From the Grooves of Vinyl: A Tribute to Philip Jeck

An evening of film and performance in celebration of the life and work of remarkable composer and artist, Philip Jeck.

www.thebluecoat.org.uk/whatson/philip-jeck-tribute

Sat 16 Nov, 7-11pm

As a tribute to Philip Jeck who died in 2022, the Bluecoat presents an evening of film and performance in celebration of the life and work of this remarkable composer and artist who wrought exquisite sounds from the worn grooves of old records. An internationally renowned pioneer of experimental ‘turntablism’, he brought old record players and vinyl together with electronic effects to create expansive sonic landscapes.

Throughout his career Philip worked with dance and theatre makers, visual artists and musicians and composers across the musical spectrum and toured internationally. Over three decades, his work was released and promoted by the experimental electronic music label, Touch.

Philip also had a long association with the Bluecoat and this special tribute includes screening of a film by Gina Czarnecki of him performing in the intimate surroundings of a friend’s kitchen. There will be the launch of a double CD tribute to Philip collated by Touch, and performances from experimental composers Chandra Shukla (US), Benjamin Duvall and Andrew Hunt (Liverpool) and poets Patricia Farrell and Robert Sheppard. The bar is open till 11pm, with DJ set from Bryan Biggs.

Click here for further information on Philip Jeck, and his releases.

Sat 16 Nov, 7-11pm
Doors/Bar 6.30pm
Tickets: £10

Tickets can be booked here

***TONIGHT***

‘Pleromatherapy’ is an invented word.

Walking every day as I do, to get the shopping, I pass by Queens Park station where outside there is a flower stall, ‘Pleromaflowers’, quite hidden in its signage and I’d often wondered why it was called that – a word or rather a prefix which I thought must refer to some personal, family association. Some days I enjoy a quick chat with the owner, Jason, maybe remarking about the sudden plethora of coffee shops in the area – I often see him sitting outside Planet Organic whose coffee is not so great and quite overpriced – but I’ve not yet asked him why he chose this name for the flower stall, but today at long last I decided to look it up, and here we are.

Pleroma (Koinē Greek: πλήρωμα, literally “fullness”) generally refers to the totality of divine powers. The word itself is a relative term, capable of many shades of meaning, according to the subject with which it is joined and the antithesis to which it is contrasted. It denotes the result of the action of the verb pleroun; but pleroun is either

♦ to fill up an empty thing (e.g. Matthew 13:48), or

♦ to complete an incomplete thing (e.g. Matthew 5:17);
and the verbal substantive in -ma may express either

1. the objective accusative after the verb, ‘the thing filled or completed,’ or
2. the cognate accusative, ‘the state of fullness or completion, the fulfilment, the full amount,’ resulting from the action of the verb (Romans 11:12, 13:10, 15:29, 1 Corinthians 10:26).

It may emphasize totality in contrast to its constituent parts; or fullness in contrast to emptiness (kenoma); or completeness in contrast to incompleteness or deficiency (hysterema Colossians 1:24, 2 Corinthians 11:9; hettema Romans 11:12).

A further ambiguity arises when it is joined with a genitive, which may be either subjective or objective, the fullness which one thing gives to another, or that which it receives from another.

All of that is from Wikipedia, God bless. But I wanted to get past the religious connotations, and reclaim this word to the beauty of flowers and a more sensual order.

It turns out that ‘Pleroma’ is a term updated by Carl Jung and Gregory Bateson to denote, first, “The totality of opposites”, and then, “The myth of power”, in other words, totality is momentary and always shifting according to circumstance. It is mobile, but not in the sense that a mobile phone is mobile (it is not – you are never mobile with a mobile phone, you just think you are).

This seemed to me an excellent new window in dealing with the contemporary malaise (of digital), always shifting from one condition to the next, the ‘plus-minus’, ‘on-off’ reflex where nothing is ever satisfactory or settled, because there is no faith in endurance nor stability. Endure for what? Nothing is ever “In-between”. The only thing that is fixed is mortality or a flat battery. It so easy to change ones mind and become like a pinball in a machine that is always promising you a higher score, and then the ball disappears and the machine asks you for more money.

As for music, it has become like this: nobody really wants anything new, The Beatles, Joy Division and Augustus Pablo and others have said what needs to be said and sounded how things can sound, however, we miss one vital element – we still have no idea of the relationship between this ‘then’ and ‘now’ because history is no longer a STEM subject and in believing that coding expertise and AI is the path to the future is much the same as believing that Shakespeare, Goethe and Huxley would agree to be tweeting on ‘X’, support Trump and listen only to things on Spotify and Apple.

