Touch Newsletter #303
Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #303. Youmna Saba’s first CD for Touch is available for pre-order, with four of its five tracks now posted and The Howling’s “Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway” (released on The Wormhole) is out now and available to order.
Those of you lucky enough to have witnessed “Vox Interruptus” at Iklectik on 19 September can check out two tracks from that evening on a split digital-only release – details below.
Mike Harding’s “Sound Travels” [Freak Zone, BBC Radio6] is now archived here with a full track listing.
Youmna Saba
“Wishah وِشاح”
T33:22
CD and digital – 5 tracks. Release date: 6 October 2023. Buy “Wishah وِشاح” on Bandcamp. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu. Design and photography: Jon Wozencroft.
1. Akaleel أكاليل
2. Ba'oud بعوض
3. Al khayal الخيال
4. Ahad أحد
5. Tareeq طريق
“Wishah وِشاح” was written and performed by Youmna Saba. Recorded and mixed by Fadi Tabbal at Tunefork Studios, Beirut. Produced by Youmna Saba and Fadi Tabbal.
“Wishah” (“Veil” in Arabic) is a composition in five stages, written by Youmna Saba between 2021 and 2022, for voice, oud and electronics.
Following her previous solo works “Njoum” (2014) and “Arb’een (40)” (2017), this album marks a significant turning point in Saba's journey. Created after leaving Beirut and settling in Paris, Wishah reveals a profound shift in her musical expression, informed by rigorous research in the sonic properties of sung Arabic phonemes and their role in shaping synthesised electronic sounds.
The album employs a digital extension for the oud, a concept developed by Saba in her research project Taïma’. This device enhances the oud's sonic range, seamlessly integrating synthesised electronics. It also amplifies subtle, often overlooked sounds generated during playing, such as resonances and fingerboard friction.
The composition is organised into five distinct stages, each contributing to a process of gradual revelation. As the tracks unfold, they strip away layers of constructed emotions and perceptions that have been intricately woven over time, to expose a space that no longer exists. Wishah is a farewell to home.
Youmna Saba (Beirut 1984) is a musician, composer and musicologist. Her current research focuses on instrument and space resonances in different sonic and musical contexts. With four albums to this date, she has collaborated with musicians of different musical expressions such as Kamilya Jubran, Floy Krouchi, Mike Cooper and the Neue Vocalsolisten ensemble, and has taken part in numerous artist residencies. She is the laureate of the first sound residency at Quai Branly Museum, Paris (2022-2023) with her research project and installation “La Réserve des Non-Dits”, now on view at the museum; and a laureate of the music residency program at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2020-2021).
Buy on Bandcamp
The Howling
“Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway”
WHO#22
CD and digital – 5 tracks. Release date: 29 September 2023. Buy “Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway” on Bandcamp. Bandcamp sales include a .pdf zine. Mastered by Steven McInerney. Illustrations by Stefan Fähler.
1. Contents Warning
2. David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor
3. The Skydivers
4. A Picture of the Picture of Dorian Gray
5. Miss Frost Miss Leslie Miss Frost
The Howling is a collaborative project started by writer Ken Hollings and sound artist Howlround devoted exclusively to their shared love of text, audiotape and Trash Aesthetics. An intense collision of spoken word and analogue tape effects, their debut album “All Hail Mega Force”, released by The Tapeworm in 2022, was hailed by The Wire as a “mesmeric disorientation.”
One year later, and with some blistering live performances at Iklectik, The Horse Hospital and the British Film Institute under their belts, The Howling are back with their second album release. Inspired by their passion for Trash Cinema, Hollings and Howlround have come up with “Incredible Night Creatures of the Midway”, which celebrates some of their favourite exploitation movies. “Contents Warning” pays tribute to the quantities of sex, horror and violence to be found in the genre as a whole, while “David Gest, Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor” is a veritable Trash Aesthetics checklist. Each of the remaining three tracks is devoted to a specific movie dear to The Howling's hearts. “The Skydivers” is a deadpan exposition of a spectacularly lacklustre 1960s soap opera set on a California airfield, backed by the throbbing of a customised street rod engine. “The Picture of the Picture of Dorian Gray” is a pounding response to a 1970s Italian soft-core porn adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s classic novel. Finally, The Howling are joined by Beth Arzy of Jetstream Pony and composer/performer Ela Orleans for “Miss Frost Miss Leslie Miss Frost”, an exacting dismemberment of “Miss Leslie’s Dolls”, a creepy Florida-based slasher flick rumoured to have been produced with money smuggled out of Castro’s Cuba. We dare you to play it in the dark!
Ken Hollings is a writer and broadcaster. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he has written and presented critically acclaimed features for BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Resonance 104.4 FM. His books include “Welcome to Mars”, “The Bright Labyrinth”, “The Space Oracle” and “Inferno”, all available from Strange Attractor/MIT Press. His latest book for them is “The Trash Project Volume Two: Purgatory”.
Howlround was founded by sound designer and radio producer Robin The Fog in 2012 to create recordings, performances and installations entirely from manipulating magnetic tape on a quartet of vintage tape machines, with all additional effects and artificial reverb strictly forbidden – a process that has been described by Electronic Sound magazine as “conjur[ing] magic”. Several albums later, his initial attempts to become a “one man Radiophonic Workshop” have morphed into using closed input tape-loops to create blistering noise and primitive techno, which is quite a long way from where he started.
Buy on Bandcamp
drøne with Julia Mariko / Philip Marshall
“Vox Interruptus”
VI1
Digital – 2 tracks. Release date: 27 September 2023. Buy “Vox Interruptus” on Bandcamp. Mastered by Mark Van Hoen. Photography by Nico Van Hoen.
1. drøne with Julia Mariko - Vox Interruptus 19:49
2. Philip Marshall - Operattack 15:42
Recorded live at “Vox Interruptus”, 19 September 2023 at Iklectik, London. “Vox Interruptus” featured live performances by Jonathan Thomas Miller, drøne with Julia Mariko (soprano), The Howling and Dale Cornish. Philip Marshall was the DJ. Recorded by Isa Barzizza. With thanks to Iklectik and English Touring Opera.
English Touring Opera approached drøne to consider working with an opera singer to see if there were collaborative possibilities between score-based work and improvised experimental sound and music. After a rehearsal at Mountview, their HQ, with soprano Julia Mariko, all parties definitely felt there was something to work on and here is the first result… English Touring Opera are touring the operas that inspired this work at venues around the country until mid-November: englishtouringopera.org.uk
London-born Philip Marshall is a graphic designer working with record labels, musicians, cultural events and fashion brands. He is a co-founder of The Tapeworm cassette label which develops new ideas for a once-obsolete medium and which, since 2009, has released over 150 tapes. For “Vox Interruptus”, Marshall manipulated audio from random opera cassettes, played on a Sony WM-D6C through a Korg Monotron Delay into a Bastl Bestie.
Buy 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 196…
Guerrilla Audio
Long Wave
“Suspending time and immersing the listener in a widescreen of sound.”
Long Wave has now moved to the second Tuesday of the month from 8am-10pm PST.
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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