#touch records

[soulmusicsongs]

Everything’s Love - Bobby Freeman ‎(Everything’s Love / Midnight Snack, 1973)

[noirage]

Feature Mist [T1]

Side One

Vladimir Mayakovsky: Final Verse, “Last Poem” New Order: Video 586 – 1 Soliman Gamil – The New Nubia Robert Wyatt, from an interview The Death & Beauty Foundation: Song of the Houseproud Ghost Hans Eisler/Mayakovsky: Subbotnik Eric Random Meets the Bedlamites In Cassette Conference

Side Two

Simple Minds: King Is White Tuxedomoon: Shelved Dreams Shostakovitch: Waltz from ‘The Bedbug’ New Order: Video 586 -2 Flesh : Hesitate

Audio notes:

“Last Poem” read by Ian McCurragh. “Video 5-8-6” written and produced by New Order, initially as soundtrack to the opening of The Hacienda in Manchester, England. “The New Nubia” courtesy of The Egyptian Cultural Embassy. The Death And Beauty Foundation by Val Denham and A.M.McKenzie. Hans Eisler and Vladimir Mayakovsky recording courtesy of The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. The Bedlamites on this occasion were Wayne, Dids and Lyn Seed. Simple Minds produced and engineered by Peter Walsh; licensed by Virgin Records Ltd. Tuxedomoon-Peter Principle, Steven Brown, Blaine L. Reininger-mixed and engineered by Gilles Martin; text by Blaine L. Reininger. Shostakovitch arranged by Gerard McBurney; performed by Kathron Sturrock (piano), Horoutune Bedilian (violin), Elizabeth Wilson (cello), and recorded live at the Riverside Studios. “Hesitate” composed and recorded by George Handleigh and A.M.McKenzie.

Visual content:

A5 32pp booklet featured the work of Keith Breeden, Neville Brody, Panny Charrington, Malcolm Garrett, Hipgnosis and Ian Wright, with manifestos by The Death And Beauty Foundation and The Temple Ov Psychick Youth (written by David Tibet). Also published were The Rozztox Manifesto (by Gary Panter / The Residents), “Vladimir Mayakovsky” by Alan Reid, Norrie MacLaren’s “Video Column”, “The New Nubia”, and Your Guide To Naming A Pop Group, “Nominal Success” by Shirley Ellis. Cover photography by Panny Charrington.

Feature Mist was produced by A.M.McKenzie, Garry Mouat and Jon Wozencroft with the assistance of Michael Harding. A cassette-only edition was remastered in March 1986.

[earinfluxion]

Biosphere: “Die Luftseilbahn” (Compilation 1991-2004, Touch 2012)

[cosmogol999-jetfm]

[earinfluxion]

Z’ev: “1″ (Headphone Musics 1-6, Touch 2004)

Stefan Joel Weisser a.k.a. Z’ev died this year at the age of 66. His vast career as a percussionist, sculptor, and performance artist has always inspired me, even as there is so much of his repertoire that I’ve not even fully heard. This is the first piece from his Touch release Headphone Musics 1-6, a series of tape music constructions that draw on the previous 30 years of Z’ev’s experience, having amassed a huge collection of tapes with source material to use as inspiration.

[earinfluxion]

Yann Novak: Ornamentation (Touch)

Los Angeles-based sound artist Yann Novak has been busy, having released both this recent performance recording on Touch as well as a two-hour album last year on his own Dragon’s Eye imprint, Idleness, Endlessness. For those unfamiliar, Novak’s repertoire focuses largely around highly minimal drones and field recordings, often supplemented by light-based visuals. Ornamentation is a live capture of one of Novak’s performances, and it falls right in line with other works in his œuvre. Like some of Novak's other work, Ornamentation is perhaps best understood by means of its conceptual underpinnings. Rather than rewrite the press release, here is what Touch has to say about it:

On Ornamentation Novak resists modernism's problematic relationship to race, class and labour, and attempts to decouple contemporary minimalist sound work from this historical precedent. The title refers to Adolf Loos’s notorious 1913 manifesto, 'Ornament and Crime,' in which the author argues that the desire to adorn architecture, the body, objects, etc., is a primitive impulse, and the proper and moral evolution of Western culture depends in part upon the removal of ornamentation from daily life. Loos devalued the labor traditionally associated with aesthetics and beauty, and equated ornamentation with the degenerate. In this context, one could consider ornamentation as a way of viewing decay. His examples as such (tattoos, fashion, style, painting, et al.) predictably fell along divisions of race and class, coding modernity as the next outward manifestation of white, capitalist patriarchy. Throughout the process of creating Ornamentation, Novak attempts to sidestep some of Loos's modernist intolerances by focusing on the labor of composition itself, rather than particular processes or structures. Novak began by incorporating specific field recordings from his archive, deliberately selected for their poor quality; awkward interruptions, low fidelity smartphone recordings, problematic frequencies. The selection of these difficult sounds, processed alongside recordings of his modular synthesizer, created a unique set of challenges for Novak where the familiar, reductive approaches would fail to be useful and ultimately abandoned in favor of more dynamic, additive, and laborious process. Unlike minimalism with its roots in modernism, or "sound art" with its conceptual biases, Novak creates a work that acknowledges these conventions, yet stands apart as a meditation on beauty, labour, and aesthetics; Ornamentation as an adornment of time itself.