“A rose is a rose is a rose”.

Tickets & info

Available to pre-order now on bandcamp
Release date: 6th December 2024

Track Listing: [CD – 6 tracks]

1. Heliconia
2. Love and the Framed Insects
3. Personare
4. A Man Outside
5. Patterning Heart
6. Goniorizon

This is Fennesz’s most reflective album to date. Composed and recorded at the end of 2023 and completed in the summer of 2024. Fennesz set up a new studio space, the third one in four years. He had no immediate concept, this time starting from scratch, with a strict working routine. He got up early in the morning, worked until midday then had a break and worked again until evening. At first, just collecting ideas, experimenting, improvising. Then composing, mixing and correcting. Yet the title came early, ‘Mosaic’, which mirrored this process of putting an element into place one at a time to build the full picture, an ancient technique of making an image, before pixels did it in a flash.

This ‘9 to 5′ working routine had already been developed on ‘Agora’ [Touch 2019]. All the other albums before were done differently; a few weeks work, then months in between and another few days or weeks of work. ‘Mosaic’ was done from beginning to end without a break.

Packaged in the now familiar DVD-style case with artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft, there is an echo to ‘Venice’ but 20 years later the division between the land, the horizon and the deep blue sea is more extreme.

Fennesz experiments with unusual time signatures. It’s not obvious, but ‘Love and the Framed Insects’ is in 7/4. ‘Personare’ is somehow influenced by West African pop music from the 1980s. ‘Goniorizon’ originally consisted of six hard rock guitar riffs mixed on top of one another. Then it became this ‘thing’ that somehow opened possibilities for new things to come… all this adds up to a filmic, highly involving and beautiful score of diverse influences and multiple possibilities to be explored by the listener.

Recorded by Christian Fennesz at Seven Fountains/Vienna between January and May 2024
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd

For more information, you can visit his website here

Release date: 15th November 2024
Available to order now on Bandcamp



Track Listing: [DCD – 16 tracks]

CD1
1. Fennesz – Dancer
2. Gavin Bryars & Philip Jeck – 1 Piste
3. Chris Watson – Saltmarshe Station
4. Rosy Parlane – Stoked
5. Cris Cheek – Clocking Off
6. Claire M Singer & Philip Jeck – Sketch One
7. Gavin Bryars & Philip Jeck – 4 Piste
8. Faith Coloccia – Pleione

CD2
1. Philip Jeck – Mono
2. David Sylvian & Hildur Guðnadóttir – I Measure Every Grief I Meet
3. Claire M Singer & Philip Jeck – Sketch Two
4. Jah Wobble & Deep Space – Jeck, Drums, 2 Basses
5. Drums Off Chaos – Keep in Touch
6. Gavin Bryars & Philip Jeck – 8 Piste
7. Chandra Shukla – The Ark Has Closed
8. Jana Winderen & Philip Jeck – Pilots

With rpm, we wanted to join some of the dots of Philip’s life and involve many other collaborators, early and more recent. Fennesz was a friend and kindred spirit on the same label. Claire M Singer formed a new chemistry and partnership and although their plans must now take a different form, Mary found some sketches Philip had laid out using Claire’s organ recordings, for further development. Faith Coloccia & Philip had already released Stardust on Touch in 2021. Their live performance together at 2220arts + archives, Los Angeles in March 2022 celebrating Touch’s 40th anniversary had to be shelved. And in September of that year Iklectik hosted a memorable tribute night with live work from Chris Watson, Liverpool Improvisation Collective, Claire M Singer and others – most of all a dedicated audience who knew and felt that this was a future event and not the end of the story.

A work in progress at the time of Philip’s death, Oxmardyke, a project with Chris Watson, saw the light of day as Touch Tone 83 in early 2023 – working on recordings Chris had sent, Philip with laptop perched on hospital bed, almost to the end. There were other artists who wanted to actively contribute further, whether in performance or contributing to this album: Jana Winderen had already sent Philip her recordings of pilot whales and the track you hear was finished in March 2022. Cris Cheek was in Slant with Philip and Sianed Jones, who also sadly left us that same year – their work together predates Philip’s with Touch. Philip owed much in his early years of composing and playing to his collaboration with dancers, theatre and film makers – in particular, a 10 year working and performing partnership with Laurie Booth, Yip Yip Mix and the 20th Century, which toured widely during the 1980s and early 90s. An early audio visual work, Vinyl Requiem (1993) was created with visual artist Lol Sargent, using 180 record players, nine slide projectors and two 16mm projectors producing a live performance on a huge scale. Vinyl Requiem wasn’t exactly about the end of vinyl, but the dawn of some- thing else regarding sound recording and music. It was never a final statement but a testament to the work to come.

