Touch Newsletter #285
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #285. Announcing two new tapes from The Tapeworm. “The Real Occult’s In The Pubs Of The East End, In The Sinking Ships Of The Thames” by Superior London Pulp (Nonexistent / Stonecirclesampler) and “Giving Water to the Dead”, a split release by Robert Takahashi Crouch and Yann Novak. More details below…
On 19 July, The Tapeworm’s Savage Pencil has a free event at Rough Trade East. To be expected: a Creative Summoning workshop, short film and Q&A plus live music, special guests and more.
Superior London Pulp
“The Real Occult’s In The Pubs Of The East End, In The Sinking Ships Of The Thames”
TTW#155
Cassette in an edition of 100 copies. Buy “The Real Occult’s In The Pubs Of The East End, In The Sinking Ships Of The Thames” on Bandcamp. Illustration – SavX.
A1: Cold Water
A2: Opium Fogs
A3: Docker Blues
A4: Submerged
A5: Haunted Cassette Spools From ’92 Jungle Tape Packs Washed Up On Bermondsey Beach Waste Away And Dissolve Into The Thames Like Nightmares
A6: Mysterious Rural Experiences Leak Into The Town And Colour His Perception Of It
A7: The Relatively Poor Quality Of London's Water
A8: Sliding Into the Thames
A9: Drink The City
A10: Subterranean Southwark
A11: This Is Where C. Wilson Wrote Ritual In The Dark
A12: Have You Been To The English Deer Park?
Programme repeats on the B-side.
‘For the born Londoner the country ever remains an incredible mystery. He knows that it is there – somewhere – but he has no true vision of it. In spite of himself he Londonises it, suburbanises it; he sticks a gas lamp or two in the lanes, dots some largish villas of red brick beside them, and extends the District or the Metropolitan to within easy distance of the dark wood.’ – Arthur Machen, Far Off Things
Buy “The Real Occult’s In The Pubs Of The East End, In The Sinking Ships Of The Thames” on Bandcamp
Robert Takahashi Crouch / Yann Novak
“Giving Water to the Dead”
TTW#156
Cassette in an edition of 100 copies. Buy “Giving Water to the Dead” on Bandcamp. Mastered by Lawrence English. Illustration – Dorian Wood.
Robert Takahashi Crouch
A1: A Determination of Salt Water Drowning
A2: Like A Shipwreck We Die Going Into Ourselves
Yann Novak
B1: Our Bodies Stirred These Waters Briefly Pt. 1
B2: Our Bodies Stirred These Waters Briefly Pt. 2
The four tracks that comprise "Giving Water to the Dead" were composed using sound materials originally recorded for the sound installation Histories of the Present, a public artwork commissioned by the City of Berkeley in 2019. But where the installation was about a melding of practices and sounds into a single gesture, Crouch and Novak wanted to take the opportunity of a split release to exploring divergent paths starting from common ground. For "Giving Water to the Dead", each artist started with the same source material and plotted their own direction without direct influence from the other. As artists in a relationship and sharing a studio this was no easy feat. Despite the planned divergence the resulting tracks compliment each other, as the artists do.
Yann Novak and Robert Takahashi Crouch are a creative and romantic couple living and working in Los Angeles. Their collaborative practice incorporates field recordings, photography, and video as tools to investigate the relationship between site and subject. Their performances and installations have been presented at the AxS Festival, Pasadena; California Museum of Photography, Riverside; Desert Daze Festival, Southern California; Downtown Berkeley BART Plaza, Berkeley; Gays Hate Techno, Northern California; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; LACMA, Los Angeles; PØST, Los Angeles; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and others. Their compositions have been published by The Tapeworm, Murmur Records, Estuary Ltd., IO Sound, and Untitled & After.
Buy “Giving Water to the Dead” on Bandcamp
Alex the Fairy
“Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch”
TTW#151
Cassette in an edition of 100 copies. Buy “Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch” on Bandcamp. Illustration – Milla Johannsen
A1: Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch
A2: Pneumatix
A3: Waking Up In Your Bed
A4: Didjdrums
A5: There’s A Cashier On The Beach They’re Scanning Pebbles Very Quickly
B1: Green White
B2: Kinda Lame DIY Hell
B3: User Sale
Composed, produced and mixed by Alex the Fairy.
Alex the Fairy is an artist based in Berlin producing music with an emphasis on electronic and concrete methods. Alex the Fairy is also part of the 3Ddancer trio, a live act focusing on improvisation and expression using electronics.
Buy “Can I Hear The Sound Of A Falling Branch” on Bandcamp
Blood Music
“For The Vagus Nerve”
TTW#153
Cassette in an edition of 100 copies. Buy “All Hail Mega Force” on Bandcamp. Mastered by Russell Haswell. Illustration – Stefan Fähler.
A: Rest And Digest
B: Feed And Breed
Strings, sines, voice and poem by Simon Pomery. Essential travel music recorded by Simon Pomery downstairs at The Park Studios, December 2020. Mixed to Tascam 38 8-track tape by Tobin Jones at The Park Studios, December 2021.
“In the face of whatever it is that is breaking our names apart” – Sean Bonney
Score for as many players as you like – the recording is for nine.
Play any frequency between 264.94 Hz and 277.18 Hz, held, bent or gliding, between B3 and C#4 – hold this note for as long as your breath and/or heart permits. If you feel you are in the same heart or breath rhythm of another player, cluster with them, or squirm out from under or over them.
Imagine a pink nerve inside your gut going up into your lungs, into your heart, into your reptilian brain, back into your gut. Imagine the colour pink on the inside of this nerve.
Stop when you feel your pink nerve is sufficiently soothed into rest and digest.
Buy “For The Vagus Nerve” 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 167…
Guerrilla Audio
Long Wave
“Suspending time and immersing the listener in a widescreen of sound.”
Each month on the second Friday, Mike Harding and Bana Haffar present two hours of audio for dublab, Los Angeles.
You can catch up with the dublab archive on dublab.com, and for the entire Long Wave history (11 series so far for dublab and resonancefm) visit mscharding.net
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