Touch Newsletter #242

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #242. Announcing two new digital releases. Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s “The Well-tempered City – Book 1” is now available on Bandcamp. The sound work has been conceived using transduction as the methodology to represent citizen-generated vibration contents at the architectural surfaces of contemporary cities. More info below…

Bill Thompson’s “Blackout” was composed using a system that draws upon a living archive of sounds culled from compositions, improvisations and field recordings from the past 20 years. This is the final work using this system before commencing its deconstruction through the removal of sounds as they are used in subsequent pieces. This 2-track digital release on Ash International is available to preorder now, releasing 24 July 2020.

Two new limited CD/digital editions on The Wormhole are available to preorder, shipping 10 July 2020. “Clear Your Screens” is a series of battle re-enactments from Manchester’s least celebrated post-punk group Biting Tongues – Ken Hollings, Graham Massey, Colin Seddon, Howard Walmsley and Eddie Sherwood. “ROMTYZ” by NYZ is “a bunch of stuff done with cheap old ROMplers and my MANIAC cellular automata sequencer,” according to NYZ’s David Burraston. Further details on both below…

We have repressed Chris Watson’s “El Tren Fantasma” (originally issued in 2011) and the CD is now available again from chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
“The Well-tempered City – Book 1”
Tone 76

1-track digital-only release, 19:01. Buy “The Well-tempered City – Book l” on Bandcamp. Design and photography by Jon Wozencroft.

1. The Well-tempered City – Book 1

All sounds recorded, composed and mixed by Budhaditya Chattopadhyay. Recorded on Sound Devices 702 using customised accelerometers.

The sound work has been conceived using transduction as the methodology to represent citizen-generated vibration contents at the architectural surfaces of contemporary cities. These surfaces serve as physical interfaces for citizens’ sonic interaction with their personified everyday urban structure and objects, such as walking, resting, touching, tapping or hitting on the structural surfaces of the city, including the streets or walls. The vibrations that are generated through such physical interactions, citizens’ participation and intervention are transduced into sounds audible to the human perception using customised accelerometers. These subtle recordings are later treated as sense data of the sonic experience in a computed and composed form. The project facilitate in-depth listening to the architectural and built spaces of today’s cities as living organisms or manmade urban nature, currently resonating with a sense of post-apocalyptic doom due to pandemics, climate catastrophe, global warming, mass migration, and racial differences. How do city-dwellers emotively intervene in and engage with the city in these contexts? In this work, the city acts as an instrument that produces its own hyper-real and digitally enhanced sounds where surfaces of the evolving buildings are used as strings tempered by human intervention in terms of embodied interaction, thereby citizens becoming part of the work in the mimetic process. The work holds the reflections of the citizen’s immediate emotional situations and affective context in today’s cities.

Media Artist and Scholar, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay graduated from India’s national film school, specialising in Sound, completed a Master of Arts degree in New Media and Sound Art at Aarhus University, Denmark, and received a Ph.D. in Artistic Research and Sound Studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Buy “The Well-tempered City – Book 1” on Bandcamp

Bill Thompson
“Blackout”
Ash 13.4D

2-track digital-only release, 52:59. Preorder “Blackout” on Bandcamp, releasing 24 July 2020. Design by Philip Marshall.

1. Within [listen to an extract]
2. Without [listen to an extract]

“Blackout” was composed using a system that draws upon a living archive of sounds culled from compositions, improvisations and field recordings from the past 20 years. This is the final work using this system before commencing its deconstruction through the removal of sounds as they are used in subsequent pieces.

“Blackout” represents the final stage then, before letting go, not only of the archive and the system that maintains it, but also of the self by way of the many personal associations related to the compositions, improvisations and field recordings contained within.

Bill Thompson is a sound artist and composer. Although originally trained as a guitarist, Thompson has worked with live electronics for the better part of 20 years. His work involves the combination of found objects, field recordings, repurposed live electronics, and digital media to create evolving structures for installation and live performance. Since 2016, however, he has returned to guitar performing with a Moog guitar combined with miscellaneous table top devices, found objects, flashing lights, and the occasional vibrator.

Preorder “Blackout” on Bandcamp

NYZ
“ROMTYZ”
WHO#18

CD in an edition of 250 copies plus digital. Written and produced by David Burraston. Recorded at Noyzelab, 2016-2018. Random artwork generated from seed 0xAF30F0843192FC4 by Matthew Petty. Preorder on Bandcamp, releasing 10 July 2020.

