Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #186. Heralding Simon Scott’s new album, “Soundings”, to be released on Touch later this year, we are delighted to announce “Grace”, a digital-only 18 minute EP.
In Los Angeles on 27 July 2018, “Sleepless: The Music Center After Hours” includes installations by Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, and Slow Sound featuring Zachary Paul & Jasmin Blasco. The following week finds Mark Van Hoen, Geneva Skeen, Zachary Paul & roughmusic performing live in LA at “Touch presents… Live at Coaxial”. Further details on both events below…
Tone 64 | Simon Scott “Grace”
Digital-only – 1 track EP – 18:39
Photography by Jon Wozencroft
Track listing:
1. Grace
We are delighted to announce the release of this 18 minute EP on 10th August 2018 from Simon Scott. Heralding his new album, “Soundings”, which will be released on Touch later this year, “Grace” features Charlie Campagna on ‘cello and Zachary Paul on viola and violin, the strings performed and recorded at Green House Studios, Glendale, California.
“Grace” begins with a 12 string acoustic guitar fed into a modular synthesiser that spits out beautiful grains of sound that rise and fall like the sun. Textures build up and then slip away leaving a pipe organ playing and the church room recordings sonically revealing passing cyclists, rainfall and Cambridge bus station. It shimmers like an oscillating river until the strings fade and the final third section slips in and a deep organ tone leads the tapestry of sound into field recordings, strings and processed instruments. The contact mics on the organ pipes are heard, floorboards and unidentified human sounds appear and the alarm call of a blackbird seeps into the piece.
Pre-order Simon Scott “Grace” on Bandcamp
www.simonscott.org
27 July 2018 | “Sleepless: The Music Center After Hours”
Experience an experimental “Sleepless: The Music Center After Hours”,
presented in partnership with Fulcrum Arts.
Buy tickets at www.musiccenter.org/sleepless
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles
27 July 2018, from 11:30pm-03:00am
i) Phonebooth playback by Chris Watson & Jana Winderen (stereo, headphones only).
Chris Watson “The Drinking Boy”
Constable is renowned as one of Britain’s greatest landscape artists. He is known principally for his paintings of Dedham Vale, Suffolk, England, the area where he grew up and now known as 'Constable Country'. Never commercially successful in England, when his painting ‘The Hay Wain’ was exhibited in Paris in 1821 it was highly praised and admired. His work greatly influenced the Barbizon school of painters and the French impressionists of the late 19th century.
On April 8th 1826, Constable sent a large landscape to the Royal Academy. This painting portrayed cornfields, a country lane bordered by trees and a young shepherd with his sheep. Constable referred to it familiarly as ‘The Drinking Boy’: we know it as ‘The Cornfield’, one of his most famous works.
Chris writes: “Gazing through the woodland and out into the cornfield creates for me a wonderful and seductive sense of perspective. The mature trees frame a pastoral scene which is in turn bridged by clouds.
I can hear birdsong billowing from the leaf cover and a great spotted woodpecker drumming on the trunk of a skeletal tree which temporarily distracts the Border collie from it’s herding duties. Unseen and almost unheard a freshwater spring bubbles into the drinking pool, a resource that is shared by animals and people alike on days such as this. From behind, a gushing breeze ripples through the tree canopy and out across open fields where ripe corn heads swish and sigh on dry stems, their slow rhythm accompanying a skylark singing from high above, a pin point of silver sound lost to all sight, in a pewter sky.
In the early 19th Century Constable could not only see into the distance but also hear it. From his memory no doubt the warm song of a yellowhammer and drifting tones and the church clock would carry far in the humid air. Noise pollution was yet to reach rural Suffolk revealing a quality of sound that has, like the landscape, passed into history.”
chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com
Jana Winderen “The Shallows”
The source of these recordings is hidden and mysterious, capturing vividly evocative sounds from nature and augmenting them until they resemble something scarier, more intriguing and otherworldly. Myriad watery textures crash, prickle, wash and trickle across the stereo field with dynamic range and intensities, seemingly changing states before your ears to conclude with more nocturnal sounds. The Shallows juxtaposes bleak, perilous subaquatic ambient pressure with crystallising surface textures. What a beautiful unnerving organic cacophony this is, the rugged brutality of the oceans and uncharted icy crevices are captured in blistering fashion here. the listener can feel immersed on a tactile and material environmental experience where the small details and background grave sonorities develop a very effective vertical narrative based on layers and depth.
