Touch Newsletter #250

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #250. Olivia Block’s “Wuther” is the second contribution to Touch: Displacing – 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.

“Touch: Displacing”
V33:50

Tomorrow might not be as bad as yesterday.

It’s hard to stand it, but here we are, standing still in the worst possible way while the USA election votes are counted and the latest chumocracy money is bevvied out to a useless test and trace system by the UK’s excuse for a government.

The first lockdown in March (and the catalyst for the Touch: Isolation project) for all its troubles at least had the advantage of novelty and fine weather, and obviously the communal need to avoid an unquantifiable virus whose long-term effects are still unknown. Eight months on, a dull fatigue predominates, the horror of incompetence and avoidable deaths mixed with the relief that yes, we are still standing. It feels like a waiting room that has no chairs available.

Now the rule of law kicks in. Can we trust it?

As for laws of sound…

Olivia Block’s recording for Touch: Displacing starts with the slow release of air to the organ pipes, a sense of breathing, the hope that there is a spirit rising that will fill the corners of our personal and collective spaces. To start to fill the world with different movement.

Olivia Block
“Wuther”

Wuther - to make a sullen roar, as the wind; a low roaring or rustling, as of the wind; to make a rustling sound; to whizz

“During a residency at UNC Chapel Hill Department of Music in 2017, I recorded the mechanical pipe organ in Kenan Music Rehearsal Hall. I chose to mic the organ near the wind chest, so that as I pulled each stop out slowly and played the organ keys, the rushing air tones were captured prominently in the recording.

The durational wind/tone threshold was the focus of my performance, hence the name Wuther. I made the recording in hopes that one day I would have the time to mix it properly for release. The pandemic allowed me the time and mental space to revisit the recording and work on the composition in my studio.

Special thanks to Allen L. Anderson and Barbra Hulka, UNC Chapel Hill Department of Music, for facilitating my visit and arranging the opportunity during my residency to work with the organ.” Olivia Block, October 2020

Releases 6 November, 2020
Photography by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Subscribe to Touch: Displacing

Jacaszek
“Gardenia”
TO:117

CD in DVD case + DL - 9 tracks - 48:29. Buy “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)

Buy “Gardenia” on Bandcamp

Cleared
“The Key”
TO:116

CD in DVD case + DL - 8 tracks - 72:24. Buy “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.

Buy “The Key” on Bandcamp

Ivor Novello Awards 2020

Many congratulations to Claire M Singer on her nomination in the Large Chamber category of the Ivor Novello Awards for her composition “Gleann Ciùin”. The piece was commissioned in 2019 by the London Contemporary Orchestra for the PRS Foundation New Music Biennial with support from the Richard Thomas Foundation. It features Claire on organ with four cellos, violin, viola and two horns. The piece will feature on Claire’s next album due to be released in 2021. You can listen to Claire talking about the work on BBC Radio 3’s “In Tune” programme, available online at BBC Sounds with a short extract from the piece at 47:45.

Claire M Singer on Bandcamp

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 127…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com