Download only – 3 tracks – 61:36
Now available to pre-order from Bandcamp

Release date: 12th July 2019

Track listing:

1. Simon Scott – Live at The Battery, San Francisco [19:09]
Desk recording – 15th May 2019 by Mike Harding. Mastered by SPS Mastering.
2. Zachary Paul – Live at Land and Sea, Oakland [14:24]
Desk recording – 16th May 2019 by Mike Harding. Mastered (mono) by Stephan Mathieu.
3. Geneva Skeen – Live at Zebulon, Los Angeles [28:03]
Room recording – 14th May 2019 by Guy at Third Eye Memories. With thanks to Yann Novak.

Recorded live on Touch’s tour of California in May 2019, with dates at Zebulon, Los Angeles, The Battery, San Francisco and Land and Sea, Oakland.

With thanks to Jen & Charles Belleville, Chris Duncan, Kevin Corcoran, Stacy Horne, Colleen Curlin, Lara dela Cruz, Guy at Third Eye Memories & Joce Soubiran and everyone who had a hand in making these events happen.

Download only – 1 track – 5:28
Now available on Bandcamp

Release date: 1st July 2019

Photo by Chris Watson

Track listing:

1. Glastonbury Ocean Soundscape 5:28

Ocean Soundscape, as played on the main stage at The Glastonbury Festival on 30th June 2019 immediately prior to Sir David Attenborough’s address, describes a journey from the Antarctic to the Arctic…

Songs of marine mammals, including bearded and weddell seals, recorded and composed by Chris Watson.

People Like Us
Daniel Menche

A rare UK performance from Daniel Menche and a a new audiovisual immersive cinema performance “The Mirror” by People Like Us;

bsh

The Mirror is a live a/v performance which splices together movie snippets with unique sample-based music exploring the masks that we wear represented through the lens, using parallel narratives across the screen to depict an ever-changing stream, rather than a singular, fixed being, narrative or moment in time.

“A feat of research and craft, this new work is a spellbinding inquiry into editing and juxtaposition; a collage one can unthread allowing the viewer to discover hidden stories through familiar images. The soundtrack is performed live, made up from hundreds of preexisting songs, as well as particular sounds from the original film clips.” — Flatpack Film Festival

Photo: Joe Derhardt

Daniel Menche is an abstract sound artist from Portland, Oregon.  He says of his music that its “…intent is to destroy all rationalized thought processes to make room for the emotional and sensual impulses to take over… The greater the intent, the greater the intensity, and intensity is based upon the blood rising in speed and heat through our bodies.”

You can buy tickets here

We have a couple of shows coming soon…

May 14th Zebulon, Los Angeles

Carl Stone
kid606
Geneva Skeen
Zachary Paul

DJ: Gabi Strong

Tickets for this show here

May 16th Land and Sea, 5428 San Pablo, Oakland

Simon Scott
Geneva Skeen
Zachary Paul

Tickets for this show here

Bana Haffar joins us from the USA, making her Belgian debut. Having trained as a professional bass player, she has now embraced electronic music fully, exploring live modular synthesizer performance. She is an enthusiastic proponent of the latest Moog and eurorack technology and has a growing discography of releases (VENT, Make Noise Records) in the last couple of years that highlight a unique melodic direction. Through synthesis, Bana is attempting to dismantle years of institutional ‘conditioning’ in traditional systems of music theory. She is interested in the disintegration and coalescence of sound into new forms and synthesized experiences.

Introduction
Bana Haffar – live
Conversation between Mike Harding and Bana Haffar

AB Salon  (free tickets)

Bana Haffar is part of the Touch Mentorship programme for 2019. You can find her full European itinerary here.