Compiled & edited by Mary Prestidge, Mike Harding & Jon Wozencroft
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

For more information, you can visit his website here

5 out of 5 stars

Claire M Singer

Old Kirk, Forgue

Neil Cooper

Five stars

“Not since John Knox called the organ a box of whistles has anybody played like this.”

So says Anthony Richardson from the Friends of Forgue Kirk introducing the opening concert of the Aberdeen based soundFestival 2024 twentieth anniversary programme of contemporary music.

As Richardson indicates, Claire M Singer’s approach to the organ is unique, as the Aberdeenshire born composer has proved on her records for the Touch imprint. Drawing from Singer’s walks in the Aberdeenshire landscape, and with many works named after the Cairngorm hills that inspired them, this makes for a quietly panoramic display…

Please read the full review here

CLAIRE M SINGER
RETURNS TO FORGUE KIRK, ABERDEENSHIRE
TO PLAY A SPECIAL INTIMATE CONCERT
SAT 19 OCTOBER

KINGS PLACE PERFORMANCE OF HER WORK
SUN 20 OCTOBER

The Friends of Forgue Kirk have invited award-winning composer Claire M Singer to return to Forgue where she recorded her latest album Saor (2023, Touch). Known for her experimental approach to the organ, her work draws inspiration from her journeys across the dramatic landscapes of the Cairngorms, exploring rich harmonic textures and complex overtones that create ever-shifting melodic and rhythmic patterns disappearing almost as soon as they emerge.

In this special one-off concert, Claire will perform pieces from her back catalogue, specially adapted for the historic 1872 Conacher organ – one of the earliest in the region and a gift from Walter Scott, the owner of Glendronach distillery.

“This is the first time I’ll be performing works from my albums in the North East, which is pretty incredible considering I grew up here. I’m thrilled to return to Forgue and play this special concert, which will hopefully raise funds for the Friends of Forgue to help them continue their vital work in preserving this beautiful Kirk and organ – a hidden gem in the North East of Scotland.”

The following night, Kings Place, London, will host Àrainn, where Claire M Singer’s 2006 unreleased audiovisual work a’ fàs soilleir is presented by the composer / sound artist Peter Sollery, as part of an event examining work by Scottish composers that each reflect a powerful notion of place.

Saturday 19 October 2024 – 7.30pm
The Old Kirk, Forgue
Free Entry | Donations welcome

Sunday 20 October 2024 – 4.30pm
Àrainn, Kings Place, London

Claire M Singer is currently working on the second in a triptych of albums that began last year with Saor, each inspired by escapes to the peaks of her homeland of Scotland

Release date: 27th September 2024
Available to order on Bandcamp

Track listing:

1. Hexa
2. Magnetic Bloom
3. Time in Return
4. 53S
5. Sunsickness
6. Ash
7. Oval Waters

Cleared, the duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera has re-emerged with Hexa, their sixth release and third for Touch. Steven Hess recorded sessions in the group’s practice space, handing them over to Vallera, who in turn added his home recordings, mixing and manipulating them. The final product provides only the barest of hints to any instrumental points of origin, such is the extent of their intermixture.

Hexa brings the listener interiority and depth, beginning with the slow build of the title track, where chiming details prompt a cycling drone. The “Magnetic Bloom” pulsations give way to granulated smears, while the well-named “Time in Return” plays with repetition and layering. The density in the tracks relents with “53S,” a recording from a train station contributed by the field recordist Chris Watson. The spatial sensations brought by the clanking and creaking offer a respite of sorts before the accretion of processed magnetics resume on the aptly entitled “Sunsickness.” Clouds of static overwhelm the initial melodies of “Ash.” Pulses, bursts, and points of electronics breach the layered blankets and sheets of sound, as with the concluding track, “Oval Waters.”