Recorded in Greenland, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden & Thailand, The Shallows is part of a multi-channel audio piece originally used for an installation in Montreal, Canada. It also formed part of a vinyl release, ‘Débris’ [Touch, 2012] and now a download.
janawinderen.bandcamp.com
ii) Slow Sound featuring Zachary Paul & Jasmin Blasco
Buy tickets at www.musiccenter.org/sleepless
4 August 2018 | “Touch presents… Live at Coaxial”
Los Angeles, 4th August 2018 at 8pm, with:
Mark Van Hoen, Geneva Skeen, Zachary Paul & roughmusic.
For further details: www.coaxialarts.org
TO:107 | OZMOTIC “Elusive Balance”
CD – 7 tracks – 41:44 + 4 sonic miniatures free with this album
Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Watch their video for “Being”
Track listing:
1. Elusive Balance
2. Hum
3. Pulsing
4. Lymph
5. Being
6. Whisper
7. Insecting
OZMOTIC is a multidisciplinary artistic project, deeply fascinated by the dynamics of contemporary society, by architecture, cities and vast uncontaminated spaces. OZMOTIC creates world sounds characterized by an intense tonal variety and a refined rhythmic research. The interaction between electronic music and digital visual art in real time is an essential trait of OZMOTIC’s aesthetic. Having previously collaborated with Fennesz, Murcof, Bretschnider and Senking, “Elusive Balance” is their third album, following “AirEffect” in 2015, and “Liquid Times” in 2016 (both for FolkWisdom), OZMOTIC now release their debut album for Touch.
“Elusive Balance” explores the relationship between humans and nature, as well as the search for balance between these two great entities. The theme of equilibrium and its precariousness, and its natural tendency to achieve relative stability connects all living things. Equilibrium is also a junction point and evolutionary engine – unstable and elusive, ready to deteriorate and to start a new reaction mechanism bringing organisms to a new harmony. “Beauty is a rare and fleeting thing; it oftencorresponds to those phases where we can grasp that unstable equilibrium which exists between us and the world at large.”
Musically the album seeks resolution of sound contrasts, in a continuous search for an emotional component that gives simultaneously a feeling of tension and stillness. There is a duality between the ‘organic’ components (represented by soprano sax and percussion) and their interaction with machinesand computers. In “Elusive Balance”, OZMOTIC investigate the essence of their sound to expand its emotional and compositional potential. Each track contains a search for a synthesis between sound elements apparently distant from each other, but in reality create a new balance – as poetic as it is musical. The album’s seven tracks draw a sonic flow in which the melodic aspects are countered by glitchesand angular sounds, and the ambient passages are subjected to heavy rains of rhythm, leaving space for dreamlike moments.
Buy OZMOTIC “Elusive Balance” in the TouchShop
Buy OZMOTIC “Elusive Balance” on Bandcamp
www.ozmotic.it
TTW#106 | “SKY-CHU /∫u/”
Cassette only – limited edition of 75 copies.
A: SKY-CHU /∫u/ – audio from the installation “SKY-CHU /∫u/” at the Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, April 2018 by Jasmin Blasco and David Okum. With thanks to Jeremy Emery and Yuta Sasaki.
B: SKY-CHU Improv 1 – recorded live at Wilding Cran Gallery, 15.iv.2018. Jasmin Blasco: audio from the 5.1 installation. Jason Adams: cello. Derek Gaines: guitar. Zachary Paul: violin. Patrick Shiroishi: saxophone.
“The desert is hard to look at, it’s too subtle.” — Captain Beefheart
SKY-CHU is a live taping of a performance on April 15th, 2018, in which Patrick Shiroishi and Zachary Paul, with additional guests Derek Gaines on guitar and Jason Adams on cello, performed an improvised piece inside Jasmin Blasco and David Okum's sound sculpture SKY - CHU /∫u/, at Wilding Cran Gallery in downtown Los Angeles.
SKY-CHU /∫u/ demands that the listener become aware of the process of listening itself. For the April 15th performance, each viewer/performer was asked to reflect on the moments of transition between interior and exterior listening – listening to oneself vs. listening to the world. The performers were invited to improvise to Blasco’s original sound piece, dramatising the spontaneous occurrence of this process.
/∫u/– the Norwegian word for cloud, spelled “sky”, is pronounced “choo”.
Buy “SKY-CHU /∫u/” in the TouchShop
More information on www.tapeworm.org.uk
www.jasminblasco.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. We are well into the 3rd year and have just posted episode 68…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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