1. NYZ-1_vocM [MONO]
2. Kay4gmg::du-daardle-teeeeeeee [MONO]
3. Kay4gmg::PNOgrainz
4. Kay4gmg::du-daardle-dhaaaaaaaa-de
5. PTSx r60Subtree119c 31tORWLL GTRHPZCHD
6. PTSx r60Subtree119c 31tORWLL MDLTD
7. SRi M12 SCHISM17t
8. RLD SEMANTIC M12 PLK10
9. SRi M12 SCHISM17t DRN24
10. SRi M12 SCHISM17t DRN7
11. NYZ-1_PBdigitM view

“Those wonderful people at The Wormhole recently got in touch and invited me to send them a CD album. So I had a bit of a think and then rummaged around in the studio and laboratory where I found a bunch of stuff done with cheap old ROMplers and my MANIAC cellular automata sequencer. After sifting through a few sessions I selected a variety of tracks and put them together for this release. For process-inquisitive types, the generative composition techniques with cellular automata used various MIDI events including => note, velocity, mono / poly aftertouch, pitch bend, mod wheel, continuous controllers and various custom system exclusive encodings to change microtuning tables and various synth patch parameters. Sequences were generated and manipulated live at the sequencer interface and recorded direct to hard disc.” – David Burraston, New South Wales, 11 April 2020.

Preorder “ROMTYZ” on Bandcamp

Biting Tongues
“Clear Your Screens”
WHO#19

CD in an edition of 250 copies plus digital. Tapes remixed and produced by Graham Massey. Compiled by Ken Hollings. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung Mastering, June 2019. Preorder on Bandcamp, releasing 10 July 2020.

1. First Use All The Gs (Moon Landing)
2. Evening State (ICA)
3. Iyahbhoone (Plan K)
4. The Reflector (Shunt Vaults 2)
5. Denture Beach (Moon Landing)
6. Glorious Stranger (Moon Landing)
7. Heart Disease (Shunt Vaults 1)
8. Where The Birdlands (Moon Landing)
9. Unhook That Boy (Islington Mill)
10. Everywhere But Here (ICA)
11. Aair Care (Islington Mill)
12. When It Breaks On You (Islington Mill)

“Clear Your Screens” is a series of battle re-enactments from Manchester’s least celebrated post-punk group Biting Tongues. Their tritone tribalism, mixed with intense language flow and layers of tape concrète, was perhaps a bit too much for the early 1980s when they released records with New Hormones, Factory and Beggars Banquet.

Always an astonishing experience live, the classic early line-up returned to the stage near the start of the 21st century with the musical and performance experience accumulated over another twenty years working apart. Applying modern digital mixing techniques ten years later to these live recordings reveals the rare blood chemistry of a team of specialists who have only grown more passionate over time.

Surely a worthy part the 20th century musical canon even if they have handed in their homework late.

“Clear Your Screens” features Biting Tongues in performance at: ICA, London, 29 May 2003; Islington Mill, Salford, 23 February 2007; Shunt Vaults 1, London, 19 November 2008; Shunt Vaults 2, London, 20 November 2008; The Moon Landing, Salford, 19 July 2009; Plan K, Brussels, 12 December 2009.

Biting Tongues were: Ken Hollings: celebrated author, academic and broadcaster #exorcist #cut_up_oracle. Graham Massey: electronic music pioneer, 808 State, music producer and broadcaster #pre_and_post_guitar_landscapes #weird_woodwind #shit_trumpet. Colin Seddon: band leader and music educator #biblical_bass lines #lord_of_the_trichord. Howard Walmsley: film director/producer #muscular_beef_sax #transistor_organ_fist. Eddie Sherwood: music educator and band leader #reverse-wired-bespoke_voodoo_drumming

Preorder “Clear Your Screens” on Bandcamp

Chris Watson
“El Tren Fantasma”
TO:42

CD and Digital. Artwork: Jon Wozencroft. Mastered by Denis Blackham. Buy “El Tren Fantasma” on Bandcamp.

1: La Anunciante
2: Los Mochis
3: Sierra Tarahumara
4: El Divisadero
5: Crucero La Joya
6: Chihuahua
7: Aguascalientes
8: Mexico D.F.
9: El Tajin; El dia y La noche
10: Veracruz

”Take the ghost train from Los Mochis to Veracruz and travel cross country, coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic. Ride the rhythm of the rails on board the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México (FNM) and the music of a journey that has now passed into history.”

