Touch Newsletter #262

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #262. The seventh contribution to the
Touch: Displacing series is by Geneva Skeen. “The clap of the fading-out sound of your shoes” is composed of recordings throughout a city on pause, though not silent, during the early months of 2021. Roughly hewn around the edges, the track acts as a concrete mixer for the industrial materials of Los Angeles and the composer’s resonating, listening body within it.

Subscribe to the series at touchdisplacing.bandcamp.com. All the income from subscribers goes to support the artists, whose activities are still being disrupted by the global pandemic.

NB: Touch: Isolation closes on 4 April 2021, so if you subscribed, please make sure you have all the tracks downloaded before then… Please download the files (if you haven’t already) or contact us via the subscribers message service if you cannot, for whatever reason… For those of you who didn’t subscribe, the full album is available here.

“Waterglass” by Simon Tassano and Eddy Sayer was originally released by Touch as TO:1 in 1984. It is now available again digitally. Its story can be read below…

On Tuesday 6 April at 6pm CET, Jana Winderen will present “Through the Bones” for the Walking Festival of Sound, reporting on two diverse field trips to the ocean in the Arctic and Tropic regions. For further information and to register for the talk, please visit wfos.net

Nigel Wrench was interviewed by Nick Roseblade for Brighton’s Slack City about his tapes for The Tapeworm, “ZA87” and “ZA86”. The tapes are made from recordings Nigel made when he was a journalist in South Africa during Apartheid. They are remarkable audio snapshots into what life was like during this turbulent period of time. Click here to listen to the interview.

“Touch: Displacing”
V33:50

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, released on a monthly basis over the coming year and featuring artists for whom duration is a key feature of their work. Contributors thus far: Sohrab, Olivia Block, Bana Haffar, Chris Watson, Richard Chartier, Robert Crouch…

Geneva Skeen
“The clap of the fading-out sound of your shoes”

This piece is composed of recordings throughout a city on pause, though not silent, during the early months of 2021. Roughly hewn around the edges, the track acts as a concrete mixer for the industrial materials of Los Angeles and the composer’s resonating, listening body within it.

Mastered by Denis Blackham, 11th March 2021
Design and photography by Jon Wozencroft

Subscribe to Touch: Displacing

Simon Tassano & Eddy Sayer
“Waterglass”
TO:1D

Digital download, 44m45s. Remastered by Simon Tassano, 18th February 2021 at Rumiville, Austin, Texas. Original recording mixed at Elephant Studios, July 1984. Design and photography by Jon Wozencroft.

“Waterglass” was originally conceived as a soundtrack for artist Sheila Stewart to paint seascapes at Studio One and a Quarter North London in 1984. Originally released on cassette in 1984 as SAYNO PRODUCTIONS. Each cassette inlay card contained a colour photo from North Wales taken by Simon Tassano – a different one each time, from hundreds of gloss ‘snappy snaps’, cut in half at the printers. “Waterglass” is now available digitally on Bandcamp.

Jon Wozencroft writes: “Simon had found some down time at Elephant Studios in Wapping in July 1984, it was a weekday and we turned up with a plan, but no clear idea as to what might happen as a result of the session.

I’d met Eddy, his partner Sheila Stewart, and Simon at the Diorama near Regents Park. It turned out that Eddy and Sheila lived near me in West Hampstead and I made many happy visits to their semi-derelict garden studio, a great ground floor space with sky lights where Eddy experimented with his percussion and Sheila painted.

Eddy says that on my first visit I needed to borrow a microphone. Whilst I was there they were playing a prototype mix of what would become “Waterglass”. The steady creep of “Why don’t we release it?” resulted in this Elephant Studios session – for Eddy a chance to finesse the soundtrack that inspired the seascapes that Sheila was working on, for Simon, to push his production skills – we talked of “Ambient dub” and “Environmental sound”.

Eddy turned up to the studio with his gongs and cymbals. Simon and Eddy had made field recordings of the sea in Cornwall, and we set to work, it was late morning (we were owls rather than larks at the time). I remember the tuning up procedure, in particular. Simon set Eddy in motion, and then proceeded to play around with the console to stunning effect. This was not recorded.

I was sitting there as an observer/encourager and thought that was a flying start. To put this into context, this was the first time we – Touch – has embarked on a release that was not a compilation but an artist-only project. We didn’t have a clue, really. We felt it had to be a cassette due to our origins and existing modus operandi, so the next consideration was to master the material so that it would fit the sonic parameters of that medium.

The allotted time didn’t give us much slack in terms of experimentation. We had to be done by end-of-afternoon. So this is indeed a performance, our first toe into the water of singular releases, Touch TO:1.

This was the first time we made a manufactured cassette with printed labels, when previous we’d done everything with tape copiers at Mike’s flat in Wandsworth and the discount deal we had established with Maxell cassettes.

Here we are pleased to present this remastered version from Simon’s original, without the perils of tape hiss, now somehow shorn of the naivety of inexperience.”

Buy “Waterglass” 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 fifth year and have just posted episode 136…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com

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The previous Touch NewsLetter can be found here