UnicaZürn
Mark Van Hoen
Touch

Doors: 7pm
Film*: 730pm
Concert: 8pm

*Film: Stargazers Assistant – Resurgam II (An Audio Visual work by The Stargazer’s Assistant and Maurice Burns). Taken from the 2018 LP Resurgam I, Resurgam II by The Stargazer’s Assistant. Duration: 19mins 52sec

The Stargazer’s Assistant is:
David J. Smith
David J. Knight
Michael J. York

Tickets
iklectikartlab.com

CD & Download – 3 tracks – 55:50

Release date: 12th April 2019

Limited edition of 500 CD in full colour jacket; artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft
Zachary Paul: Violin & Electronics

Track listing:

1. Premonition (3:30PM Lake Perris) [31:50]
i Rays ii Clouds
2. Slow Ascent (9:30PM Downtown) [12:06]
3. A Person with Feelings (Original score) [10:24]

You can listen to an extract here

Premonition was recorded live at Desert Daze, Oct 12th 2018. With thanks to Cris Cichocki.
Slow Ascent was recorded by Mike Harding at Touch presents… Live at Human Resources, Feb 23rd 2018. Remastered by Simon Scott.
A Person with Feelings; a short film by Tanner Smith.

On Zachary Paul’s debut album for Touch, “A Meditation on Discord” compiles two live recordings from 2018 and a short film score, showcasing his expressive range and unique playing style. Both live recordings — “Premonition” and “Slow Ascent” — were fully improvised on his violin (“The Duke,” 1878), a minimal assortment of pedals (Earthquaker Afterneath, Diamond Memory Lane Jr, and Boss RC-30) and looped vocals.

Notes:
“Premonition” (October 12, 2018) was recorded on the first day of Desert Daze music festival. For this performance I tuned my violin in open G (G-D-G-D) for the very first time. The afternoon was warm and bright, but storm clouds, yet to be seen at the time of this recording, loomed on the horizon.* My improvisation began in the present moment, reflecting the vibrations of the sun. Once locked in with these higher frequencies, the instrument took control and painted the evening. This performance was both a premonition of night and an astral projection towards the clouds crawling towards the festival grounds, catalyzed by an instrument resonating with the frequencies of the earth.

“Slow Ascent” (February 23, 2018) was recorded at Human Resources, Los Angeles, for an event celebrating the release of Yann Novak’s second solo album for Touch. This performance was an inverted guided group meditation. In front of my biggest audience to date, I was extremely anxious. Rather than letting my nerves lead the way,** I fed off of the energies of the audience, letting their patience, calm and warmth guide the instrument.

“A Person With Feelings” is a score for a short abstract film to be released in 2019. A modern trance film, the piece follows a young actor’s internal journey. The soundscape reflects the arc of the film and showcases the textural range of my instrument.

* Later that night, the headline act was forced to leave the stage and the festival was shut down after intense lightning and rain storms.
** My anxiety, manifesting as physical tremors in my arm, can be heard in the jagged bow stroke that opens the piece.

Available to order the CD from Bandcamp now
www.thezacharypaul.com

Bad Alchemy (Germany):

CD & Download – 4 tracks – 47:04

Release date: 29th March 2019

Recorded at Kaiserstudios, Vienna, August, September 2018
Rainfall: Vocals Katharina Caecilia Fennesz
Agora: Field recordings Manfred Neuwirth, vocals Mira Waldmann
Mastered by Denis Blackham @ Skye
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft

Track listing:

1. In My Room (12:28)
2. Rainfall (11:58)
3. Agora (12:09)
4. We Trigger the Sun (10:29)

Agora is Christian Fennesz’s first solo album since ‘Mahler Remixed’ [Touch, 2014] and ‘Bécs’ [Editions Mego, 2014]. Fennesz writes: “Its a simple story. i had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn’t even have the courage to plug in all the gear and instruments which were at my disposal. I just used what was to hand.”

You can hear a medley of the 4 tracks, which constitute a symphony*, here

* a work usually consisting of multiple distinct sections or movements, often four.

Fennesz uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic sound of enormous range and complex musicality. “Imagine the electric guitar severed from cliché and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new musical language.” – (City Newspaper, USA). His lush and luminant compositions are anything but sterile computer experiments. They resemble sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. He lives and works in Vienna.

Available to order the CD from Bandcamp now
www.fennesz.com

with

Charles Matthews
Claire M Singer
Sohrab

& The Eternal Chord

In its ninth year, Borderline, the most adventurous music festival in Athens, returns more timely than ever. The Onassis Stegi, in collaboration with the Irtijal Festival of experimental music in Beirut, brings us the most contemporary and avant-garde sounds of the international musical stage, in concerts, dj sets, screenings, and talks.

