Touch Newsletter #244

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #244. We are delighted to announce preorders of Anna von Hausswolff’s new album, “All Thoughts Fly” on cassette via Ash International. The vinyl, CD and digital are available from Southern Lord. Each cassette comes with a Bandcamp download code inserted in the shrinkwrapped package. (We are not offering the digital separately.) Shipping starts 25 September. Anna’s “Källan (Betatype)” is also available on Ash International’s Bandcamp page.

Touch Radio returns, with its 150th edition courtesy of Jez Wells. “Traces of Sound and Light” is binaurally captured (and therefore ideally suited to headphone listening) audio from the version of the installation presented in St Margaret’s at the 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio.

The debut album from Norwegian composer and artist Kaj Aune, “Superstring”, is a distortion shellacking – using the old and worn, corrosiveness and decay. Available from 14 August on digital services.

Vaniy Publishing’s new release is “Balanceo y Vaiven” by Courtis Posset. Available on digital and cassette in an edition of 60 copies.

Anna von Hausswolff
“All Thoughts Fly”
Ash 13.3

Cassette in an edition of 250 copies, plus download code. Releases 25 September 2020. Preorder “All Thoughts Fly” on Bandcamp. Photography by Gianluca Grasselli. Design by Philip Marshall.

A1. Theatre of Nature
A2. Dolore di Orsini
A3. Sacro Bosco
A4. Persefone
B1. Entering
B2. All Thoughts Fly
B3. Outside the Gate (for Bruna)

Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s new album “All Thoughts Fly”, incoming on Southern Lord and Ash International on 25 September. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. “All Thoughts Fly” radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music.

Sacro Bosco is a garden, based in the centre of Italy, containing grotesque mythological sculptures and buildings overgrown with natural vegetation, situated in a wooded valley beneath the castle of Orsini. Created during the 16th Century, Sacro Bosco was commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, some say to try and cope with his grief following the death of his wife Guilia Farnese; others speculate the purpose was to create art.

About the album Anna explains “there’s a sadness and wilderness that inspired me to write this album, also a timelessness. I believe that this park has survived not only due to its beauty but also because of the iconography, it has been liberated from predictable ideas and ideals. The people who built this park truly set their minds and imagination free. “All Thoughts Fly” is a homage to this creation, and an effort to articulate the atmosphere and the feelings that this place evokes inside of me. It’s a very personal interpretation of a place that I lack words to describe. I’d like to believe Orsini built this monumental park out of grief for his dead wife, and in my Sacro Bosco I used this story as a core for my own inspiration: love as a foundation for creation.”

Anna summarises, “Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo is a creation carved out from one man’s head. A frozen thought lasting throughout time and touching people across generations. All thoughts fly, Ogni Pensiero Vola, is about this: the importance of sharing for surviving, creating space and evolving. Once you’ve shared your words they are not only yours anymore.”

“All Thoughts Fly” ultimately embodies the exploration of any and all possibilities, and the audience is invited to listen, liberate the mind and let it wander.

Preorder “All Thoughts Fly” on Bandcamp

Jez Wells
“Traces of Sound and Light”
Touch Radio 150

13:06 – 320 kbps – exclusive to TouchRadio and free to listen.

Buildings, and the spaces and atmospheres that they enclose, are primarily experienced through seeing them and hearing them. Visions of them are the trajectories and alterations of light that travel within them to the observer. Audition of them is via the patterns of reflected and diffracted sound that repeatedly pass the observer as their energy decays and spreads. Just as buildings have a visual signature (what they look like) so they have an aural one. Each is dynamic: changing how a room is lit will change how it looks, making different kinds of noise within it will reveal different aspects of its sound. However, exploration is bounded by the laws of physics and perception and the fixed nature of the buildings themselves. Useful techniques and modes of expression such as feature exaggeration, time manipulation, rapidly changing or impossible perspectives and micro/macro-scoption require augmentation of reality, but enable boundaries to be exceeded. It becomes possible to experience not just what a building is, but how it is in our perception; how, for example, the different elements of its geometry and fabric relate to each other and the individual contributions they make to the whole.

The fixed nature of buildings is one of their defining characteristics. They often stand immutable amongst the peoples, their cultures and technologies, that create them and use them. They are perhaps the person made things that change most slowly over time and reach furthest into our present from their past. The National Centre for Early Music is housed within the Medieval church of St Margaret in the Walmgate area of York. Traces of Sound and Light was site-specific fixed-media installation created by this author and the visual artist Annabeth Robinson. Based on data obtained from light detecting and ranging (LIDAR) and acoustic impulse response measurement (AIR) it used technological augmentation of the both the observer and the space to literally enable the audience to see and hear the space which they are within in new ways that would otherwise be impossible. A 3D animation derived from the point cloud obtained from the LIDAR process was delivered to head-mounted smartphones worn by the audience, and audio created solely from the AIR measurements and readings of text fragments inscribed within the space was diffused via multiple loudspeakers.

This is binaurally captured (and therefore ideally suited to headphone listening) audio from the version of the installation presented in St Margaret’s at the 2019 Audio Engineering Society International Conference on Immersive and Interactive Audio.

Listen to “Traces of Sound and Light” on TouchRadio
Subscribe to TouchRadio in the Apple Podcasts app

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

Courtis Posset
“Balanceo y Vaiven”
CARLY#08

Cassette in an edition of 60 copies, plus digital. Releases 22 August. Preorder “Balanceo y Vaiven” on Bandcamp.

A1. Five Hungry Mouths Breathing
A2. Space Mission Cancelled (For Religious Reasons)
B1. Re-written Narrative, Re-visited Methods

Courtis and Posset scrape the magnetic dust from a bunch of traded tapes (sent between Newcastle and Buenos Aires) to create a random and violent Beam Drop. With dub methods becoming the glue, occasional milky sunlight pokes through the clouds. Meaning begins to form into a language of tones, gestures and tingles. The intent is clear but results are wantonly indistinct.

Anla Courtis, well known for his time served in psychic troubadours Reynols, provides dark guitar, chains and bells that swing like coal-cutting machines; black with rust but inset with diamonds. Posset chants the ancient names into an array of Dictaphones and plays back the lost language with added tape pinch and FFW scree.

Preorder “Balanceo y Vaiven” 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 122…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com