Artists: Jana Winderen, Maia Urstad, Christine Ödlund, Brandon Labelle, JG Thirlwell, Petteri Nisunen, Tommi Grönlund, The Sons of God, Franz Pomassl, Anna Ceeh, Mike Harding, Finnbogi Petursson, BJ Nilsen, Jacob Kirkegaard, PerMagnus LIndborg and Carl Michael von Hausswolff.

Format: Gatefold LP. Design: Philip Marshall. Artwork: Achim Mohné.

Side A is composed, arranged and mixed by Carl Michael von Hausswolff in November 2014 at the Castle, Stockholm and at the Carlton Opera Hotel, Vienna, using the thirteen original sound files composed by the artists during the period May – October 2014.
Side B is a location recording made on 6th November 2014 between 16:00 and 16:30 by Carl Michael von Hausswolff

freq_out has been a musical project since 2003 when Carl Michael von Hausswolff was invited to Copenhagen to invent a new concept for and install a sound-art installation. He divided up the audible sonic register into twelve parts and asked twelve artists, musicians, composers and architects to each accept one of the twelve parts and compose a sonic piece from it. The result became twelve compositions/art works that were simultaneously played on twelve different sound systems in the art space of Charlottenborg and by this becoming one piece.

During the following years freq_out has also been installed in the cities of Oslo, Berlin, Paris, Budapest, Chiang Mai, Kortrijk, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Marrakech.
This LP contains the studio mix and a live recording of the first permanent installation of a freq_out piece called freq_out 1.2 ∞ Skandion.

The work is up and running in the entrance garden at the Skandion Clinique – a new hospital for cancer treatment inaugurated in May this year (2015) – in Uppsala, Sweden. It’s accessible 24/7 and anyone that comes by the place can enjoy the work.

Buy “freq_out 1.2 ∞ Skandion” [Gatefold LP] in the TouchShop
www.freq-out.org
www.ashinternational.com

Re:Sound
Saturday, September 19 at 3:00pm
Magazine A-168 on Mare Island
Railroad Ave and Mercado Ct.,
Vallejo, CA 94592

Re:Sound + 23five present an afternoon of Touch

Simon Scott
Steve Roden
Mark Van Hoen
Touch “Live Mix”

+ Screening of the Fennesz Wozencroft film “Liquid Music”.
Doors at 3pm, Screening of Liquid Music at 3:30.

Tickets – ticketriver.com
ReSound on Facebook
Event on Facebook

CD + Download – available 4th September – on pre-sale now.
24-bit Download – available to download now

When you buy the CD version you receive two bonus tracks not available elsewhere:

1. ‘Into Birch’ (Pipe organ and electric guitar)
2. ‘Mere’ (Acoustic 6 string)
(both 24 bit, mastered by Denis Blackham)

Photography: Simon Scott. Design: Philip Marshall.
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Track listing & timings (plays as one track):

0.00 An Angel From The Sea Kissed Me
6.59 Holme Posts
9.00 Confusion In Her Eyes
15.12 Relapse
16.42 Oaks Grow Strong
21.47 Ternal
22.36 Nettle Bed
25.40 Fen Drove
28.06 Nember
31.46 Far From The Tree
37.30 Swanbark

You can hear extracts here and here.

Couldn’t sleep… arose to forage for sound. The hum of the fridge encouraged further investigation of hidden, domestic sounds; the fish tank, dvd player, a broken laptop…
Dawn and morning light allowed more sound and the guitar, in its case, beckoned…
From darkness to light…

Guitars: Guild 12 string D-125 & Vintage Guild 6 string GF-25
Mics: Induction coil pick up & Hydrophones
Buddha Machine pre-recorded and mixed, then re-recorded at Holme Fen Posts using mobile speakers
Recording device: Edirol r-09
Radio: static between stations
Software: Max MSP (self-programmed), Supercollider & Logic Pro
Simon Scott (b. 1971) is a British multi-instrumentalist who is currently based in Cambridge, UK. Insomni is his fourth album and his debut for Ash International and is published by Touch. His music is a fusion of digital signal manipulation combined with an aesthetic of compositional collaboration with environmental sounds and organic acoustic textures. He is inspired by his interests in sound ecology, music technology, the natural world, illustration, photography, composition and sonic art.

Below Sea Level, originally presented live in quadraphonic sound, was released on TOUCHLINE in March 2015, after 12k originally released the album in 2012 as an 80-page journal and seven track CD. It explores the aesthetics of active listening, sound ecology and the subjective distinction of compositional materials and sound timbres. Critically applauded for creating juxtapositions of analogue and digital timbres, the man-made and natural world sounds, captured in his local sunken landscape of The Fens in East Anglia, create a fusion of digital signal manipulation combined with organic acoustic textures.

