Touch Newsletter #272
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #272. September heralds Jon Wozencroft’s Sound Seminar, “Pause Button”, at Iklectik on the 16th, a new Touch Radio by Patrick Franke of recordings from a trip to Iceland, and Byron Wesbrook’s first CD for Ash International, “Mirror Views”, which is now available for pre-order. Boomkat are calling it his “his most convincing album to date … delicate, careful field recordings and subtle tonal elements that places Westbrook solidly alongside his heroes and the greats of the genre.”
Jon Wozencroft Sound Seminar: “Pause Button”
IKLECTIK, London, 16 September 2021
On Thursday 16 September 2021, Jon Wozencroft presents “Pause Button”, a sound seminar, at IKLECTIK in London’s Waterloo. Tickets are now available from iklectikartlab.com
The pause button first appeared on reel-to-reel tape recorders in the early 1960s, on Ampex machines. Thanks to financial help from Bing Crosby, Ampex had developed reel-to-reel magnetic tape and tape recorders in the late 1940s, so Bing could play golf and not have to do live radio broadcasts on a Saturday. Reel-to-reel tape technology had been invented by BASF in Germany during WW2, eventually discovered by U.S. Army Signal Corps in a studio at Radio Frankfurt at the end of the war.
Compact cassette recorders were developed by the Dutch company Philips not in the Netherlands but in Hasselt, Belgium, by Lou Ottens and his team in 1963, but the format took a few years to hit the home recording market. Seven-inch singles, jukeboxes and portable radios ruled at the time.
VCRs had developed in parallel but VHS did not become a big thing until the 1970s. One could argue that pause buttons had been there years earlier, in the form of stop frame film cameras like the Bolex (1935) or even the on/off switch of a wireless.
No-one thought to pause a vinyl record until turntables and slip-mats let DJ’s reinvent their functionality. In digital/electronic contexts, the pause button is an essential feature, from soundcloud sites to washing machines. Pause for thought, or a vital tool to offset frequent interruptions?
The button itself – “In musical notation, caesura is the term used for a pause of decent size. The same word is used for the part of a poem when you take a breath.” A caesura is indicated in poetry by the symbol || and in music by the symbol //.”
The root meaning of the word is specific, it comes from the Greek ‘pausis’, to halt, or to stop. Could a pause be an opportunity to take stock, to think twice and maybe change your mind – or simply a delaying tactic, a respite from the endless now?
Further Information and Tickets: iklectikartlab.com
Byron Westbrook
“Mirror Views”
Ash 13.8
CD and digital. Now available to pre-order for 17th September 2021 release. Buy “Mirror Views” on Bandcamp. Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering. Designed by Philip Marshall. Photography by Byron Westbrook.
1. Reflection Noise
2. Mirror View (First Contact)
3. Mirror View (Second Contact)
4. Mirror View (Totality)
Ash International presents “Mirror Views”, a new long-form work from LA-based composer Byron Westbrook. While Westbrook’s field recording process has been central for many years to both his composition and installation works, there has yet to be a major release showcasing this aspect of his artistic practice. On “Mirror Views”, he seamlessly blends cassette field recordings with “faked” synthesizer binaural environments created from noise and unstable tones. The album’s four sections and 72 minutes unfold with patience, taking cues from Luc Ferarri and Maryanne Amacher to use the passage of time to create deeply immersive effects. Westbrook also incorporates animated phase relationships between speakers to simulate perspective shifts, blurring what is a documented event vs. electronic fabrication. This is a work of subtlety and sonic precision that is only possible to reproduce on CD and digital formats.
Buy “Mirror Views” on Bandcamp
Patrick Franke
“Iceland Miniatures for Inga Martel”
Touch Radio 152
32:49 – 320 kbps – stereo and ambisonic mix available
“During my travels to and in Iceland, I was repeatedly reminded of the film “Despair” by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. My desire to immerse myself in a peaceful environment for some time and also my naïve projections, unexpectedly and drastically caught up with reality.
Hundreds of thousands of people visit Iceland every year for comparatively short trips. Many escape their ecologically and aesthetically depleted places of origin to seek the salvation of unspoiltness on the island. One could get the impression they are driven by the belief that they are entitled to it - as if someone else were cheating them out of this salvation at home, that there is no connection between them and the cause of the condition of the ecosystems there.
From this desire, the natural history and ecology of Iceland, but also the lifeworlds of the inhabitants are often ignored. All irritations are suppressed in order to be able to hold on to the sentimental image of the magical, untouched island. To this end, some of these holidaymakers may even expect the islanders to kindly maintain it in a state that does not stand in the way of their projections – a strange, structurally colonial habitus.
Oscillating between the ecosystem of Iceland, the Iceland of its inhabitants and the Iceland of my expectations, I tried to focus entirely on the sounds themselves, during the recording and organisational processes for this piece.
I didn’t want to give much room to my preconceptions about how sonographic sketches of the island should sound. I simply wanted to forget them.
Therefore, the “Iceland Miniatures” can be understood as reconstructed subjective, sonic impressions. They are based on long listening sessions which preceded the actual sound recordings as well as my notes of the respective places.”
Listen at touchradio.org.uk
“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 Sohrab, Olivia Block, Bana Haffar, Chris Watson, Richard Chartier, Robert Crouch, Geneva Skeen 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 147…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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