German Evangelical Church, Sina 66, Athens
8-10PM 6/04/19

Touch presents…

Simon Scott, presenting his recently released album, “Soundings”
Touch

8pm
AB Salon
Boulevard Anspachlaan 100
1000 Brussels

Today, 11th March, is the official 37th 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…

CD, Cassette & Download – 8 tracks (or 2 x cassette mix) – 67 minutes

Cassette strictly limited to 100 copies
Now available for pre-order – see below for pre-order links

Release date: 22nd February 2019
The cassette version features an extended 60 minute version of the album remastered by Scott

All tracks composed by Simon Scott
Strings played by Charlie Campagna & Zachary Paul
Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham

Track listing:

1. Hodos
2. Sakura
3. Santori
4. Mae
5. Grace
6. Nigh
7. Baaval
8. Apricity
9. Live at The Jazz Café (bonus track not on CD or cassette)

Soundings, his debut studio album for Touch (he previously released the live album ‘Floodlines’ in 2016 and re-issued “Below Sea Level” in 2017), finds Simon Scott, the composer and sound ecologist, using field recordings from various cities around the globe; modular synthesizer treatments; live strings and laptop electronics to create an album of transition and shifting time zones. The recordings were edited and composed in hotels rooms across the world as Scott was constantly on tour as the drummer for Slowdive, who successfully reformed in 2014.

Hodos, the album opener, begins with 85 mph Storm Barney recordings, ending with the fading sounds of bellbirds and cicadas recorded in Brisbane 2018. “I took a home recording I made of Storm Barney in Cambridge, listening to it on repeat when I was flying from continent to continent. I wanted this to be the starting point of the process of musically documenting how much travelling I was doing”. This album was created from the US to Asia, South America to Europe and the Arctic Circle back to the UK via California. “Working in hotel rooms and on flights, listening to and editing the recordings I’d made from all of these distant cities formed the basis of the album. It’s the soundtrack to four years of my life in flux with constant change, jet lag, excitement and the seeming perpetual motion of travelling”.

Available to pre-order the CD from Bandcamp now
Available to pre-order the Cassette from Bandcamp now
www.simonscott.org

UnicaZürn
Howlround
Touch

You can buy tickets here

iklectikartlab.com

Download only – 10 tracks – 67 minutes

Track listing:

01. Switched
02. Particulates
03. Synthi AKS waves
04. Spinturn
05. Entangled
06. A chime of psalters
07. Hoedown
08. The psaltery sea
09. A likely outcome
10. Arithmetic in the dark

I like to imagine a time and place where arithmetic is done in a natural way by simply experiencing the unique possibility offered by sound, that of distinguishing simultaneous differences; the non-displacing waves of either AND both. Despite the observations of cool cats like Bill Sethares on the subjective nature of the octave´s perception, one fact remains  unfailingly true. An octave is a doubling of frequency – the higher octave has exactly twice the number of vibrations per second than the lower. I am imagining a planet without the invention of writing, even of symbols and scratchings in the sand where, on hearing the sound of a child and an adult singing together, a listener is doing a multiplication by two in a mathematics without signs; arithmetic in the dark.

The album consists of a set of 10 works which focus on repetition and change. The pieces evolve mostly through the active perception of the listener. Saccades and oto-acoustic emissions are evidence that perception is far from passive reception. The transmitting ear determines much about what it takes in. [Anthony Moore, Arles, November 2018]

Available to buy from Bandcamp now
www.reflectionsonsound.com

Vinyl LP – 4 tracks – 32:59
+ 6 bonus tracks

Track listing:

Side A
1. Threip 11:53
2. The Black Path 5:21

Side B
3. Talkin Tarn 8:23
4. Moat 7:22

Bonus Tracks:

5. Cloven Stone
6. Dungeon Ghyll
7. Aira Force
8. a-melt-saetr
9. Carling Knott
10. Blea

[The Present Continuous]

Profile: Modern Trends In Tape Music and Contemporary Artists in The Field

You can read a feature here

In December 2017, Howlround (Robin the Fog) was invited to perform at “The Winter Solstice Soundscapes” event for the recently opened record store “Vinyl Café” in his home town of Carlisle, Cumbria. Inspired by the reception to his first ever performance in the great border city, he covered his parent’s dining room table with the same equipment, stretched loops of tape around his mum’s seasonal candlesticks when she wasn’t looking… and this LP is the result. The only equipment used on the album is two 1/4” reel-to-reel tape machines and one microphone. The sounds created are entirely at the discretion of the machines (much of them derived from ‘closed-input’ recordings) and all tracks were produced in a single take. There are no edits, no overdubs and no additional effects.

