Touch Newsletter #213

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #213. Announcing “The Heat Equation” – a 100pp book + CD showcasing a new portfolio of photography by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio’s last performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for a solo CD on Touch.

Made in a limited edition for 750, “The Heat Equation” is available to pre-order now from Bandcamp.

NB: we request that buyers outside Europe please buy their copies from forcedexposure.com (North America) or kudosrecords.co.uk (elsewhere).

Joséphine Michel, Mika Vainio
“The Heat Equation”
CODEX 2

100pp book + CD
Pre-order “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

Book contents: 69 photos, a portrait of Mika Vainio by Joséphine Michel and an introductory essay by Jeremy Millar. Art direction: Jon Wozencroft.

CD features a recording of Mika Vainio live at Contra Pop, Ramsgate, 16 August 2016. Mastered by Russell Haswell.

“The Heat Equation” is a 100pp book + CD showcasing a new photographic work by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio’s final performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for his proposed 2017 solo CD for Touch.

Following their previous collaboration on “Halfway to White” (Touch # FOLIO 001, 2015), Michel and Vainio had been planning a second production, and in March 2017, Michel visited Vainio in Oslo to show him the first examples of the photographs she had been taking for this purpose. Included in the book, as a postcard insert, is Michel’s tender portrait of Mika Vainio taken at this meeting.

Shortly before Mika’s untimely death in April 2017, the project took an unexpected turn. The recordings for the new album for Touch were nearing completion but his sequencer broke down and the project needed to be restarted. The collaboration turned into a complementary exploration between Michel’s both quasi-scientific and lyrical photographs, a perception of a world on the edge of discovery – whether it be born of physics, medicine or space travel – and the legacy of Vainio’s musical vision, with its vast imaginary of matter, and its tension between heat and icy precision.

The photographs and the music interact through a variety of climates, where the microcosm and the macrocosm, the animate and the inanimate, the telluric and the cosmic coexist – and sometimes fuse.

In August 2016 Vainio performed a blinding set at the Contra Pop festival in Ramsgate, which was recorded off the desk for the purposes of the festival’s annual compilation CD. With Contra Pop on hiatus in 2017, it wasn’t until June 2018 that the festival organisers contacted Touch to introduce the idea of a compilation. At which point, as if miraculously, Vainio’s counterpoint to Michel’s work rematerialised in the form of this live festival recording. Mastered by Russell Haswell, Mika Vainio’s new music is the equal of anything he released in his lifetime.

Bound in a linen cover with foil blocking, Michel’s photography is expertly printed on 200gsm Arctic Silk. The Heat Equation is released in an edition of 750 copies, accompanied by an introductory text by artist Jeremy Millar, “The Devouring Drop”, art directed by Jon Wozencroft and the latest development in Touch’s new series of “ear books”.

Pre-order “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

NB: we request that buyers outside Europe please buy their copies from forcedexposure.com (North America) or kudosrecords.co.uk (elsewhere).

Guerrilla Audio

Guerrilla Audio is a new 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 3rd year and have just posted episode 102…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com

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The previous Touch NewsLetter can be found here