Since the late 1990’s Scott’s solo work has been featured in a variety of international films, sonic art exhibitions, dance productions, television productions and digital multi-media projects.

He has toured worldwide since 1988 and he is the drummer for UK band Slowdive, who worked with Brian Eno on 1993 ‘Souvlaki ‘ album. His track “Für Betty” was included on the German label Kompakt’s ‘Pop Ambient’ (2014) compilation series and his solo music has also been previously released on recording labels 12k, Morr Music, Miasmah, Sonic Pieces and Ghostly International.

Scott is also a freelance composer and sound recordist for film and television and recently appeared on the BBC program ‘Springwatch Unsprung’ recording aquatic wildlife and discussing his work with presenter Chris Packham. He has taught Music Technology and sound recording in Cambridgeshire and lectured at Cambridge University.
In 2008 he established the KESH recording label, releasing global artists audio and visual projects and he has also collaborated on various projects with Taylor Deupree, Nils Frahm, Machinefabriek, The Sight Below, Isan and James Blackshaw.

Order Simon Scott “Insomnia” [CD + download] in the TouchShop
…also available as 24-bit WAV Download files
www.simonscott.org
www.ashinternational.com

RESONANT FORMS
8:00PM – 11:00PM Nightly, Workshop 12:00PM – 4:00PM, $20 – $70

VOLUME and LACE present the second Resonant Forms festival
for three days from September 11 – 13, 2015
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions [LACE]
6522 Hollywood Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Simon Scott
Bethan Parkes
Jen Boyd
Touch [live mix]
Tickets
Volume

180 gram vinyl LP – 6 tracks – + download code
We are now taking orders for this new release – shipping will commence the week beginning 13th July 2015.
Released in Poland by Gusstaff Records
Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft

Track listing:
Side One
1. Sigh (Les peupliers)
2. A book of lake (Roselière)
3. Garden (Les sureaux)
Side Two
4. From a seashell
5. Circling (Le pré)
6. Kingdom (Les chênes, les bouleaux)
For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michał Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe’s long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation, harpsichords being swarmed by woolly static one minute and pulled apart by billowing wind the next. A push-and-pull tension runs deep and constant throughout. Ambient music is rarely so sonically challenging. Jacaszek has recorded for Ghostly International, Miasmah, Gusstaff Records and Experimedia and other labels. This is his first release for Touch.
Michał Jacaszek writes:
“When poets and writers declare their enchantment for the forms of nature, they often use musical terms as methaphors. Visual artists’ creations often resemble graphic partitas, when recapturing the rhythms of landscapes.Confirming, in a way, these musical intuitions, composers write great music deeply inspired by birdsongs, wind rustlings, waves repetitions etc.
Buy Jacaszek & Kwartludium “Catalogue des Arbres” [LP] in the TouchShop
www.jacaszek.com

CD – 12 tracks – 40:20

Released 1st June 2015
Photography: Jon Wozencroft & Heitor Alvelos
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Track listing:

1. Errant
2. Exodus
3. Edict
4. Alluvion
5. Pseudoself
6. Vicarious Solace
7. The Way of Malamat
8. Peirasmos
9. The Other
10. Home, Elicited
11. The Hopeful Night
12. Dedication

Faith is the first full-length sound release by media researcher and curator Heitor Alvelos under his own name. Heitor Alvelos has been a long-time on/off collaborator of Touch, having on occasion provided photography and stage visuals for Biosphere, Fennesz, BJNilsen, Rafael Toral and Philip Jeck, as well as releasing sound pieces under the aliases Autodigest, Antifluffy and Before Surgery, on Ash International, TouchRadio and The Tapeworm.

“The essence of the present piece is autobiographical: therefore the use of my own name”, the author clarifies. “And yet it aims at being resonant to others”: in this context, resonance may be regarded as both semantic and visceral, as the sound frequencies on Faith are often of the kind that “rearrange one’s organs”, to quote the recently departed Bernadette Martou. A necessity in order to carry the gravitas inherent to the subject, a confessional confrontation with the zeitgeist.

All sources have been gathered, recorded and produced throughout five decades, all the way back to a recording by Francisco Alvelos in 1972 that closes the release. Elsewhere, sounds have been processed to various degrees, the bookends retaining their original contexts, others mutating into deep abstraction. Overall, they flow as one single composition, evocative and foreboding in equal measures.

