaborated on Lori E Allen’s ‘Tears of the Material Vulture’ cassette on The Tapeworm, a re-imagination of a brief collaboration with Madame Chaos of cut-up cablecasts, 1995-1996, on Manhattan Neighborhood Network and Television in New York City. That release served to resurrect a hibernating creative practice between the three friends.

“A Hopeless Place” was initiated by a commission from Wolfgang Tillmans to perform at the Tate Modern’s South Tanks, part of a concert series curated by the artist in parallel to his 2017 retrospective at the gallery. “We were asked to play a gig at the Tate in March 2017” recalls Lori. “I’d already started on some of the tracks, but it gave us an opportunity to present them as a composition around their connected themes. Sometime after the gig we decided to capture the work and turn it in to an album.” [continue reading…]

Buy Tears|Ov “A Hopeless Place” on Bandcamp

Strafe F.R.
“Shadow Position”
Tone 68

Vinyl LP, and on digital services. Buy Strafe F.R. “Shadow Position” on Bandcamp. 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” on Bandcamp
Videos for all four tracks have been uploaded to Touch’s YouTube channel

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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