Touch Newsletter #249
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #249. We have two new releases imminent, which you can pre-order now, shipping next week, on Bandcamp.
Jacaszek’s field recordings from Mmabolela game reserve in South Africa were later digitally processed and used as part of nine musical arrangements which constitute the album, “Gardenia”.
Cleared – Steven Hess and Michael Vallera from Chicago – is a project formed to focus on repetition and patience as central elements of composition. For “The Key”, their first album for Touch, they invited artists to investigate and reimagine the four tracks on the album - Philip Jeck, Fennesz, Bethan Kellough and Olivia Block. [Steven Hess performed on Fennesz’s “Seven Stars”, released on Touch in 2011.]
Olivia Block’s organ composition “Wuther” will form part two of “Touch: Displacing”, available to subscribers on November 6th 2020, on Bandcamp Day.
Touch art direction and photography: Jon Wozencroft.
Jacaszek
“Gardenia”
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CD in DVD case + DL - 9 tracks - 48:29. Releases 30 October 2020. Preorder “Gardenia” on Bandcamp. Recorded, composed and produced by Michał Jacaszek. Photography and design: Jon Wozencroft. Mastered by Francisco López.
1. Waterhole 05:50
2. Mmabolela 06:19
3. Riverbed 03:20 - you can hear this track here
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 nine 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)
Preorder “Gardenia” on Bandcamp
Cleared
“The Key”
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CD in DVD case + DL - 8 tracks - 72:24. Releases 30 October 2020. Preorder “The Key” on Bandcamp. Photography and design: Jon Wozencroft. Mastered by Denis Blackham.
1. The Key 10:51 - you can hear this track here
2. Bonded 7:11
3. Of Air 12:56
4. Mesa 10:32
5. Philip Jeck - The Key 10:46
6. Fennesz - Bonded 6:28
7. Bethan Kellough - Of Air 6:52
8. Olivia Block - Mesa 6:48
Cleared is the Chicago-based duo of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera, formed in the latter part of 2009 as a project to focus on repetition and patience as central elements of composition. Hess and Vallera have previously worked in various contexts of improvisational, long form and experimental music (Hess contributed to Fennesz’s Seven Stars, released on Touch in 2011). Cleared is an effort to take the knowledge both have gained from these arenas in order to build hypnotic patterns of sound and rhythm.
“The Key” was recorded in the spring of 2019 at Electrical Audio in Chicago Illinois with engineer Greg Norman. After a silence of several years, Cleared went into the studio with a set of drawings and notes describing the arcs of various systems for the creation of soundscapes and rhythmic patterns. There was no rehearsal, demo recordings or any other preparation besides theses diagrams which were designed by both Hess and Vallera in tandem. The logic behind this strategy was to erase the confines of previous releases and return to the origin of the project, which simply began as an open improvisation between the two musicians, centering a focus on slow, gradual changes and a meditative sensibility.
The recordings were made with a specific attention to sonic detail and fidelity, resulting in hours of material that was arranged and mixed over the next year by Michael Vallera in his home studio.
The resulting four tracks were further investigated and reimagined by Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz, Bethan Kellough and Olivia Block, adding another form of “The Key” as a collection of discreet and weighted sonic explorations.
Steven Hess is an American drummer and sound artist living and working in Chicago. He is a member of Cleared, the Vienna/Chicago trio, Innode (Editions Mego), and the long running electro-acoustic group, Haptic. He has collaborated with a number of artists over the years and has recorded for labels ranging from Relapse Records (with Locrian) to Kranky (with Pan American) and many others.
Michael Vallera is a musician and photographer who lives and works in Chicago. Prolific as both a solo artist and collaborator, he has released albums under his own name and as COIN (Denovali / Opal Tapes), with percussionist Steven Hess as Cleared, and with Joseph Clayton Mills as Maar (Umor Rex, Entr’acte). An MFA graduate of School of the Art Institute of Chicago, his work has been exhibited in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.
Preorder “The Key” on Bandcamp
“Touch: Displacing”
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Following Touch: Isolation which covered the first lockdown period in the UK, Touch: Displacing is a new subscription project where the focus falls on longer-form compositions, to be released on a monthly basis over the coming year and featuring artists for whom duration is a key feature of their work.
Twelve new and exclusive tracks recorded by Touch or Touch-affiliated artists for one year’s subscription, with contributions from Oren Ambarchi, Olivia Block, Richard Chartier, Ipek Gorgun, Bana Haffar, Philip Jeck, Chris Watson and others, leading with “Kharabat” by Sohrab – all mastered by Denis Blackham, to whom once again grateful thanks are due. Receipts will, as with Touch: Isolation [the collection is still available], be shared amongst the artists. A time to support independent music while it still exists!
Each of the releases will be mirrored by a cover/counterpoint by Jon Wozencroft – not fixed to one location, as they were with Touch: Isolation.
Touch: Displacing is necessarily a global action. Everybody knows of the water crisis facing the planet. Few may be aware that we are running out of sand, with equally dire consequences, owing to the demand for concrete.
In the current state of the world, the process of displacement has been accelerated by politicians whose techniques of disinformation, U-turning and barefaced lies scramble any attempt to form a perspective on the events taking place. In the physical realm, the fracture of once stable glaciers, the erosion of coastlines and the constant stream of migration from one state of upheaval to another consolidates the force of digital systems to amplify a maelstrom of change – but not change as we know it, rather the consolidation of power and vested interests that have seized this opportunity to raze the roof on previous systems of protection and stability.
The advent of the personal computer in the late 1980s was mirrored by the promotion of a new way of coming to terms with the scale of the world as we knew it, though chaos theory, fractal geometry and the idea that the most delicate of actions could have massive consequences – the saying went, that a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan could create a storm front across the Midwest of the USA.
Chaos theory is now chaos practice, with the caveat that initial actions are no longer born of delicacy nor collective expansion but the non-stop displacing of any position of longer term vision.
Displacement theory has its roots in psychology to denote the process of shifting one state of perception to another, in an unconscious and generally automatic form of behaviour – shifting the blame, “taking it out on someone” and on a greater scale, highlighted by the rise of nationalism and the growing intolerance of detail.
“The devil is in the detail”. “The Beauty of Fractals” made it clear that the smallest element was intrinsic to the harmony of the whole*. Instead, the world seems to have finessed the promotion of disharmony as a form of entertainment, at the very time when artistic, musical, cultural challenges to the perceived “fait accompli” are needed more than ever. To counter the policies of rapid confusion, the forward/reverse procedure, we shall endeavour to slow down the pace, turn things up and respond.
The subscription costs £33 for twelve tracks – please support the artists by investing in the Touch: Displacing project, and expect surprises – good ones for a change.
* “The Beauty of Fractals”, Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter Richter, Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 1986
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 126…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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