Touch Newsletter #261
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #261. A further four files have been added to The Digital Archive of Tapeworm, a repository for audio from out-of-print cassettes on The Tapeworm. Marta De Pascalis, Nigel Wrench, Lary Seven and Mamiffer are now available to download. The series will continue to grow at random intervals over the next months…
On 14 March 2021 at 18.45 GMT, Jana Winderen appears on BBC Radio 3’s ‘Between the Ears’ series with ‘Listening to the Deep’, a documentary hosted by Winderen and produced by Jack Howson. For further information visit the BBC Sounds website.
The second installment in Kristoffer Cornils’ and Thaddeus Herrmann’s new series for Das Filter, titled “Jóhann Jóhannsson – A User’s Manual”, is now online. This time the pair discuss Jóhann’s second recording for Touch, “Virðulegu Forsetar”. Read on dasfilter.com
The Digital Archive of Tapeworm
A repository for audio from out-of-print cassettes on The Tapeworm, available from datworm.bandcamp.com
DAT#05 – Marta De Pascalis – “Anzar”. Originally released on 30 September 2016 by The Tapeworm as TTW#88 in a cassette-only edition of 100 copies. De Pascalis is a musician from Rome, currently based in Berlin, who works primarily with synthesisers and tape loops. Her most recent release was “Sonus Ruinae” (Morphine Records, 2020).
DAT#06 – Nigel Wrench – “ZA86”. Originally released on 11 February 2015 by The Tapeworm as TTW#86 in a cassette-only edition of 150 copies. “ZA86” is a 25 year old radio reporter’s personal journey in the final, most repressive moments of a hated regime. It was followed up earlier this year by “ZA87” (see below…). More information on “ZA86” can be read at za86.org
DAT#07 – Lary Seven – “Rotation”. Originally released on 15 October 2011 by The Tapeworm as TTW#36 in a cassette-only edition of 200 copies. Track 1: live at White Columns, New York (2001), recorded by Jackson Ryker. Track 2: live at Experimental Intermedia, New York (2004), recorded by Daniel Smith and Byron Westbrook.
DAT#08 – Mamiffer – “Recordings For Lilac III”. Originally released on 11 December 2017 by The Tapeworm as TTW#103 in a cassette-only edition of 150 copies. Mamiffer write: “The majority the sounds on this tape were culled from cassettes we used in live performances and recordings. Many were field recordings from various sources, found tapes from thrift stores, some were samples/textures we made as backgrounds/backing tracks for specific live songs. A few pieces were also in finished Mamiffer studio recordings but ended up being somewhat buried in the final mixes – they were and are elements we felt strongly about and have thus given them a proper chance to shine herein. It was put together semi-chronologically starting with some of the earliest Mamiffer materials going back to 2008 or so. It was all edited together with the idea of creating a listenable narrative and letting the chance audio occurrences within each piece inform the choices about how they were melded together and sequenced. We have been meaning to assemble these sounds for a while and are glad to have had the chance to finally do it." – Mamiffer, Vashon, WA, 13.xiii.2017.
Explore The Digital Archive of Tapeworm on Bandcamp
Nigel Wrench
“ZA87”
TTW#138
Cassette in an edition of 100 copies. Buy “ZA87” on Bandcamp. Artwork: Melissa Wrench. Read the full story at za87.org
A: Seen - “This is the devil’s government"
B: Unseen - “You want him to disappear”
The dusty streets of apartheid-era Soweto, 27 July 1987. The politically charged funeral of a young activist who fled South Africa to became a commander in the military wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. Police await in armoured cars. The funeral is restricted by specific government decree.
The man being buried is Peter Motau, assassinated in neighbouring Swaziland on the orders of South Africa’s most notorious government-sanctioned killer, Eugene de Kock, orders carried out by his secret police unit in a bloody ambush.
For De Kock and the apartheid government, Peter Motau was a terrorist. For the singing, chanting mourners at his funeral, he was a freedom fighter, a hero from the streets of Soweto itself.
ZA87 is a raw audio document of one extraordinary day under apartheid. A father mourns, himself breaking the regulations declaring any political statements at the funeral illegal. Young activists, the “Comrades”, sing in praise of the banned ANC’s military wing, sirens blare, helicopters hover overhead, a police officer orders all television and photojournalists to leave. Nigel Wrench’s microphone remains. Also there is Winnie Mandela, on behalf of the ANC’s exiled leadership. Banned from speaking at the funeral, she speaks instead into Wrench’s microphone and stages a remarkable intervention as the police seek to detain activists.
The authorities sought to keep the events of that day away from the eyes and ears of anyone who wasn’t there. ZA87 breaks that silence.
Nigel Wrench is an award-winning journalist whose career began in South Africa under apartheid. He is the winner of a Sony Award for “Out This Week”, BBC Radio’s first national lesbian and gay news programme, and a New York Radio Award for BBC Radio 4’s “Aids and Me”, chronicling his experience of living with HIV. “Few journalists have quite so intimately captured the essence of their era’s great moral panics as Nigel Wrench” (The Quietus).
ZA87 is the follow-up to Wrench’s acclaimed first cassette on The Tapeworm, ZA86, “a remarkable documentation of South Africa under apartheid in 1986” (Boomkat), “chilling and at times stunningly beautiful” (The Quietus), “stylistically not dissimilar to Adam Curtis’s 2015 documentary ‘Bitter Lake’, its hypnagogic float through the rushes feels curiously vivid, free of the dating or distancing effect further media packaging might bring” (The Wire).
Buy “ZA87” on Bandcamp
Read the full story at za87.org
Long Wave
"Long Wave 9.7", titled “Mirare” and hosted by Mike Harding and Bana Haffar, broadcasts this Friday 12th March at 2PM PST on Dublab, Los Angeles. The broadcast features Yann Novak, Yenting Hsu, Geneva Skeen (whose music has recently been used by Adam Curtis for his latest BBC series "Can’t Get You Out of My Head"), drøne, fennesz sakamoto, Simon Scott, Anna von Hausswolff and more… The second hour is dedicated to the music and words of Miles Cooper Seaton, a traveller and teacher that left us too soon. Listen in on dublab.com. All 10 series to date are archived at mscharding.net
venoztks
There are still a handful of copies left of the cassette album “How It's Not Meant To Be” on The Tapeworm.
A new series of recordings, “All is lost, everything is found” is now available for download from venoztks.bandcamp.com.
“filament” – the video can be also seen on YouTube.
“piqûre”
“insecticide”
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“Touch: Displacing”
V33:50
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. It follows on from Touch: Isolation which covered the first lockdown period in the UK.
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, Sohrab, Chris Watson and others – 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.
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.
Subscribe at touchdisplacing.bandcamp.com
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 fifth year and have just posted episode 135…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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