Buy Heitor Alvelos “Faith” [CD] in the TouchShop
…also available as 24-bit WAV Download files
www.benevolentanger.org/faith

Doors at 5:30PM, Show at 6:00PM, $5
Elephant
3325 Division St.
Los Angeles, CA 90065
OFFING
Yann Novak
Touch [live mix]
Playlist:
in a constant state of rebellion
AER – mach .853
venoz tks – The Longest Day
Fennesz – “Tom”
Chris Watson – “El Divisadero – The Telegraph”
daredevil
Philip Jeck – soundcheck
Claire M Singer -Solas
Buy Tickets
Yann Novak is a sound and visual artist living and working in Los Angeles. Through the use of sound, light and space, he explores how these intangible materials can act as catalysts to focus our awareness on the present moment and alter our perception of time. Novak’s work, whether conceptual or rooted in phenomenon, are informed by his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness. His works can be experienced as architectural interventions, sound diffusions, audiovisual installations and performances, durational performances, concerts and recorded sound-works.
OFFING is the moniker for sound explorations by Oakland California based artist Chris Duncan. After a decade of functioning primarily as a visual artist, recent years have found Duncan applying learned behaviors in image making to sound works. The open ended, often improvised, compositions are a sonic equivalent to his paintings- slowly built atmospheres that are the accumulation of simple gestures, looped and layered to the point of transcendence, responding to light, shadow and the ocean.
Mike Harding has been running the audio-visual label Touch for 30+ years and in this period has acquired much experience and information on disseminating cultural sounds to a wider audience. Since its first release in 1982, Touch has created sonic and visual productions that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

Saturday May 2nd at Krems, Austria
Touch presents…

Jana Winderen
Thomas Ankersmit
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
and Edwin Pouncey (Savage Pencil) in conversation with Mike Harding

www.donaufestival.at/festival/programm#selector_date=alldays&selector_genre=allgenres

With a new imprint, TOUCHFOLIO, Touch introduces a new series of bespoke hardback book and CD publications, produced to the highest specifications and continuing 33 years’ experience of audiovisual publishing.
www.touch33.net/touchfolio

Released on 4th may 2015 and now available for pre-order.

60pp hardback book + 60 min CD
Bound in a grey linen cover, printed on heavy hi-white paper
There are no digital versions or copies of this release in any format
Release date: 4th May 2015

Track listing:

1. Fade from Black
2. Missing a Border
3. Notes on the Exposures
4. Line of a Curve
5. White Out – you can listen to an extract here

Here you can read the full interview with Joséphine Michel with The Photographers Gallery and also an essay in Photomonitor and for readers in french, in fisheye
Order Joséphine Michel & Mika Vainio “Halfway to White” [Book and CD] in the TouchShop

www.touch33.net/touchfolio

MIKA VAINIO, HILDUR GUDNADOTTIR & THOMAS ANKERSMIT – presented in collaboration with CPH:PIX

You can find out more here

Sammen med The Lake og CPH PIX præsenterer Jazzhouse label night for det engelske label Touch, der siden 80’erne har været et af de vigtigste for eksperimenterende musik og lydkunst. Oplev Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic m.fl.), Hildur Guðnadóttir og Thomas Ankersmit.

CD – 7 tracks

Release date: 30th March 2015
Artwork and photography is by Jon Wozencroft. The CD was mastered by Helge Sten [Deathprod].

stator (ˈsteɪtə) n
1. (Electrical Engineering) The stationary part of a rotary machine or device, esp of a motor or generator
2. (Aeronautics) A system of nonrotating radially arranged parts within a rotating assembly, esp the fixed blades of an axial flow compressor in a gas turbine
[C20: from Latin: one who stands (by), from stāre to stand]

Track listing:

1. Muses-C (Biosphere)
2. Shimmer/Flicker (Deathprod)
3. Baud (Biosphere)
4. Polychromatic (Deathprod)
5. Disc (Deathprod)
6. Space is Fizzy (Biosphere)
7. Optical (Deathprod)

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen, a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music.
He is well known for his “ambient techno” and “arctic ambient” styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources.

His track “Novelty Waves” was used for the 1995 campaign of Levi’s. His 1997 album Substrata is generally seen as one of the all time classic ambient albums [1].
Biosphere regularly performs live during electronic music festivals and in clubs throughout Europe and various other locales around the world. Live performances usually consist of Jenssen performing improvisations or variations on newer tracks on a laptop while video art is projected behind him; for example, full-screen video art was projected in his Picturehouse cinema tour in April 2006. Although these performances are rarely tied specifically to a recent album release, the uptempo material from the Bleep and Microgravity/Patashnik era is rarely featured in Biosphere performances.
He has been working with Touch since 1999…

Deathprod is a musical pseudonym used by Norwegian artist Helge Sten. Sten began creating music under this name starting in 1991, culminating with a box set of most of his recorded work being released in 2004. Simply titled Deathprod, the collection contains three albums along with a bonus disc of previously unreleased, rare, and deleted tracks.
On recordings, Sten is usually credited with “Audio Virus”, a catchall term for “homemade electronics, old tape echo machines, ring modulators, filters, theremins, samplers and lots of electronic stuff.”[1]

Sten also did the mixing of the album “PB” by the Norwegian artist Per Bergersen.
Sten is a member of Supersilent and works as a producer on many releases on the Norwegian label Rune Grammofon. He has also produced Motorpsycho and has worked with Biosphere on an Arne Nordheim tribute album called Nordheim Transformed.
Mastered by Helge Sten at Audio Virus LAB. This work was commissioned by Tape To Zero. Thanks to Kjetil Husebø.

