I've gathered all songs related to Touch from the song list to the suggestions/song game and put it into a spotify playlist because I usually prefer spotify hehe
Here it is
ahhas;dlfakjsd;fad thank you! I have my own spotify playlist for Touch (huehuehue) but I haven't shared it yet because I like to release the songs for it by each chapter. But this is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to listen to the music for it!
I notice the playlist is collaborative - are others allowed to add to the playlist for Touch/Dabi song vibes, or do you want to keep it as-is? (Just checking since others will see this and might want to interact with it).
'I always care more for music when I am playing it myself' - Hermann Helmholtz
— Tim Shaw (@Tim4Shaw) May 17, 2018
Victorian acoustician Herman Helmholtz studied sound and sensation in the 1800s; through his research he developed the Helmholtz Resonator, this object, usually made from glass or brass, is tuned to a specific resonant frequency and used to demonstrate the principle of acoustic resonance. Helmholtz writes about using these tuned devices to listen to sustained pitches from musical instruments. He also accounts hearing waterfalls, the howling wind and horse drawn carriages through his handheld resonators, using these devices to extract tones from the environmental sounds around him.
Inspired by the work of Helmholtz, this piece incorporates both ‘tuned’ and ‘un-tuned’ vessels to explore resonant sound objects. Using two large glass carboys (designed as liquid transportation vessels) partially filled with rainwater, alongside two smaller Helmholtz Resonators, ‘Surrounding Air’ comprises extended recordings of these acoustic objects. Each vessel contains its own unique sound space, a distinct resonating signature quietly bellowing and heard only at the point at which it meets the outside world.
Placing small omnidirectional microphones and hydrophones inside the glass reveals a unique perspective on this space. Recording a rainstorm through the vessels we hear a complex and ever-changing sound world from this fixed listening point. After capturing the sonic signature of the vessels I built a semi-generative synthesis engine in tune with the containers, moving towards a musical world tempered to these glass vessels, extracting tones from the surrounding environment in honour of Helmholtz. Listening through these objects allows us to hear the world as he may have done over 150 years earlier.
Recordings, processing and programming carried out in my home studio and rooftop in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK.
Last week Fennesz returned with his latest record, Agora, and it’s remarkably paced, and gorgeously rendered work of ambient music. Album opener “In My Room” sets the tone, with patient waves of rolling synths that slowly intertwine in disorienting figures over subdued low-end tremors. There’s a palpable sense of discovery lurking around every corner here thanks to the superb pacing. Despite a 12 and a half minute run time there isn’t a wasted gesture here. The first half is a steady build that teases brief pockets of melody beneath the droning synths, blossoming into a shimmering melodic peak 6 minutes in. The drones recede briefly, only to return with a heightened intensity reminiscent of a cicada cloud. The effect is as brutal as it is mesmerizing, and from there Fennesz guides “In My Room” to an ecstatic, sweeping finish. Each song on Agora has an arc just as satisfying as the one that develops throughout the course of “In My Room”, and when taken together at once it’s a thing of overwhelming beauty. There have been few records this year, ambient or otherwise, that have demanded such attention while being able to completely deliver on it.
Brian Williams, aka Lustmord, pioneer of the sub-genre known as dark ambient, may seem an odd figure to find his way to the venerable Touch Music, home to several leading names in the fields of modern classical music, string drones and avant-garde composition. Still with Dark Matter, he fits in just perfectly alongside the likes of Gavin Bryars, Philip Jeck and Hildur Gu∂nadóttir. That’s as much an indication of how Lustmord’s music has evolved in recent years as it is of Touch bosses’ Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding’s ability to spot visionary potential. Building on the experimental nature of 2013’s The Word as Power, Williams takes his slow-grinding, spectral music out into the heavens on Dark Matter, transforming his familiar assembly of deep tones and unsettling atmospherics into something both more complex and more spacious along the way.
Dark Matter is based on sounds recorded by deep space objects and satellites. From the opening drones of “Subspace” the listener hears the record of our solar system’s darkest depths rendered into sound. It’s a disconcerting feeling — I had always assumed that there was nothing but silence out in the space beyond our atmosphere — but instead, in Lustmord’s hands, the galaxy doesn’t exactly scream back at us but it certainly utters some sounds. “Subspace” is a drifting colossus of a track, quiet and ponderous, more akin to early Cluster circa their 1971 debut album or Klaus Schulze’s more ambient Cyborg. Wafts of gaseous textures shimmer in and out of focus like clouds of nebulae, never quite coalescing into physical form. The track remains entirely present, like a giant astral body that’s drifted behind the sun: you know it’s there but you can’t quite perceive it.
Lustmord’s creations become more esoteric as the album progresses. Both “Astronomicon” and “Black Static” share the DNA of “Subspace” in that they’re based on the same samples of outer space noises, but as they build up it becomes harder to engage the rational mind when analysing the music that results. This is not a found sound or field recording work in the mold of Touch stalwart Chris Watson’s explorations of our planet. Lustmord toys with the sounds he’s accrued from NASA and elsewhere, retro-fitting a context that is equal parts ambient drift and sci-fi horror. In Williams’ hands, the final frontier becomes a nebulous territory of unseen threat and dark promise, something that takes its most potent form towards the end of “Astronomicon’: as strange eructations that sound like the cries of lost souls pierce the tapestry of drones and hiss. For a moment it feels like any venture out into space won’t actually see us meet the aliens of our future but rather the tortured ghosts of our past. In striving for his most “academic” work, Lustmord has actually delivered his most unsettling album in years.
In itself, that last sentence will be enough to draw back to the ranks any dark ambient fans puzzled by the sheen of respectability Dark Matter initially seems to carry. In many ways, it’s Lustmord’s most truly “ambient” album, in that it can drift into the background more often than it reaches into one’s frontal cortex, but when those disquieting non-voices creep into the psyche it’s a truly disquieting experience. If space is at all like Brian Williams seems to think is, we should probably be wary.
