Tickets & info

DB: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
JP: Isn’t it just a tool?
DB: No, it’s not. No – it’s an alien lifeform…”

David Bowie interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight, 1999

26 years later, many are waking up to the realisation that digital systems, social media, the internet, Meta-Apple-Google-Amazon (the MAGA oligarchy) are quite the opposite of liberating forces. A Venice wedding is the latest distraction. And yes, they are aliens… it’s exhilarating for them.

“I programme my home computer/Beam myself into the future”
Kraftwerk, Computer World, 1981

PCs became reasonably affordable in the late 80s (the MacSE, with a hard disk of 20mb, cost a heavy £2000 in 1988 – it’s all relative). There was no easy domestic internet connectivity at that point, dial-up came some years later – it wasn’t until broadband became commonplace in 2004-5 that the internet finally entrenched itself in everyday existence.

The realisation in 2025 is simply What the fuck has happened, and why is it that so many feel that the present world is completely fucked?

The mainstream media supermarket aisle of horrors – more wars than at any time since WW2, extreme right wing politicians and policies more repressive than they have been since the 1930s; poverty, starvation and suffering endemic. Climate change. The allowance of genocide. Systemic breakdown; a world of water swimming in the sewage of corporate corruption. A mental health crisis. Gender wars, culture wars. Male violence. The tip of the iceberg. And then an article about the perils of doomscrolling!

‘Realisationism’ begs the questions Whatever next, what the hell are we meant to do now?

“One day, my sister said, Bri, who is really good with machines and tech, is going to invent a technology that eats all the data that exists about people online so people can be free of being made to be what data says they are. …
Yeah, and then you’re going to invent a technology that means you can stop surveillance following people who are travelling from one place to another, because that surveillance isn’t anything to do with the real journeys people have to make in the world. And we’re going to call that technology Campervan.
Yep, I said. And we’ll call the tech that eats all the saved data Colon.
Colon and Campervan, my sister said. They’re the future. We’re the future. It is this simple.”
Ali Smith, Gliff, Hamish Hamilton 2024

A bridge from the closed world of the earbud to the power of live performance…

MBV, You Made Me Realise, live concerts 1991–present, aka “The Holocaust encore”.
“20-40 minutes of white noise, the volume of which was alleged to be around 130db, which apparently is about the same as a jet taking off from 100m away. Er, anyway, without being too gushing (I sent a text to a friend describing it as ‘sound as beauty as fire as fire as fire’… ahem), it was incredible”.
Andrzej Lukowski/Lucy Johnston, Drowned in Sound, 2009

This weekend, 28th June 2025 at Glastonbury. Neil Young on the main Pyramid stage. Charli xcx on The Other Stage. The old meets the new, or rather doesn’t. The ‘authentic’ vs an autocued synthetic rapture. A festival is both a playlist and it isn’t. You cannot listen to both/and. In this sound seminar you will! There has to be hope, beyond Realisationism and ongoing binary paralysis.

CD + DL – 8 tracks – 56:36

Track listing:

1: Far and Beside
2: Sonneur
3: Luminance
4: Far in the Distance
5: Grus
6: Fringilla
7: Far Behind
8: Closer

Pre-order from Bandcamp now

Released 27th June 2025

Idylla is the third of part of a trilogy of nature-based recordings that Polish composer Michał Jacaszek has recorded for Touch. The first, Catalogue des Arbres (Touch TO:94), was a collaboration with Kwartludium that celebrated the earlier inspiration of French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue des Oiseaux (1958). Gardenia (Touch TO:117) was a response to a field recording workshop organised by Francisco Lopez in Limpopo province in South Africa, on the border with Botswana, the participants living in a subtropical nature reserve in the middle of nowhere.

Idylla takes Jacaszek’s unique approach to field recording a step further. Faced with the spectre of AI and the progressive blur between digital simulation and the natural world, Jacaszek has made a series of source recordings and then used MIDI technology to isolate key sounds before scoring them for classical instruments and the vocal treatments performed by the 441Hz Choir from Gdańsk, under the direction of Anna Borkowicz.

It is said that there is nothing new under the sun. Here is a collection of recordings that are poised between a lamentation for a disappearing world and a joyous reflection upon the beauty of being sat by a river, listening to birdsong amidst the movement of trees in a soft wind. Idylla consolidates Jacaszek’s work as being amongst the most essential of any contemporary composer, its symphonic quality matched by its beauty and detail above and beneath.