If you need to identify a genre locale, put Hexa on the side of the street where current electronic music lives. However you categorize the album, it is an absorbing listen front-to-back. Each track emerges with layers peeling and/or accreting and new details revealing themselves. [Bruce Adams, 2024]

All sound by Steven Hess and Michael Vallera
Arranged and mixed by Michael Vallera
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Audio for 53S recorded by Chris Watson

Release date: 23rd August 2024
Available to order now on Bandcamp

Track Listing: [CD – 15 tracks – 58:43]

1. Rivers of Sand
2. Chateau Rouge
3. City of Light
4. Onsra
5. Circassian (guitar: Burkhard Stangl)
6. Onsay
7. The Other Face
8. Transit (vocals: David Sylvian)
9. The Point of It All
10. Laguna
11. Asusu
12. The Stone of Impermanence
13. Sognato di Domani
14. Tree
15. The Future Will Be Different

All tracks written, mixed and produced by Christian Fennesz
Re-Mastered by Denis Blackham
Photography & Design: Jon Wozencroft

The 20th anniversary re-issue of Fennesz’s best-selling ‘Venice’, originally released in 2004, is now available as a deluxe version remastered by Denis Blackham, with new and extra tracks not on the previous CD or vinyl versions. Included in the DVD-format edition is a booklet with texts by Fennesz himself, Denis Blackham & Jon Wozencroft, with unseen photographs from the original 2004 sessions. The booklet also reproduces David Sylvian’s original handwritten lyrics for ‘Transit’. This “stunning collaboration with David Sylvian continues where their fantastic duo track on Sylvian’s album Blemish left off. Situated directly in the middle of a mostly subdued listening experience, ‘Transit’ literally bursts out of the speakers accentuating the album’s more pop-like characteristics as well as its more restrained moments.”

Denis Blackham:
“Fast forward to 2024 and here I am again with the same original master mixes I used in 2003 to make a new and expanded version of the album – Venice 20. A little over twenty years later, technology in audio production, recording and mastering has improved substantially, so I was excited to return to this album and give my 2024 treatment.”

Jon Wozencroft:
“…The whole work has a stillness and a stature that is essentially timeless. This is of course exemplified by the collaboration with David Sylvian on ‘Transit’, which, now 20 years on, has all come true. I hoped the cover art to be on the level of a painting, to endure, like the music. It’s mad because I’d never claim to be able to paint, or assume that photographs can endure as long as paintings can. The work with Christian, which continues, always moves me and above all it’s a chemistry, a feeling you can’t quite put your finger on.”

Christian Fennesz:
“Over months, I collected material for the album: short recordings of acoustic and electric guitars, experiments with newly introduced soft synths and samplers, and field recordings, sometimes done on the go and directly in Venice, where I stayed for several weeks. The sound and acoustics of the city fascinated me. From my room, you could clearly hear conversations at night with the window open, but it was uncertain whether they came from the neighbouring house or several blocks away, as if the sound waves in Venice followed their own rules. It was during this time that the idea for Venice as an album title came to me, as a suggestive description of a dignified decline, decay, death, and rebirth. David Sylvian’s lyrics and vocal performance for ‘Transit’ perfectly encapsulated this idea for me. The piece remains a highlight of a wonderful, ongoing collaboration.”

The Way You Are

Art and culture has been a powerhouse of the UK economy for decades. In the last 14 years this has all changed, evidently because it is not a good thing to have people inspired by ideas and feelings that might be against the grain of the neoconservative lust for homogeneity and their flat earth crusade for cultural control. This has been years in gestation – never again can there be Sex Pistols, nor Nirvana, just the odd unexpected release that struggles to break through the firewall of PR, privilege and money – but most seriously, the impact of all eras of music being EVERYWHERE and therefore no longer an agent of the making of vital difference. Music has suffered because the cocktail of conditions between internet ‘freedom’, corporate fear, Covid, cost of living conspire with the policy that “there is nothing new under the sun”, so why not sell the sun on ‘exclusive’ pink vinyl for £40 a shot.

“Music is for the things that cannot be discussed” – Sinéad O’Connor

Travis Kelce stepped out on stage at the Taylor Swift concert at Wembley last Sunday June 23rd. OMG – amidst a setlist largely devoted to break-up songs. Paul McCartney was in the audience with his wife, dancing with Swifties. In this world of extremes – Taylor’s now extravagant wealth and stratospheric influence – it’s important to note how amazing this is for young people, especially young women and girls, who can say “FUCK, I love this and it’s changed my life!”

