Touch Newsletter #243

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #243. New releases out today from Bill Thompson and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay are joined by pre-orders for the debut album from Norwegian composer and artist Kaj Aune. “Superstring” is a distortion shellacking – using the old and worn, corrosiveness and decay.

Two new limited CD/digital editions on The Wormhole are now shipping. “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…

Kaj Aune
“Superstring”
Ash 13.7D

5-track digital-only release, 36:12. Preorder “Superstring” on Bandcamp. Imagery by Wolfgang Ganter. Design by Philip Marshall.

1. Superstring
2. Dark Ground and Cold Night in a Black Hole
3. Hyperstew
4. Unstable Mirror Waves
5. Wave Zonocton Critical

Kaj Aune is a composer and artist from Norway. In addition to electronic music his works often includes different ways of incorporating visual and theatrical elements into performances that he himself likes to describe as the combination of a one man band with an opera of objects.

“I do not like to write so much about my own music, but I do have an aesthetic tendency towards the old and worn, corrosiveness and decay. I use alot of pedal effects and samplers, and modular synths – mostly analogue – and home-made string instruments and microphones. The focus is on distortion and muddling the sound by using the lower frequencies. I also love feedback and the overtone spectrum as a way of shaping and sculpting the sound.”

Preorder “Superstring” on Bandcamp

Bill Thompson
“Blackout”
Ash 13.4D

2-track digital-only release, 52:59. Buy “Blackout” on Bandcamp. 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.

Buy “Blackout” on Bandcamp

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

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. Buy on Bandcamp.

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

Buy “Clear Your Screens” 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. Buy on Bandcamp.

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.

Buy “ROMTYZ” on Bandcamp

“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 120…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com