Mastered by Denis Blackham. Photography and design by Jon Wozencroft.

DL – 1 track – 53:45

Order from Bandcamp now

Designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren between 1672 and 1684, St James’s Church in Piccadilly was badly damaged during the Blitz in October 1940 and restored after the war by Sir Albert Richardson.

Following the release of Venice20 and an epic new work, Mosaic, this was Christian Fennesz’s first London concert since the Touch40 nights at Iklectik in June 2022. The vast and vaulted space was well-suited to his soaring sound. With support from Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, this 53 minute set finds him in tremendous form.

Recorded by Lee McFadden and mastered by Denis Blackham.
Photography/design by Jon Wozencroft.

Recorded by Lee McFadden, 11th April 2025

Concert hosted by Baba Yaga’s Hut

DL – 1 track – 17:14

Now available on Bandcamp

CSound & Violin is the sister piece to CSound & Saz, both realised with the sadly deprecated software of a gui programmed by Richard Boulanger and his team for interactive engagement with the historic, computer programming language, Csound.

The crucial element common to both works is that the source of every single sound heard is derived solely from the instrument named—first sampled, then distorted, fragmented, and stretched. CSound & Violin was commissioned by the virtuoso violinist Richard Moore (no relation) as a collaborative project to stage live performances in which he improvises to the accompaniment of the real-time manipulation of his sampled violin. With each performance, for both Richard and myself, the composition evolves, and whilst never identical, repeated themes emerge.

This version of Csound & Violin is a live recording taken from the stage of the Stadtgarten in Cologne 2023, organised with the generous support of reiheM. I am grateful to Touch for bringing the two works under one roof.

(anthony moore st leonards feb 2025)

Tickets & info

www.resonancefm.com/schedule/2025-04-04

The Whole Point of No Return
Resonance FM, Friday 4th April, 5.30pm
Presented by Mark Aitken

Once you’ve left, there’s no coming back to exactly where you were. Mark Aitken and guests walk and talk and discover that things will never be the same again. Episode 2: The sight of immediate reality is like an orchid in the land of technology (Walter Benjamin). Join Mark Aitken and guest Jon Wozencroft as they work out the whole point of no return. With music by Michal Jacaszek from his forthcoming album (Idylla, Touch).

Today, 11th March 2025, is our official 43rd 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…

Now available

Released on 7th February 2025, when Bandcamp donated all their fees to MusiCares, a charity supporting artists affected by the fires in Los Angeles during the winter of 2024/5

DL – 1 track – 41:03

The Classic, 321 Queen Street, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Philip Jeck
Sandoz Lab Technicians
Sam Hamilton

With thanks to Zoe Drayton and the Audio Foundation & Rosy Parlane
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft

The Pressure on Expression

There are (arguably) more communication channels open to us than ever before, the digital convenience that makes sending a message more effortless than tying up one’s shoelaces. What has grown in difficulty is to find a space to say and develop new ways of seeing and listening that transcend this multinational grid. Telephone calls used to be expensive, now they are more or less free. Posting a letter used to take time and effort, now an email does it in minutes if not seconds. Music? – click here. Meeting up in person, once a frequent pleasure, is now equally likely to be a remote video call or a last minute cancellation (I’m too busy!)… Does this world of ours add up to a greater freedom of expression?

“We cannot prohibit that which we cannot name… Even when we are outwardly mute, speech is active within and our skull is like an echo chamber”. [George Steiner, ‘The Language Animal’, 1969]

“Music – like everything else – has become ‘information’… Digital formats were supposed to give music more room to stretch out. But music, in its frigid digital form, is unexpectedly brittle. Instead of stretching, it shatters… Promising to meld all people in a global mind, digital culture leaves the actual minds of real people fragmented, their shards scattered across the landscape.” [Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel – Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2005]

Possibly, the future of sound reached its apogee in August and September 1977, not as a result of the primal scream of the Sex Pistols, but with the launch of the two Voyager spacecraft by NASA that sent music, sound recordings and images to possible extraterrestrial civilizations in an attempt to document and project the summit of human cultural achievement to an unknown future situation? From Bach to Blind Willie Johnson, with a prescient inclusion of world music from societies not then part of the Western musical paradigm, the recordings were mastered onto gold-plated copper, electroplated with a pure sample of the isotope uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4,468 billion years (yes, the mind boggles). While NASA plans to shut down its contact with the Voyager spacecraft in 2025, it is envisaged that the vessels will reach constellations (already visible to cosmologists) in about 60,000 years time, and will then continue on their journey for an eternity to deliver this record. 