(Please, Taylor, speak now about Trump, you will be protected by the great and the good).

+++

Can we agree that music is a crucial form of nourishment, and of course there is often sugar involved – but in the best of cases, music can “carry a candle” and shine a light into the corners that art, theatre, even film and writing are slower to affect. If “You are what you eat”, it follows that “You are what you listen to”.

“The Observable Universe”, Heather McCalden, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2024.

With thanks to Corinne Noble.

Tickets & info

Available on Bandcamp to order now
Release date: 26th July 2024

Track Listing: [CD – 1 track – 52:38]
1. Natur – you can listen to an extract here

All tracks written, mixed and produced by KMRU
Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS
Photography & Design: Jon Wozencroft

When KMRU relocated to Berlin from Nairobi, he was immediately fascinated by the German capital’s relative silence. Back home, he was surrounded by sound: the omnipresent churr of birds and insects, the chatter of passers-by, and the electrical smog belched out by criss-crossing power lines and roaring transformers. In Berlin, this noise was muzzled; pedestrians wandered the streets with headphones in, barely communicating, while electrical cables were hidden away underground, and wildlife retreated from the imposing, concrete jungle. KMRU compares this observation with his visual experiences. Acclimatizing to life in Western Europe, he realized that night, a dusky blue-black lit up by streetlights and shops, offered little contrast with day. Nighttime in Kenya felt more tangible, somehow. After 6PM, when the sun sets, even the dim glow of a screen can dazzle the eyes, which must quickly adapt to the conditions. And as anyone who’s closed their eyes while listening to music will know, the ears also adjust when visibility is impaired, enhancing even the tiniest sounds. So KMRU used this phenomenon to inform ‘Natur’, a billowing long-form narrative that blurs the audible spectrum with an imperceptible sonic universe, contrasting cacophonous electromagnetic soundscapes with more familiar and grounding natural sounds.

The piece was composed in 2022, and since then KMRU has made it a live staple, tweaking and reshaping it as he performed on tour with Fennesz, and with the London Contemporary Orchestra at Southbank Centre. “I became it,” he says. “I merged with it on a performance level.” The experience allowed KMRU to sculpt not only the album’s crucial dynamics, but its philosophy. Following up records like 2020’s acclaimed, field recording-rooted ‘Peel’ and last year’s synthetic, ethereal ‘Dissolution Grip’, KMRU makes a decisive step forward. ‘Natur’ is KMRU’s most uncompromising work to date, crackling to life from dense clouds of static and intimidating, dissonant drones. Using electromagnetic microphones, he uncloaks the commotion hidden by the digital era’s ambiguous stillness, juxtaposing roaring, mechanical growls with microscopic glitches and tranquil, electrical wails. When environmental recordings do appear, they’re used as transitions between the thickets of harsh noise; sometimes hard to identify, they subconsciously remind the listener that behind the wall of sound there’s a natural world in constant communication, continually adapting to the fluctuating ecosystem.

KMRU sees ‘Natur’ as a way to reconsider what technology actually is and how it changes our perception of reality. This can be abstract, or more basic – like wearing rubber soled shoes to walk on asphalt, or using a leaf to drink water in a swamp. “Nature is connected with technology, and we’re so connected with nature that we adapt,” he says. “It’s like being blind, but still seeing.” On ‘Natur’, KMRU allows us to visualize a concealed landscape, one that’s teeming with life and in dialog with mechanization.

Number 10

Ten is a significant number: 10 marks the full stop at the end of one cycle and the pause before the beginning of the next. It represents both the start and the end of things. 

Change is difficult, the human condition generally resists anything that upsets the stability of everyday life. 

Homeostasis, from the Greek words for ‘same’ and ‘steady’.

Ten is also a metaphor and a target for life as a competitive activity, ‘the perfect 10’, the number of achievement. 

By the time we celebrate Iklectika10, there will be a new order in Number 10 Downing Street, a turning point.

This seminar is about 10 things that have been significant these last 10 years, not only in music but the way we have been changed, and how we currently relate to the past, present and future.

Tickets & info available here

LP + DL – 9 tracks – 48:29

Available on Bandcamp
Release date: 7th June 2024

***NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL

Track listing:

1. Waterhole 05:50
2. Mmabolela 06:19
3. Riverbed 03:20
4. Red Dust 04:30
5. Dawn 06:14
6. Bones 05:23
7. Nidus 05:55
8. Nebula 05:35
9. Ruins 05:23

GARDENIA is an existing land located at the Limpopo province of South Africa, right at the border with Botswana. The place’s real name is Mmabolela and it’s a private nature reserve covering 6500ha of subtropical savanna and part of Limpopo River.