This marks a new, heavier direction for Howlround, a project better known for more ambient work. Described as ‘Tapeloop Techno’, thick knotty tangles of dense, pulsating bass are an echo of Robin’s early days making bad dance music, while the abrasive snarls of feedback swirling around these tracks point to his more recent embrace of indeterminacy and chance composition. Previous vinyl releases on Psyché Tropes, The Wormhole, A Year in the Country and Front & Follow as well as his own label The Fog Signals have shown a deep understanding of the possibilities of tape manipulation. On The Debatable Lands Howlround eschews the usual field recordings in favour of exploring the interior world of the machines themselves.

Available to order from Bandcamp now
www.howlround.co.uk

Watch this church concert and tribute to Jóhann Jóhannsson. A complete live performance of ‘Virðulegu Forsetar’, Jóhann Jóhannsson’s second album, which we released in 2004, following his debut ‘Englabörn’.

CD + booklet – 3 tracks – 77:49

Track listing:

1. Interview with Carlos Duarte 5:48
2. Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone – Headphones mix 37:00
3. Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone – Speakers mix 35:00

Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft
Booklet photography by Philipp Assmy
Mastered by Denis Blackham, Skye

The marginal ice zone is the dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice, which is ecologically extremely vulnerable. The phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the oxygen on the planet. During spring, this zone is the most important CO2 sink in our biosphere. In Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone the sounds of the living creatures become a voice in the current political debate concerning the official definition of the location of the ice edge.

In view of the recent UN Climate Change report, this release is most timely…

The listener experiences the bloom of plankton, the shifting and crackling sea ice in the Barents Sea around Spitsbergen, towards the North Pole, and the underwater sounds made by bearded seals, migrating species such as humpbacks and orcas, and the sound made by hunting saithe, crustaceans and spawning cod, all depending on the spring bloom.

Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone is a Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology commission first shown as a 7 channel installation at the Sonic Acts festival (Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam, 2017). It was supported by Art & Technology – Arts Council Norway, Fond for lyd og bilde, Tono stipendet, ARCEx research cruise on R/V Helmer Hanssen, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Thanks to Paul Wassmann, Ingrid Wiedmann, Britt Kramvig, Berit Kristoffersen, Hilde Methi, Annette Wolfsberger, North Sailing, Arctic Encounters, Mamont Foundation & TBA21 Academy.

CARLOS M. DUARTE is Professor of Marine Science, Tarek Ahmed Juffali Research Chair in Red Sea Ecology, Biological and Environmental Science and Engineering Division, and is a world-wide leader in multiple branches of biological oceanography and marine ecology.

PHILIPP ASSMY is a researcher at The Norwegian Polar Institute, Tromsø, Norway. Current activities include species-specific studies of planktonic and sympagic communities and primary productivity in the Arctic Ocean north of Svalbard. He is also studying the impact of changing sea ice conditions and associated effects (e.g. changes in light climate and surface stratification) on phytoplankton and ice algal communities.

Available to order from Bandcamp now and also here on Bandcamp
www.janawinderen.com

Strafe F.R have added 8 videos to Touch’s Youtube channel, a new spin on
‘The Bird Was Stolen’ (Touch TO:110) CD.

Watch them here

All the videos were made and edited by Strafe F.R. with absolutely no use of material available online, and thus there are no credits.

Some remarks about the animals that appear… The spider was caught by a
member of STRAFE F.R. in Romania and was subsequently set free unharmed after filming. The dog ‘eating STRAFE F.R.’ was fed with edible paper. The writing was made with food colouring.

“A surrealist’s playground that reminds us what festivals were like before festivals were Festivals™” (Noisey)

The Sanctuary / FAULTLINE curated by Epicenter Projects and Touch presents Jasmin Blasco, Robert Crouch, Yann Novak, Zachary Paul, Simon Scott, Geneva Skeen & Mark Van Hoen in Moreno Beach, Lake Parris, California

+ special guests and collaborations

www.eventbrite.com/e/desert-daze-2018-tickets-44497646659