I find this interesting in the sense that Novak eschews ornamentation in any traditional way, but he also is creating music whose utility is ornamental by nature, albeit one that largely has no shape or definition in any conventional sense. There is none of the elaborate intricacy found in the works of Louise Nevelson, nor the highly detailed filigrees of rococo, as two more sculptural examples that come to mind, but perhaps I'm merely bringing my own baggage to the table in what “ornamentation” means.

It's that paradox that makes Ornamentation perhaps most compelling; it's simultaneously hinging on its own elaborate, laborious nature of construction and execution, and yet the finished product's ornamental nature is diffuse, minimal, additive but reserved. It's simultaneously concerned with a highly labor intensive methodology in execution, and yet largely free of obvious decorative gestures or adornments; all an applied means to a decorative, arguably ornamental end without any of the formal results that one might associate as such. So while his methods and approach may fundamentally have deviated from what would be more personally familiar, Novak's end result does not feel so removed from his greater body of work. Those familiar with a past release like his Line album Relocation.Reconstruction may not be surprised by Ornamentation, for example. But while they may not be surprised, they will no doubt be moved by its sublime beauty and gliding elegance. Ultimately, Loos be damned, Novak has crafted another sublime field of drones that I highly recommend.

Buy it: Touch Shop

[affairesasuivre]

SOLAS / CLAIRE M SINGER (Touch, 2016)

Directrice musicale de l’Union Chapel de Londres, Claire M Singer était jusqu’alors dotée de virginité discographique. Elle a néanmoins maintes fois traversé les frontières pour présenter ses divers travaux et installations. La glorieuse maison Touch ne sort plus aussi régulièrement des disques indispensables, mais continue d’éditer des oeuvres dont la production et les qualités d’enregistrement demeurent exceptionnelles.

L’artiste y rejoint donc une galerie d’artistes impressionnante (Chris Watson, Biosphere, Oren Ambarchi, Fennesz, Hildur Guðnadóttir…) pour y poserSolas (lumière en gaélique), un recueil de travaux électro-acoustiques enregistrés entre 2002 et 2015.

La britannique utilise un violoncelle et l’orgue datant de 1877 de l’Union Chapel où elle travaille, et allie ces deux éléments à des manipulations électroniques. En terme de mixage et d’enregistrement, on peut ici parler de pure orfèvrerie. Rien ne dépasse, le grain du son résonne comme particulièrement pur, bien aidé souvent par la réverbération naturelle inhérente aux lieux clos et « sacrés » dans lesquels elle opère.

Le disque s’ouvre sur le somptueux A Different Place, pièce en crescendo d’intensité, au tempo enlevé et presque martial, où les notes d’un plaintif violoncelle ont le mérite d’être joliment déliées, évoquant une course poursuite à la recherche du temps perdu dans une forêt de cyprès galloise.

Il est à mon sens regrettable qu’on ne retrouve pas ce genre de tempis par la suite, avant tout parce que l’intervention des crins et de l’orgue dans un registre « dronesque » invite malheureusement à une injuste comparaison avec les exceptionnels et inégalables derniers albums de Stars of The Lid. Les meilleurs titres sont donc pour moi ceux où elle accepte un peu de lâcher la bride et la rondeur de ses notes (A Different Place, Eilean et Wrangham).

La valeur ajoutée du disque tient sans nul doute dans l’intégration de l’orgue, cet instrument puissant qui renverse la tripaille, diffuse des colonnes de lumières lacérant l’azur et rassurant ceux pour qui habituellement la contemplation de l’horizon brûle la rétine.

Si j’avoue m’être cordialement ennuyé lors du trop long The Molendinar malgré ses éparses fulgurances, Solas demeure un album assez impressionnant, où le temps se suspend, où la vision se stratifie puis se dilate clairement lors d’errances lumineuses parmi les fougères et les lichens, entre les glens et les lochs où résident les banshees.

Claire M Singer livre donc chez une crèmerie légendaire un travail de haute volée. Si son écoute au casque n’est pas à négliger, elle sera d’un écho tout autre encore chez les chanceux équipés d’une installation de forte qualité.

[naivemelodie-blog]

David Sylvian & Fennesz - Transit (Touch, 2004)