“El Tren Fantasma”, (The Ghost Train), is Chris Watson’s fourth solo album for Touch, and his first since “Weather Report” in 2003, which was named as one of the albums you should hear before you die in The Guardian. A Radio programme was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday 30 Oct, 2010, produced by Sarah Blunt, and described as “a thrilling acoustic journey across the heart of Mexico from Pacific to Atlantic coast using archive recordings to recreate a rail passenger service which no longer exists.” It’s now more than a decade since FNM operated its last continuous passenger service across country. Chris Watson spent a month on board the train with some of the last passengers to travel this route. As sound recordist he was part of the film crew working on a programme in the BBC TV series Great Railways Journeys. Now, in this album, the journey of the “ghost train” is recreated, evoking memories of a recent past, capturing the atmosphere, rhythms and sounds of human life, wildlife and the journey itself along the tracks of one of Mexico’s greatest engineering projects.

Buy “El Tren Fantasma” on Bandcamp

Simon Scott
“Migrations”
Tone 70

Vinyl in an edition of 300 copies plus digital – with two digital bonus tracks when purchasing from our Bandcamp. Vinyl mastered at SPS Mastering. Cut by Jason @ Transition. Digital mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio (NY). Photography and design by Jon Wozencroft. Buy from our distributor, Kudos.

A. Red Square 14’ 14”

Field recordings captured during a day under Moscow’s Red Square in the underground metro in 2015. It has a narrative of motion as my microphones move with me through a vast sounding environment. The space reveals the aural diversity of the people moving beneath the Russian city of Moscow, the complex acoustics, and complex rhythms mixed together in a subterranean space. These communitive sonic events transformed my perception of space and time as reverberant boundaries led my ear into unknown acoustic destinations.

AA. Murmurations 18’ 53”

Recorded in March 2018 at RSPB Strumpshaw Fen in, Norfolk, UK using DPA 4061 microphones. I was showing Australian sound artist Lawrence English around the Fens of East Anglia, when he requested we head to Buckenham to find a flock of crows roosting. I recorded the spectacular murmurations of thousands of crows, rooks and jackdaws, as the spring sun slowly set at dusk, and deer ran across the marshes. The field recordings are accompanied by a gradually shifting modular synth tone, that musically represents the slow change colours, until the light fell off the horizon.

Download only: The Borderlands 6’ 30” and Fen(ce) 7’ 06”

Both compositions were recorded in Holme Fen nature reserve, Cambridgeshire, with two JrF contact microphones on 22nd to 25thMay 2020. The long lines of wires and wooden posts stretched across the sunken landscape of the Fens follow the man-made drainage canals and rivers for hundreds of miles. Bowed, plucked and struck by natural phenomena (strong winds caused by climate change) and indigenous flora, reveals dynamic sonic intra-events and hidden acoustic ecologies.

Buy “Migrations” from our distributor, Kudos

“Touch: Isolation”
V33:40

“Touch: Isolation” – 28 new and exclusive tracks recorded by Touch artists: Jana Winderen, Chris Watson, Bana Haffar, Mark Van Hoen, Richard Chartier, Zachary Paul, fennesz sakamoto, farmersmanual, ELEH, Anthony Moore, Daniel Menche, Geneva Skeen, Simon Scott, Oren Ambarchi, UnicaZürn, Bethan Kellough, Strafe F.R., Yann Novak, Howlround, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Philip Jeck, Rosy Parlane, OZMOTIC, Claire M Singer, Heitor Alvelos, Sohrab, Fennesz and Charlie Campagna. Photography by Jon Wozencroft, Hampstead Heath, March to May 2020.

The cancellation of gigs and festivals has already severely impacted our artists creatively and financially. In addition it has denied you, our audience, the opportunity to see them play and support them. The notion of ‘independent music’ might, in effect, be pushed deeper into the self-isolation mode it is already struggling to break free from. We don’t need studios to the same extent, but we do need a stage, a physical reference and if not, a mental space with which to question the drive to online existence.

We set out to respond to these challenging times in a creative and helpful way. From March to May we published new pieces twice weekly every Monday and Thursday – a new exclusive track from one of our artists, each with a bespoke photograph/cover image. All the income received is collected from sales and put in a kitty, the proceeds of which are then divided up between the contributing artists.

We trust you will see this as a whole work; it’s never too late to catch up. We view it as a narrative hoping that ecology and the future of this earth is going to win through against the dreadful political and mediated mendacity that can only worsen the situation.

“Touch: Isolation” is now available to purchase as a complete album, so there is still time to support independent music, its artists and its fragile support systems. Thank you to everyone who has taken the plunge.

Buy from touchisolation.bandcamp.com

Guerrilla Audio

Guerrilla Audio is a 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 third year and have just posted episode 118…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com