In November 2019 I had a chance to visit the location and participate in an annual residency for composers and sound artists called ‘Sonic Mmabolela’, initiated and curated by Francisco López.

We lived in an isolated property in the middle of savanna having a unique opportunity to exist in undisturbed touch with the African wilderness.

All the natural sounds later used to create Gardenia were captured there – during longtime recording sessions over the virgin interior of Mmabolela Reserve.

The album’s field recording content was selected from several hours of birdsong, calls of frogs, insect noises, sounds of trees, bushes, grass as well as non-living natural elements like stones or shells.

These field recordings were later digitally processed and used as part of 9 musical arrangements.

However the recording sources and the location of Gardenia is defined, it was not my intention to document a South African natural soundscape nor create any other kind of strict concept album.

All I do in my work is an affirmation of beauty hidden in various aspects of the Creation. (MJ)

Recorded, composed and produced by Michał Jacaszek
Photography + Design: Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Francisco López

Special thanks: F. López, Ch. Kubisch, B. Ellison, and all Sonic Mmabolela 2019 team and staff

Artist: Richard Chartier
Title: On Leaving
Formats: CD & Digital Download
Catalogue Number: TO:124
Street date: 24th May 2024

You can order this CD album here

Track Listing:

1. variance.1
2. variance.2
3. variance.3
4. variance.4
5. variance.a

Mastered by Denis Blackham
Photography & design: Jon Wozencroft

About Richard Chartier

Richard Chartier is a Los Angeles-based artist/composer considered one of the key figures in minimalist sound art. Chartier’s works explore the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception, and the act of listening itself.

Since 1998 Chartier’s critically acclaimed sound works have been published on labels including Room40, Editions Mego, Important Records, Touch/Ash International, mAtter, Raster-Noton, 901 Editions, his own imprint LINE.

He has collaborated with William Basinski, ELEH, France Jobin, Robert Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, AGF, CoH, Yann Novak, Asmus Tietchens. As Pinkcourtesyphone he has collaborated with Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kid Congo Powers, harpist Gwyneth Wentink, AGF, and Evelina Domnitch.

Chartier’s sound works/installations have been presented in museums and galleries internationally. His performances have occurred live across Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and North America. Chartier’s compositions have accompanied dance works by noted choreographers Ohad Naharin, Cristina Caprioli, Dustin Klein, and Marco Blazquez).

Since 2000, Chartier has curated his influential label LINE, publishing over 150 editions documenting the compositional and installation work of international sound artists and composers who explore the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism.

the tree in a breeze
too much movement to focus
on a single leaf

dedicated to Steve Roden (1964-2023)

For over a quarter of a century, sound artist and composer Richard Chartier has interrogated an ever deepening thread of minimalist sound that meshes questions of stasis, pulse and timbre. The results of this work is some of the most quietly intense compositions of this century. His is a music of subtle variation, unwavering concentration, and also patience. This five part work created between 2020 and 2022 is dedicated to his friend and fellow sound artist Steve Roden.

“I first became friends with Steve Roden (and later his wife, Sari) back in 1998 when my first album ‘direct.incidental.consequential’ was released. He was one of the first group of artists to whom I sent the album. Almost instantly he had been there on the other side of the phone (or email) and ever since.

His way of listening and attention to details (no matter how small) was inspirational — the clarity and complexity of his understated and only seemingly simple compositions, engaging. Underneath it all, ‘the less’ truly opened your ears to ‘the more.’ Steve saw and heard everything between the noise, no matter how faint.

Some of the last times I was able to see Steve were right before the pandemic. The effects of his advancing Alzheimers were present, still somewhat subtle, but increasing. I am still regretful that we were unable to spend more time together prior to his succumbing to his condition’s cruel effects. Another regret is not engaging in the collaboration we had both talked about for YEARS. ‘We should really start on that sometime soon’ Steve and I would say with each passing year.

I worked on the compositions included on this album as Steve gradually slipped away from communication. He was not in my life like he had been before. During this time it became apparent that these pieces were for Steve. A reflection of his ability to find beauty in the most minute details. Even when finally reviewing the final masters after his passing, I tried to think about how Steve would listen.

