Touch Newsletter #288
This week and next our attention returns to London; Touch.40 live at Cafe Oto on Saturday 1st October and Jon Wozencroft’s Sound Seminar at Iklectik on Thursday 13th October. Unfortunately, owing to a family bereavement, Jana Winderen is unable to perform at Cafe Oto as scheduled, but we are delighted to have Jacaszek to headline. Thanks for stepping in at such short notice.
There is due to be a national rail strike on 1st October. Fortunately, buses and the tube are both operating (Highbury & Islington tube, for example is on the 30, 38 and 56 bus route which takes you right there.) But do check tfl.gov.uk for up to date information. Looking forward to seeing you there! More details below…
Out now – the new album “Of Endless Light” from Chicago-based duo, CLEARED; Steven Hess and Michael Vallera have created a “dramatic, exquisitely layered, and hugely absorbing” album (Mat Smith, Electronic Sound) - you can order here from Bandcamp.
Touch.40
Cafe Oto, London
1 October 2022
Artists: Jacaszek, Simon Scott, Howlround, Claire M Singer + a short film by People Like Us. Further info and tickets: cafeoto.co.uk
Jacaszek is a composer, producer and sound artist. Creates electroacoustic music combining electronically prepared sounds with acoustic instruments. He also works with other artists, in a variety of media including video, visual art, choreography and photography. Composes movie scores for film and live theatre music. He has released two album for Touch, “Catalogue des Arbres” (2014) and “Gardenia” (2020). jacaszekreleases.bandcamp.com
Claire M Singer is an award-winning composer and performer of acoustic and electronic music, film and installations. Known for her experimental approach to the organ her work draws inspiration from the dramatic landscape of her native Scotland, exploring rich harmonic textures and complex overtones that create ever-shifting melodic and rhythmic patterns disappearing almost as soon as they emerge. Her three critically acclaimed releases on Touch feature Singer playing both organ and cello (‘…each piece is timeless and genuinely magical’ – The Quietus). Performances include Queen Elizabeth Hall; Glasgow Cathedral; Tate Modern; Westerkerk opening for Low and the Barbican opening for Stars of the Lid. The Guardian wrote ‘Claire M Singer really knows how to wring the best out of this magnificent instrument, creating moments of sustained rapture’ Most recently in December 2021 her solo organ work “The Molendinar” featured in The New York Times ‘5 Minutes That Will Make You Love the Organ’. clairemsinger.bandcamp.com
A Howlround live set is always a spectacle, due to the distinctive nature of our performances, in which haunting and uncanny soundscapes are created from loops of quarter-inch tape stretched and balanced precariously around the venue, while Howlround tries desperately to prevent the loops from snarling, snapping or becoming entangled – part sound design, part chaotic performance art. So far they’ve taken their loops all over Europe and to the US, playing churches, basements, industrial shafts and secret nuclear bunkers to name a few… robinthefog.com
Simon Scott is a British composer, mastering engineer and sound artist from The Fens in Cambridgeshire, England. His albums “Soundings”, “Floodlines” (Touch), “Between” (12k), “Insomni” (Ash International), and “Below Sea Level” (12k/TouchLine) are out now. His work explores creative methodologies of field recording, the process of active listening, the implications of recording the natural world using technology and the manipulation of natural sounds used for musical composition. simonscott.bandcamp.com
Further info and tickets: cafeoto.co.uk
Soundseminar
Iklectik, London
13 October 2022
Jon Wozencroft: “Fluid Vortex / The Spiral Column” + live performance by CLARA. Further info and tickets: iklectikartlab.com
Jon Wozencroft developed his sound seminars in the late 1980s as a means of highlighting the potential of sound-related research and practice in art and design education. Primarily, the seminars promote the art of listening and seek to rebalance the dominant bias of visual culture which favours the eye over the ear. Listening both enhances one’s perceptual awareness and creates an oasis away from 24/7 non-stop media. The seminars underline the power of sound and music as catalysts for change in a context in which recorded music has been progressively devalued in the digital environment. Drawing upon forty years of working in music publishing and performance, Wozencroft moves the audience between and beyond genre classifications and makes connections where past present and future come alive in the moment.
CLARA is a multidisciplinary artist with roots in the visual arts world, who over the last seven years has refined her practise of drawing voices from silence. Using a microphone, analogue circuit and movement, she traces and weaves an offering of resonances from the electromagnetic, subtle and sonic waves unique to her present environment.
Further info and tickets: iklectikartlab.com
CLEARED
“Of Endless Light”
TO:119
CD – 6 tracks – 72:21. Buy “Of Endless Light” on Bandcamp. Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft. Recorded by Jeremy Lemos. Mastered by Denis Blackham.
1: First Sleep
2: Of Endless Light
3: Dawn
4: Pulse
5: Blue Drift
6: Walking Field 11:28
CLEARED is the longstanding project of Steven Hess and Michael Vallera, based in Chicago, Illinois. “Of Endless Light” was recorded by Jeremy Lemos at Electrical Audio in Chicago and mastered by Denis Blackham. The six tracks complete the longest release to date by the duo, who were resolute in utilizing the maximum time available on the compact disc format. CLEARED has produced a series of critically recognized recordings since its self-titled debut in 2011. Working with the Touch label on The Key (recorded in spring 2019, released in October 2020) was a leap forward, prompting remixed tracks by Philp Jeck, Fennesz, Bethan Kellough, and Olivia Block.
“Of Endless Light” is noctambulant, a walk through formal sonic spaces and colors beginning with the cascading, bell-like tones of the opening track, “First Sleep.” The husks of a city’s industrial past are summoned: warehouses hollowed out for condominiums, dust-covered factory floors, a distant grind of machining, clouds of metallic particles, and the persistent background hum of traffic. These remnants contrast with hints of the sterile present of a city no less cruel than its industrial past. “Dawn” opens with a grey drone and scattered electronic rhythms as wiring, and extended guitar lines suggest the opening of another cycle of the day into evening. “Pulse” offers a hypnotic pattern that suggests the movement of people through the city’s core, slowly overlain with cymbals evoking the shimmer of sunlight cleaving off the windows of distant buildings. The album appropriately concludes with “Walking Field,” methodically moving forward via a cloud of meditative clicks and looping melodies.
“Of Endless Light” is a patient listen, distilled into a sonic environment specific to Hess and Vallera’s lens. Cleared created its crepuscular moods using the core methodology of their previous records while expanding their music’s range, artistry, and subtlety. Deploying careful instrumentation, sampling, and mixing to experiment with tone and atmosphere, Of Endless Light breathes and drifts through layers of sound that veil, reveal, and intrigue. The result gives a listener much to discover, examine, experience, and consider – as well as the incentive to return again and again. [Bruce Adams, 2022]
Buy “Of Endless Light” 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 172…
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 (12 series so far for dublab and resonancefm) visit mscharding.net
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