Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #156 – a digital special. We now have an extensive library available on Bandcamp. Here you can find some new releases, out-of-print items and bandcamp exclusives. The main label page is touch333.bandcamp.com where you can find latest releases, digital and physical, Fennesz’s first three albums for Touch (digital only) and more besides… Below, an index of all Touch artist pages, many featuring rare or out of print recordings, and associated labels launching here for the first time: The Tapeworm – the-tapeworm.bandcamp.com – featuring tapes, books, posters, vinyls and T-shirts from The Tapeworm, The Bookworm and The Wormhole. Ash International – ashinternational.bandcamp.com – R&D not A&R…
TouchLine announce a new TOUCHLINE digital release: “Gravitas - A Frequency Crescendo In 11 Movements” is a studio re-construction and re-consideration of a sound performance that took place at the Futureplaces Medialab on October 24, 2015, in Porto, Portugal. Woven and edited by Heitor Alvelos, Oporto, August-September 2016. .wav download and .pdf.
Finally – we are delighted to broadcast a new TouchRadio, by Farmers Manual – listen here…
Touch now has an Instagram account – follow us @toucharchive.
TOUCHLINE8 | “Gravitas - A Frequency Crescendo In 11 Movements”
Digital Download - 1 audio track – 27' 34"
Zipped .wav + .pdf
Heitor Alvelos, digital frequencies
Anselmo Canha, bass, field recordings
Anabela Duarte, treated voice
José Maria Lopes, guitar
Jaime Munárriz, guitar, trumpet, electronics
Jono Podmore, theremin
André Rocha, arduino-activated lemon tree (concert)
Woven and edited by Heitor Alvelos, Oporto, August - September 2016.
Mastered by Jono Podmore, Köln, September 2016.
"Gravitas" is a studio re-construction and re-consideration of a sound performance that took place at the Futureplaces Medialab on October 24, 2015, in Porto, Portugal. The words that bookend the piece belong to Bernadette Martou (1962-2015).
The original plan was to release the gig itself, but a series of technical and aesthetic drawbacks, affecting both the performance and the recording, rendered this undesirable. The state of exhaustion of some of the participants, after a four-day marathon running multiple fronts of the Medialab, certainly did not help: yet all reasons boil down to a simple evidence - every performer has at some point found him/herself in a situation where all the ideal ingredients seem to be there, and yet the momentum just does not follow. This was one such evening. It happens. However, the ingredients remained very much present, and so did the commitment of all involved. A decision was thus made to pay justice to what had not been.
The process towards "Gravitas" rebuilt, the present piece, began with each contributor revisiting their own sounds through their own means, while being allowed to change them further, if desired. One rule applied onstage, and that one rule remained: each individual contribution should be a crescendo from infra-sound to ultra-sound (voice mercifully exempted from this rule). During this second process, individual tracks were not shared with others until finished by each contributor.
The source material was abundant and opened up a wealth of possibilities, as it would; so in good paradoxical fashion, the choice was made to be sparse and surgical in its use, and open up as much of a reflective and introspective mood as possible. The concert recording is also in there, minimally, whenever it made sense for it to be. Other variations of "Gravitas" may surface, as there is substance in much of what was left out; for the time being, however, this is the gig that could have been.
Order “Gravitas - A Frequency Crescendo In 11 Movements” in the TouchShop
www.benevolentanger.org
www.futureplaces.org
Touch Radio 127 | Farmers Manual
14.10.16 - Farmers Manual – glague general gen (UNSUPERVISED LEARNING AND REFINEMENT OF RHYTHMIC PATTERNS) - 01:00:00 - 320 kbps
Farmers Manual is an electronic music and visual art group, founded in Vienna in the beginning of the 1990s. This computer set mode to c'mon in dictation on the B minor Asian. All ReachOut has paragraph and has a hot rod UART 13 of the real problems with seen a shift away levels here promotion and unsuccessful menu change and use the case yet this and this year amended in step 0 for restructuring and chill for Celsius until Vander all the four sources that are real and organs to be called from as a place you'll Flushing's police and how often initially and rendering rulz lives and the madness of all this is the hell is extreme frequencies fat and salt and flickering image's bourse your office. Photo: Nik Gaffney (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Subscribe to the TouchPod podcast of TouchRadio via the iTunes Music Store
Play Farmers Manual “glague general gen (UNSUPERVISED LEARNING AND REFINEMENT OF RHYTHMIC PATTERNS)”
www.touchradio.org.uk
Touch artists and associated labels on Bandcamp
Touch – touch333.bandcamp.com – where you can find latest releases, digital and physical, Fennesz’s first three albums for Touch (digital only) and more besides…
Oren Ambarchi – orenambarchi.bandcamp.com – including his sold out albums “Insulation”, “Grapes from the Estate”, “Suspension” and “Intermission 2000-2008”.
drøne – thisstrangelife.bandcamp.com – featuring their debut album.
Hildur Gudnadottir – hildurgudnadottir.bandcamp.com – all her Touch releases, including the out of print album “Leyfðu Ljósinu”.
Philip Jeck – philipjeck.bandcamp.com – all his Touch releases.
BJNilsen – bennynilsen.bandcamp.com – including vinyl deletions and missing tracks…
Sohrab – sohrab.bandcamp.com – his complete Touch works.
Spire – theeternalchord.bandcamp.com – a substantial archive of live and recorded output, including the deleted vinyl “Fundamentalis”, the editor’s personal recommendation, and recordings from the latest and 17th live edition at Union Chapel on October 8th 2016, including Philip Jeck, The Spire Ensemble and The Eternal Chord.
Chris Watson – chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com – a growing archive of Chris’s recorded output, including his out of print albums “El Tren Fantasma” and “Stepping into the Dark”.
Jana Winderen – janawinderen.bandcamp.com – and her collaboration with Thomas Köner – konerwinderen.bandcamp.com…
The Tapeworm – the-tapeworm.bandcamp.com – featuring tapes, books, posters, vinyls and T-shirts from The Tapeworm, The Bookworm and The Wormhole.
Ash International – ashinternational.bandcamp.com – R&D not A&R…
Tone 55 | Yann Novak “Ornamentation”
Limited edition CD + DL.
Photography by Jon Wozencroft.
Mastered By Lawrence English at 158.
Track List
1. Ornamentation 49:00
Presented live in Los Angeles at a small, private event. Source material includes field recordings captured throughout the United States and Canada from 2006 - 2016 and modular synthesizer recordings, all digitally altered.
Yann Novak is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. “Ornamentation” is Novak’s first physical release on Touch and continues his investigations of presence, stillness and mindfulness through the construction of immersive spaces, both literal and figurative. 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.
Order Yann Novak “Ornamentation” in the TouchShop
www.yannnovak.com
Guerrilla Audio
Guerrilla Audio is a new series of audio raids by Simon Fisher Turner.
guer·ril·la
ɡəˈrilə/
noun
noun: guerilla
a member of a small independent group taking part in irregular fighting, typically against larger regular forces.
Each audio edit will be posted for 14 days and then removed from the site, although the information about each guerrilla activity will be archived, but without the audio. There will be two postings per month with the first (also featuring Klara Lewis & Rainier Lericolais) on 1st August 2015, so please check in regularly to listen to the latest offering.
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
twitter.com/touchmusic | twitter.com/ash10_3 | twitter.com/the_tapeworm
Instagram – @toucharchive | Touch on Facebook | The Tapeworm on Facebook
TAPP 01 | Touch app for iOS and Android
Download the free Touch iOS app at the iTunes App Store
Download the free Touch Android app on Google Play
Click here to unsubscribe
The previous Touch NewsLetter can be found here.