What would Steve hear in the details? His effect on this album is strong… the accumulation of influence and inspiration. This album feels organic and warm and was developed during a time when his absence in my life increased. That warmth is reflective of the nature of who Steve was himself, his friendship, and his visual & sound work.

on listening… on loss… on leaving…

As Steve and I mutually suggested… for quiet amplification or headphone listening.”

Artist: Fennesz
Title: Sognato di Domani
Label: Touch
Format: DL only
Catalogue Number: TO:5320S
Barcode: 5050580826403
Street date: 10th May 2024

Fennesz releases a new digital single, “Sognato di Domani”, on 10th May. It is available to pre-order now from Bandcamp. Further details below.

Track Listing:
1. Sognato di Domani (6:38)

“Sognato di Domani” is a new recording made by Christian Fennesz, completed in the context of his upcoming album due for release later this year. In parallel with making new work, we are planning to present a 20th anniversary release of “Venice”, which will be ready very soon in its remastered splendour. “Sognato di Domani” fitted the complexion of this earlier 2004 classic quite exactly, and in many ways revitalises it. The track you will hear on the “Venice 20” CD is an edited version of the digital release we present now: the full version. The photography is an out-take from the footage captured for “Liquid Music”, made in 2001 and planned for the technically impossible DVD release in 2005.

The Power of Limits

Sound Seminar by Jon Wozencroft, 9 May 2024
Theme, Arlington House, 220 Arlington Road, London NW1 7HE

“Freedom of speech is freedom of music”. Sun Ra

“You can teach the craft; the poetry, you can’t teach. You can live in a virtual world if you want to, and perhaps that’s where most people are going to finish up – in a world of pictures”. David Hockney

Theme Studio is an intimate space with a great sound system, Tannoy speakers, and an upstairs area which doubles as a bar and a social space. It looks out onto a block of Victorian-era railway flats. Whilst resident in one of them in 1943, fatigued by the war, George Orwell started writing “1984” before moving to Jura and completing the work. 40 years later in 2024, “1984” seems less of a fictional warning and more like a documentary, concerning the abandonment of any limits to the relationship between war and peace, truth and lies. Psychological and linguistic abuse is the new normal.

Much less is known about György Doczi, a Hungarian architect who practiced in his home country before moving to Sweden, Iran and the United States. He settled in Seattle, and in 1981 published a major study “The Power of Limits – Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture” which uses sacred geometry and the measurement of the golden section to map out the relationships between the natural world and human form; presenting a holistic vision made by “a dynamic union of opposites, as demonstrated by spiral forms” which might extend to psychological and social realms. He noted that these could form a model for the need for ‘sharing’ as a way of life. Opposites, in the natural world, achieve balance and proportion; processed by technological/political dogmas, the new oppositional matrices create a maelstrom where sharing is seen as a sign of weakness.

The current climate of binary divisions between rich/poor, young/old, overheated/frozen, North/South etc., destroys harmony and creates chaos. What happened? The 60s/social vision that everything is possible lost its light and is being replaced by a dark shadow – AI promises a frictionless future, biomedicine will bring us increased longevity, and as Warhol promised, “we can stay younger longer”. Digital media and the internet drowns the everyday in material choices – what to click, what to follow, have a makeover. Clothing is crucial. On a political level our choices are compressed between ‘more of the same’ neoliberalism and aging leaders – the other options, Social Democracy, Labour, the Green Parties, fail to conjoin anything truly oppositional for fear of precipitating an economic collapse.

Last week Forbes published their latest rich list recording that there are now 2781 billionaires in the world, up 141 on the previous year, sharing a combined fortune of $14.2 trillion – (bravo that Taylor Swift is now amongst them?) – a sum greater than the GDP of any country in the world except the U.S.A. and China. The world’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, purveyor of luxury goods, was worth a mere $86 billion in 2020 – by 2024, his nest egg had risen to $223 billion. Fashion accessories are today just as profitable as computers.

“Eins zwei drei vier fünf sechs sieben acht. One two”. Kraftwerk, ‘Numbers’

In his book Doczi didn’t refer to the relationship between honey bees and humans. If they die out, we die out. There’s a fantastic sculpture talking about this at Kew Gardens, “The Hive” by Wolfgang Buttress and his collaborators.

