Sunday April 6th 2008
@ Ghost Club
Catch, 22 Kingsland Rd, Shoreditch, London E2 8DA, UK

Rosy Parlane plays a rare London date after his live appearance at the Qwartz Awards in Paris on April 4th

Touch has entries in 12 nominations for the Qwartz Awards 2008 and will be appearing live for these awards. A special edition of Touch Tone 25 has been manufactured for this event, with the kind permission of the artists.

April 3rd: Black venue: Maison des Métallos, rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, Paris 75011 (Metro Couronne).

Rosy Parlane | Fennesz

April 4th: Cirque d’Hiver Bouglione: 110 rue Amelot, Paris 75003 (Metro Filles du Calvaire). 1 hour after Blixa Bargeld, Max Mathews, Jean-Claude Risset and Beatriz Feyrrera [Qwartz d辿onneur attributions] from 23h to 1h30, with Radio France [France Musique] direct retransmission, Qwartz’s official sponsor.

Chris Watson | Philip Jeck | BJNilsen

Free entrance

Whispering in the Leaves

A major new sound installation at Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens
Presented as part of AV Festival 08: 29th February – 9th March 2008
Artists’ Talk & Desert Island TV: Sat 8 Mar, 2.30 -3.30pm

Chris Watson discusses his new work Whispering in the Leaves. The talk will be followed by Desert Island TV, where Chris will introduce and screen BBC nature documentary the Life of Birds made with David Attenborough.

For AV Festival 08, Watson has created a powerful new sound work derived from his extensive archive of wildlife and on location recordings in Central and South America – habitats that host over half of the planet’s wildlife. Diffused through the tropical foliage of the enclosed botanical environment of the Winter Gardens, which is home to over 2,000 flowers and plants, the surround soundtrack of wildlife dawn and dusk choruses will be transmitted at hourly intervals throughout the day for 15-20 minute durations – the approximate time taken in the rainforest for the transitions from darkness into light, and from daylight to dark. The sound pieces feature the calls and voices of thousands of species, including the howls and shrieks of black howler and spider monkeys, the musicality of diverse birdsong and the shimmering and hissing of tree frogs and cicadas. A highly sensory and captivating experience, Whispering in the Leaves is a remarkable demonstration of the power of sound recordings and natural history broadcast to transport us to far flung, inaccessible and often extraordinary locations.

LISTINGS INFORMATION

Venue: Sunderland Museum & Winter Gardens, Burdon Road, Sunderland, SR1 1PP
Free entry, opening hours: Mon – Sat 10am – 5pm, Sun 2pm – 5pm.
T: 0191 553 2323 / W: www.twmuseums.org.uk/sunderland
Installation: Fri 29 Feb – Sun 9 Mar 08
Live performance: Thurs 6 Mar 08, 8.30 – 9.00pm
FREE but limited capacity to register your interest contact info@avfestival.co.uk
A full press release can be downloaded here
[photo: Sean Thamer]

A full pdf of this info can be downloaded here

Touch is providing the music for the elevators in the Lloyd Hotel. Here is the track listing:

AER – As I Wander Round
BIOSPHERE – Moistened & Dried
RAFAEL TORAL – Desiré
BJNILSEN – Götland
ROSY PARLANE – Iris part 3
CHRIS WATSON – Sunsets. Breachacha, Island Of Coll, Scotland
BRUCE GILBERT – Sliding Off The World
GEIR JENSSEN – Tingri The Last Truck

Storm – Live in Bergen
Chris Watson ｬ BJNilsen
Bergen Kino
4.12.07 MB1

18:30 Chris Watson & BJNilsen perform live their soundtrack to the film by Ole Mads Vevle ‘Tanakh Bibelen Al-Quran’
18:45 Storm

Readers viewers & listeners will have noticed that the 25 year anniversary celebrations have lasted well beyond their alloted timespan. Maybe it is our response to a time-based conundrum, to further the question concerning what we are doing with our time.
These two texts were written in close proximity to the Touch 25 CD released in February 2006, and having got somewhat lost in cyberspace, are here re-presented in their unedited form.

The first was a commission by Computer Arts magazine, published in June 2006 though written a few months earlier. The second, “Digital Glass”, was written for the London College of Communication site ‘Limited Language’, both forming part of a work in progress called “On/Off”. [Jon Wozencroft, 28th November 2007]

The Moon Is Down
Digital Glass

‘Weather Report’ is named in The Guardian’s ‘1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die’ List…

Chris Watson is one of the world’s leading recorders of wildlife and natural phenomena, and here he edits his field recordings into a filmic narrative. The unearthly groaning of ice in an Icelandic glacier is a classic example of, in Watson’s words, putting a microphone where you can’t put your ears.

Instinct (ITV), for which Touch did the music design, won a RTS NW award for Best Single Drama or Drama Serial on Saturday 18th November at The Hilton, Manchester

The Ghost Train by Chris Watson
The British Library
16.11.07

Take the ghost train across Mexico, coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic, Los Mochis to Veracruz. Ride the rhythm of the rails on an acoustic journey that has now passed into history. Travel through the heart of Mexico on board the most exciting, beautiful and dynamic feat of engineering that this country has ever seen.

The Ghost Train celebrates the sounds of a project that fuelled a revolution. [Chris Watson, September 2007]

Touch has been nominated for Label of the Year by French organisation, Qwartz. Marhaug | Asheim – Grand Mutation has been nominated for Album of the Year, and Chris Watson ｬ BJNilsen – Storm for Experimental/Research project.