Known as ‘The Golden Record’, how might its content be curated half a century later? An essentially USA-driven initiative, it was a romantic and vitally analogue landmark in the history of recorded sound, but the only vaguely contemporary inclusion was Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’. The Beatles ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was vetoed by their publishers EMI. (Would that happen now?). The Rolling Stones, Elvis and Bob Dylan were considered as back-ups but rejected. Electronic music doesn’t get a look in. No doubt AI would be enlisted to help compile a 2025 version of the record. In the current US matrix of MAGA (Meta Amazon Google Apple), what would it sound like (shit?), and how would 40 years of digital recording impact upon its message? What would the aliens make of dark ambient? What if they are all working from home?

The Voyager Golden Record – www.ozmarecords.com

Daniel K.L. Chua/Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening, 2021

Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, 2025

Tickets & info

Released on Bandcamp 10th December 2024

DL – 2 tracks 22:32

1. the wooden building will be left for the angel’s revenge 11:16
2. rehearsing the ancestors

Brandon Shimoda is someone that I have the immense pleasure of calling a friend & collaborator. He has a huge presence in the Japanese American community, not only as an organizer & facilitator, but also writing poems & novels examining, processing & expressing what all of us in the community feel. During the day, Brandon is a professor at Colorado College. It is there, on the 80th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, that I had the privilege to be on a panel with other descendants of the camps to share and talk about our work. It was a truly beautiful experience – i’ve never openly discussed the camps and what they meant to me, so to do so with other artists really warmed my soul.

When I was putting together my record ‘I was too young to hear silence’, that event was still ringing true in my heart. Nervously, I decided to ask Brandon if he would write the liner notes for the album… he graciously agreed. What he sent back was perfect, something only he could do – part non-fiction, part fiction, part Japanese dreamscape, part me. And part him.

‘The Afterlife is Letting Go’ is the name of Brandon’s book that also comes out on 12th December 2024. In the early stages of writing, we talked about there being some sort of music that would accompany the book, a soundtrack to it if you will. After reading, sitting, and re-reading the book, these two pieces make up my physical processing of his words. if you listen to this & feel something, anything, i urge you to pick up this book & spend some time with it. i promise you it will be worth it. [Patrick Shiroishi, December 2024]

All music composed & recorded by Patrick Shiroishi at Orange Door in Nov ’24 except for the poem ‘The Dead Tree’, written & recited by Yumi Taguchi Schumaier Shimoda

Mixed by Patrick Shiroishi
Mastered by Derek Colburn

Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd.

This record was made to accompany the book ‘The Afterlife is Letting Go’, written by Brandon Shimoda & published by City Lights
Song titles taken from chapter titles in the book

Published by City Lights
ISBN-10: 0872869296
ISBN-13: 9780872869295
citylights.com/city-lights-published/afterlife-is-letting-go

“In a wrenching exercise to understand history and his own biracial ancestry, Shimoda visits the ruins of incarceration sites and connects with many descendants of the Japanese Americans whose lives were upended during WWII. Mere statistics are never enough to drive home the severity of a wound, especially one that impugns the moral fabric of a country that is supposedly a beacon for human rights. It’s sobering that many of those Shimoda interviewed speak up at another time in which immigrants are painted anew as the terrifying ‘other.’ Tragic and illuminating.” Poornima Apte, Booklist Magazine, Starred Review

Available to 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

277 attended the Listening Event last night. It was really nice to see everyone and thank you for all your wonderful comments about this great album. Christian would personally like to thank everybody for making it such an enjoyable evening.

We’ve added a 3rd track for you to listen to from Fennesz’s forthcoming album ‘Mosaic’… and a reminder about tomorrow’s Listening Event –

November 22, 2024 at 7:00 PM GMT
Join Fennesz and Touch for a free listening party to celebrate ‘Mosaic’. Come along and take a deep dive into the album with the artist and label. Feel free to ask questions and make comments. Please be respectful – this a friendly and creative platform.

RSVP here:

fenneszreleases.bandcamp.com/merch/fennesz-mosaic-pre-release-listening-event

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

‘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

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).

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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.

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