Touch Newsletter #277
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #277. As calendar dates become effectively meaningless in a time of a public health crisis, who can say when this long year actually started… the issues affecting the creative community continued in very much the same vein as before, and it was in this spirit we started the second subscription, “Touch: Displacing”.
Following “Touch: Isolation”, which covered the first lockdown period in the UK, “Touch: Displacing” was a new subscription project where the focus fell upon longer-form compositions, released on a monthly basis over the year and featuring artists for whom duration acts as a key feature of their work. “Touch: Displacing” is now available as a full album featuring all the tracks in sequence, accompanied by Jon’s photography.
Sound is one of the forms of expression which lends itself more easily to collaboration and this can take differing timespans to evolve. Thus we saw various degrees of time’s untrue arrow, specifically four unfolding projects that predated the calendar year of 2021, but all reaching fruition at this point.
Travelogue (Carl Michael von Hausswolff & Chandra Shukla) produced their first album together, resulting from a journey to Nepal in 2019, the first in a series of collected international audio diaries. In October, the fennesz sakamoto collaboration “Cendre” was released on vinyl for the first time as 2x10” – for now, the pressing plants bent to our will. The repress is due March 2022 and is available to pre-order now. Faith Coloccia and Philip Jeck first met on a Touch tour of the west coast of USA in 2016. Faith sent recordings to Philip as dubplates which resulted in the album “Stardust”. Earlier in the year Steven Hess & Michael Valletta followed up their first album as Cleared, “The Key”, with a digital single “Breathing Ring”.
Two albums formerly on cassette in the 1980s were released digitally for the first time. “Waterglass”, remastered by Simon Tassano, came out in 1984 and “Myth” by Behzad was originally released in 1989.
Jon restarted his sound seminar sessions at Waterloo’s Iklectik Art Lab. Mike’s Dublab radio show in L.A. featured a series of collaborations with Bana Haffar. Simon Fisher Turner’s online Guerrilla activity has so far reached its 155th edition.
2022 is Touch’s 40th anniversary. Given the volatile circumstances of everyone’s situation, we will do our very best to stick to the programme planned on the new Touch.40 website, but of course events might overtake us and force changes.
Thank you to all for your support, and to the artists for making it all possible. May the winds keep blowing, the rivers run their courses, the seas swell, and the earth continue to turn.
“When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains must be the truth” –
Sherlock Holmes
Touch
Ash International
A relatively quiet year for Ash International saw two compact discs released; Byron Westbrook’s “Mirror Views” and Valery Vermeulen’s “Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001”. Both release titles begin with the letter M and inhabit a dark place.
“Mikromedas AdS/CFT 001” is the concept-driven, new electronic album from Dr. Valery Vermeulen featuring music produced using data from one of the most enigmatic, exotic objects in space – black holes. With this album Vermeulen augments electronic music, art and science in previously unexplored ways.
“Mirror Views” is composed from audio elements of “Threshold Variations”, a multi-channel audio and light installation presented in 2017 while Westbrook was artist-in-residence with ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn. The audience visiting the installation was invited to navigate a dark room with mirrored walls while a sequence of colored low lighting filled the space, gradually shifting hue and amplitude as the sound played at low volume, co-existing with exterior sound. The installation’s focus was dynamic play with perception of presence, both real and imagined.
Where there is darkness, light will follow.
The Tapeworm and The Wormhole
In 2021 The Tapeworm released tapes by Nigel Wrench, Patrick Shiroishi & Zachary Paul, Howlround, The Sons of God, Rotary ECT, Cut A Lonely Figure, Push For Night, Tom Schneider / Stefan Goldmann, Evan Lindorff-Ellery, Bill Thompson, Ken Hollings and Opal X. Coming in the first half of 2022, tapes from Robert Takahashi Crouch & Yann Novak, Alex The Fairy, Superior London Pulp, Alvars Orkester and Blood Music…
The Wormhole released “At A Moment’s Notice” by Stefan Goldmann & .es – three tracks of instantaneously formed music from an artist whose work typically involves carefully sequenced and layered integration rather than real-time spontaneity; and “Jungle Shuffle”, a white label 12” by Jay Glass Dubs and Laura Agnusdei in three screen printed covers which was named by Bleep as a Single of the Week.
The Tapeworm also announced The Digital Archive of Tapeworm – long out-of-print tapes from the catalogue, available digitally for the first time. 2021’s editions – including Aaron Turner, Fennesz, UnicaZürn, Oren Ambarchi, Philip Jeck and more – are available from datworm.bandcamp.com, with more to follow in 2022.
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 155…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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