You can vote for your nominations from November 5th here

Here you can fine a review and photos of the recent Touch 25 event and for the atmospheres festival here

The Londonist have reviewed the event here

Touch follows up its 25th anniversary event of 2006 with a final show featuring:
Chris Watson | BJNilsen | Biosphere | People Like Us
+ special guests Zerocrop & Autodigest

Order of events:

2015 Chris Watson
2045 People Like Us
2100 BJNilsen
2145 People Like Us
2200 Zerocrop
2215 Touch 25
2245 Biosphere
2330 Autodigest
2345 People Like Us

Biosphere
Chris Watson ｬ BJNilsen – Storm

Live @ The Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol

Touch is Beatport’s [USA] Label of the Week. Beatport write: “Amassing an impressive body of work over the last 25 years, Touch is host to several of today’s pioneers in electronic listening music. Biosphere, Mark Van Hoen/Locust, Chris Watson, Philip Jeck, Fennesz are among their current catalog artists…”

A full programme for this festival can be found here

‘THE SOUND OF SANCTUARY’, an installation will appear at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, throughout the festival.

Tropical rain forests hold a special place in our imaginations. They sustain myriad life forms yet retain a mysterious sense of presence. A place of marvels where we sometimes fear to tread. Chris Watson, one of the world’s greatest sound artists and sound recordists has produced, in real time, ‘The Sound of Sanctuary’, re-creating the sounds and atmosphere to be experienced at sunrise in the Amber Mountain rain forest of Northern Madagascar within the beautiful acoustics of Holy Trinity church at Goodramgate. This will be a contemplative installation which combines some of the common elements of these two very different sites to produce an inspiring and reflective soundscape. The internal architecture and sound of Holy Trinity has similarities to the deep forest acoustic of dense tropical rain forest. Specially recorded location surround sound will fill the space and immerse the listener in the slow drip of time. The sounds of one ancient place played in another. Come inside and take a walk in one of the most remarkable habitats on earth.

‘MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS’ – LIVE, at the Marquee in Parliament Street on 13th September 2007

The Kalahari desert is a vast open space where over 85% of the wildlife is nocturnal. After sunset the dunes, grasses and thorn bushes are patrolled by an alien empire – the insects. ‘Midnight at the Oasis’ presents an un-seen soundscape from a beautiful and hostile environment. In a live mixing Chris Watson, one of the world’s greatest sound artists and sound recordists, will create a 20 minute time compression from sunset to sunrise in South Africa’s Kalahari desert. Within the neutral acoustic space of a canvass marquee in the centre of York the listener will be transported and then surrounded by the unique and delicate nocturnal sonic detail recorded in this remote habitat.

A rare viewing of Jon Wozencroft’s film ‘Liquid Music’, produced for Christian Fennesz’s live performances, can be seen at Faster Than Sound on 9th June 2006. This installation will be shown with a selected edited audio track from a Fennesz concert.

The DVD remains unreleased…

Philip Jeck also performed – here is a review of his set:
from k-punk:

Philip Jeck – a godfather of sonic hauntology, of whose work I was shamefully ignorant until last weekend. Using two turntables and a magic-box of effects which defamiliarise the vinyl source material to the point of near-abstraction, Philip reconceives DJing as the art of producing sonic phantasmagoria. The occasional recognizable fragment (the Byrds, Mantovani-like lite classical kitsch, sonic objet as made all the more alluring by their partial submersion) thrillingly bobs up out of the whooshing delirium-stream. As he performs, Philip leans over his machines with a look of tender melancholy (perfectly captured in Jon Wozencroft’s picture, above), almost as if he is tending a dying puppy.
Earlier in the evening, there was a duet from Hildur Guadtir & BJNilsen.

Here is what kpunk says about their set:

“Hildur Gudnadottir first to perform in the ‘Multi-National Circle’, an outdoor concrete circle adjacent to a runway, Hildur overcame the unceremonious conditions in which she was asked to play (she wasn’t introduced, and the late afternoon sunlight threatened to dissipate any atmosphere) with a performance of sombre rapture, her cello multiple tracked (with live playing augmented by laptop loops) into a slow sonic ocean sound whose ebbs and flows were shifted expertly around the six speakers of the ultravivid PA by BJNilsen. Hildur achieved something akin to the dark tranquility about which Dominic writes so eloquently, the suspension of all urgencies in a viscously tactile sound that gives the illusion of being poised on the edge of stasis (perhaps it’s no accident that Xasthur use cello).”

There is also a review in the Financial Times

Tate Etc.

“With every year that passes, Joy Division seem less like the transmitter of their own era’s geist than the medium through which the ghosts of a dead future – our present – first made their sepulchural voices heard.” k-punk

Touch is appearing at Faster than Sound…

A performance by Philip Jeck and an audio-visual installation by Jon Wozencroft will take place on 9th June 2007 at Bentwaters Airbase, Suffolk, as part of the Aldeburgh Festival.
A festival on the airbase in the most secretive airbase in the UK. For a one day only the Airbase where Spacecadets were filmed and the Rendlesham UFO sighting took place will be open to the public. Faster Than sound is a sound experiment joining the dots between musical genres and digital art forms. The Festival will provide public access to the previous inaccessible Bentwaters Airbase. Come and join us in a celebration of light and sound across the cold war buildings of the space.

Faster Than sound is a sound experiment joining the dots between musical genres and digital art forms. Artists from various backgrounds will collaborate and explore the worlds of electronic music genres, contemporary classical practice and interactive visual arts. A range of immersive installations, musical collaborations, a wireless walk in the woods, illuminated cold war buildings and a large dome filled with inspiring sounds will make this a day you won’t forget for a long time. Allow yourself to be taken somewhere you’ve never been before to experience the unexpected.

There is an article on the death of the audio cassette here and recycling suggestions for your old cassettes…

Last night Oren Ambarchi played in front of 40,000 in Melbourne with Red Hot Chilli Peppers… watch this space for photos…

A feature on him can be read here