Meridians One and Two, Touch Travel, Ritual: Lands End and Ritual: Magnetic North, featuring artists such as Test Department, A Certain Ratio, Derek Jarman, Russell Mills, Peter Saville, General Strike, Jah Wobble, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, Jamie Reid, Greil Marcus, Jon Savage, The Residents and Cabaret Voltaire… Slow improvements in the quality of cassette production/reproduction – a medium designed entirely for domestic purposes rather than mass distribution. 1984 sees Touch’s first LP release, The Egyptian Music by Soliman Gamil, the composer for the National State Theatre in Cairo who trained his own troupe to perform and record traditional Egyptian music annotated from documents found in the Pyramids. The Revox tapes quickly deteriorated; they were treated at the Exchange prior to release on CD in 1987, later the original cassettes were remastered for A Map of Egypt Before the Sands.
Year
1982
4th March – Official founding of Touch by Jon Wozencroft
11th March – New Order perform at The Newcastle Mayfair
December – First Touch release, Feature Mist, one in a series of six cassette magazines. Exclusive tracks by New Order, Shostakovich, Simple Minds, Tuxedomoon, Soliman Gamil, with images, graphics and stories from Psychic TV, Neville Brody, Mayakovsky, Robert Wyatt and The Residents’ Rozztox Manifesto… The cassettes are sponsored by Maxell but the mastering quality is pre-Roman.