David Hockney/Martin Gayford, ‘Spring Cannot be Cancelled’, Thames & Hudson 2021
György Doczi, ‘The Power of Limits’, Shambhala Publications 1981
Kraftwerk, Computer World, EMI Records 1981

‘The Hive’ – kew.org

Tickets can be purchased here

Liquid Music ll features a full-length video by Jon Wozencroft, an extract of which you can view above. The download bundle also includes audio of the soundtrack, by Fennesz. This is a Bandcamp exclusive release.

This release is now available here

The film was made for Fennesz’s live performances on the Touch 2001 tour (with Hazard/Heitor Alvelos and Biosphere/Jony Easterby) and the first version eventually released on a Touch 30 USB stick in 2012, from an incendiary performance at Brighton Gardner Arts Centre which centred on material from the Endless Summer release, amplified to the max. A DVD release was scheduled in 2005 but this proved impossible to master due to the fast–moving nature of the footage… once compressed for the demands of the format at that time, it looked like a pixelated jigsaw.

The DVD was to be partnered with this quite different set by Fennesz at the 2004 Norberg Festival in Sweden, shortly after the release of Venice, but totally improvised, including few traces of that release. Liquid Music II is now available for the first time and is “the extended version” to take account of the longer set times and the continued synergy that it gave to Fennesz’s live performances. Christian’s performance was trance-like in comparison to the Brighton gig three years earlier and is in itself an essential document of his developing sound.

The footage was filmed on Hi-8 and mini-DV between 1995 and 2001 and is intended as an analogue to the fast moving developments of digital media and its distribution at that time. With this in mind, none of the footage benefits from any post-production nor processing, it is as seen through the lens of the camera which often involved dangerous positioning, close to the edge of rivers and rocks to get a forensic capture of the movement. A tripod was impossible; at times the camera is almost touching the water.

I call it a film and not a video because the inspiration was from classic avant-garde interventions by such luminaries as Stan Brakage, Peter Kubelka, Guy Sherwin and others, who always shot on celluloid. I did it on camcorders because there was no budget to use a Bolex and it was simply a question of what was practical, portable and a kind of guerrilla action when the weather was favourable. In addition, it was becoming a big thing at the time for ‘electronic’ musicians to use digital video projections to frame their naked-laptop performance situations, but I felt Fennesz did not fall into this perceptual grid, his music having a romanticism and a harmonic force that was more timeless and would be neutered by the latest software aesthetic.

The film challenges the notion of sync between sound and image, so that every time it was projected, and every time Fennesz played, the connection would be different and the chemistry personal to each member of the audience. In that way it becomes a live conversation and not simply a ‘show’ nor wallpaper for the music.
[Jon Wozencroft, March 2024]

A rare live performance by Travelogue [Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla] in Italy this May.

Tickets & info

530PM on resonancefm [Repeats Wednesday 1am]

A showcase for records of contemporary experimental and underground music, hosted by Ed Pinsent. Tonight, some recent music from the Touch label. Anthony Moore, Cleared, Carl Michael Von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla, Philip Jeck & Chris Watson, Bana Haffar, drøne, Eleh, Itchy Spots, and Phill Niblock. For more about the label, please visit the Touch Bandcamp page. Visit thesoundprojector.com/radio-show/ for more information.

The show has been archived here

Today, 11th March 2024, is our official 42nd anniversary…

Since its founding in 1982, Touch (based in London) has created audio-visual productions and live events that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

First contact with New Order after their concert at the Newcastle Mayfair on 11th March 1982… ‘Video 5-8-6’ appeared on our very first release, Feature Mist, released in December of that year.

You can follow our progress year by year here…

Tickets & info

As Yet Untitled, 7 March 2024

JW writes: Usually, I don’t decide on the title of a seminar until as near as possible before the event, having gathered a long list of the recordings I’d like to play. And in this instance, after nearly 5 years of doing the nights at Iklectik Art Lab, the invitation to present one at a new venue, Theme Studios in Camden Town, is of course a special challenge and a leap into the unknown.

Experimental artists and musicians often use the get-out title, “Untitled”, to keep the meaning of a work open to interpretation. Understood, but I have always viewed this tactic as something of a missed opportunity, like a plain white sleeve or a room without a window.

However, the present need for new directions and the desire for some respite from the same-old/same-old needs a breathing space from our urge to name a phenomenon before it has had a chance to find its direction of travel. In other words, it is clear that “The next big thing” cannot and should not follow a formula that may have worked in the past. Discovery is often about difficulty. 

Here the title comes with the prefix “As Yet…”.

Please read this for more:

What Is (Not) to Be Done