Buy Biosphere Deathprod “Stator” [CD and mp3 download] in the TouchShop
www.biosphere.no

Today, 11th March, is the official 33rd anniversary of the founding of Touch in 1982…

First contact with New Order after their concert at the Newcastle Mayfair on 11th March 1982…

You can follow our progress year by year here…

Written by Jon Savage and directed by Grant Gee, the 2007 Joy Division documentary is now available to watch on the BBC iPlayer (UK only).

The 2007 documentary features commentary by Touch’s Jon Wozencroft alongside band members Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, Anthony H. Wilson, Paul Morley, Annik Honoré, Peter Saville, and more.

Watch “Joy Division” on the BBC iPlayer
Further reading…

IMPRESSIONS MULTIPLES #4
ésam Caen/Cherbourg & La Fermeture Éclair
27 & 28 February 2015

Touch presents…
Philip Jeck
Jana Winderen

Soirée de clôture, Saturday 28th February 8pm
www.esam-c2.fr/~im

Jacaszek & Kwartludium perform “Catalogue Des Arbres”
Hildur Guðnadóttir

Enthralling double-bill featuring electronic musician Michał Jacaszek in collaboration with Polish ensemble, Kwartludium, plus a solo set from Icelandic cellist and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir.

Jacaszek’s collaboration with Kwartludium evokes the sounds of trees and feel of the forest; and in doing so they use a whole host of classical and modern techniques. In keeping with a lot of modern classical there is a direct link with the past masters, and here the link to Messiaen’s Catalogue d’Oiseaux can’t be a coincidence.

“… and the trees, like earth’s wistful sighs to the sky” – K. Janiszewska

Jacaszek and Kwartludium’s album “Catalogue des Abres” and Hildur Gudnadottir’s “Saman” were both released summer 2014

www.cafeoto.co.uk

Photos by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee

Continue reading →

BJNilsen interviewed by KCRW’s Madeleine Brand, ahead of tomorrow’s premiere in Los Angeles of his sound installation for The Broad Museum

“L.A.’s newest art museum won’t open for another seven months, but visitors can get a sneak peek this weekend. The Broad Museum – located downtown, next to Walt Disney Concert Hall – is opening one floor of its new building on Sunday. We hear from the museum’s leader, and one of the artists whose work will be showcased this weekend.”

Click here to listen on kcrw.com
and Yann Novak is featured on Fluid Radio

Sky-lit: Volume, Light and Sound at the Broad
BJNilsen & Yann Novak
Sunday, 15th February | 3–10 pm
General Admission Tickets: $10

The Broad is a new contemporary art museum being built by philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, opening 20th September 2015.

With construction of the building nearing completion, The Broad is offering the public an unprecedented glimpse into the unfinished museum on Sunday 15th February, when two temporary art installations will activate the expansive third-floor gallery designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. For one day only, visitors will be able to see The Broad’s vast, column-free third-floor gallery in its raw state, before the art walls are put in place for the museum’s opening.

“DTLA” is an audio installation by Swedish omposer and sound artist BJ Nilsen, who recorded sounds in more than a dozen locations to create what’s described as “an abstract audio landscape of downtown Los Angeles.”

After dark, “Stillness,” a work in sound and light by Los Angeles artist Yann Novak, will aim to immerse museum-goers in an “environment for reflection” about “the effect of climate and light on their physical and emotional states.”

Curated by Ed Patuto

Reservations: thebroad.org/skylit
www.bjnilsen.com
www.yannnovak.com

The New York Times
LA Times and sneak preview
KCRW (preview)
KCRW (blog)
Cultural Weekly

Many congrats to Jóhann Jóhannsson for his Golden Globe Award for the soundtrack to The Theory of Everything… Apart from releasing the two albums Englabörn and Virthulegu Forsetar, it was Jóhann who recommended Hildur Guðnadóttir to Touch, so there is a strong affinity…

Jóhann’s soundtrack with BJNilsen for the film I Am Here is just out on vinyl (with free download)

Hazard
Mark Van Hoen
Pinkcourtesyphone
(presented by Mike Harding)

LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions)
January 21, 2015, 8:00PM, $10 advanced, $15 at the door
VOLUME is please to present an evening of performances by Touch-related artists curated by Mike Harding.

You can buy tickets here