Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #195. The Wormhole is The Tapeworm’s sublabel for other formats. It opens 2019 with two CD/DL releases by Blood Music and Armin Lorenz Gerold.
Blood Music is Simon Pomery: London-based, Irish-born producer, musician and maker of the “infinity-poem”, who released previously on Diagonal Records. Of “GPS Poetics”, his new album, he writes: “Hit record and mixed tracks from 2017-2018. Turns out I made an album, by mistake. Old school BM guitar-&-drum machine, a Linn-Drum & a Fred Moten sample, Serge drone, FM synth kicks & a YMO interview & a robot, ‘shut up and listen to him play’, 808 acid funk, 280bpm Gescom memories, a taiko ramen break rounded & a just intonation poem - abc, the whole alphabet: performance from within fugitive study. I like to enjoy myself.”
Produced in November 2017 for KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s “Compound” series, Armin Lorenz Gerold’s “Scaffold Eyes” is a 45 minute audioplay tracing the paths of four characters as they wander through the urban landscape of Berlin. Gerold is a sound artist, himself based in Berlin. His work mostly focuses on links between sound, voice and intimacy. He works across different mediums – sound installations, audio plays and live performances.
On 1st February 2019 at Iklectic, London, Touch presents UnicaZürn and Howlround. UnicaZürn will be debuting a new vinyl release “Sensudestricto” (2019), their follow up to “Transpandorem” (2017). More info on this release soon…
WHO#11 | Armin Lorenz Gerold “Scaffold Eyes”
CD/DL - 4 tracks - 45:06
Preview the album on Bandcamp
Track listing:
1: Chapter One (Crane)
2: Chapter Two (The Cemetery)
3: Chapter Three (Glass City)
4: Chapter Four (A100)
Armin Lorenz Gerold is a sound artist based in Berlin. His work mostly focuses on links between sound, voice and intimacy. He works in different mediums – sound installations, audio plays and live performances. Since 2017 Gerold has collaborated with Irish filmmaker Doireann O’Malley, composing soundtracks for her ‘Prototypes’ film series which won the Berlin Art Prize. In November 2018, Gerold premiered his most recent audio play ‘Atmospheric Disturbances’ in a solo show at LambdaLambdaLambda, Kosovo. Under his alter ego Wirefoxterrier, he has recently contributed music to the soundtrack of the web series SKAM Italia.
Produced in November 2017 for KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s Compound series, Armin Lorenz Gerold’s ‘Scaffold Eyes’ is a 45 minute audioplay, first presented as a multi-channel installation and a live reading performance. It is narrated by Gerold alongside London-based art and architecture historian Miriam Stoney and Berlin-based artist and filmmaker Doireann O’Malley.
‘Scaffold Eyes’ traces the paths of four characters as they wander through the urban landscape of Berlin. We listen in to their meandering thoughts. The lines they walk are never straight, their narrated memories and observations oscillating between the diffuse and the precise. Berlin’s cityscape echoes their psychological space, its dimensions distorted. The city’s sounds blend into each other. Scaffold is everywhere. In juxtaposing the constant reshaping of this metropole with the transient lives of his characters, Gerold places us into a world seemingly in flux.
The compositions seem algorithmic, yet mood-driven and fluid. Gerold combines spoken word with a collage of field recordings, ambient compositions and song sketches. For example, the faux-jazz of ‘Love Theme of Scaffold Eyes’ suggests a film noir theme while resonating with a characters’ depiction of construction sites by night. As we follow a character into an uninhabited highway construction site, we listen to his voice shifting gradually into vocoder, glancing a the autobahn superstructures around us, cars streaming by.
Buy or download on Bandcamp
Buy from the TouchShop
More information on www.tapeworm.org.uk
www.arminlorenz.net
WHO#13 | Blood Music “GPS Poetics”
CD/DL - 10 tracks - 37:40
Preview the album on Bandcamp
Track listing:
1: There Is No Centre And There Never Was
2: I Like To Enjoy Myself
3: What About The Punk Thing
4: Play From Your Fucking Heart
5: Glitz Mercury
6: Zero Hours
7: Banjul Taiko
8: Voice Voice Voice
9: Ipomoea Violacea
10: The Table The Table The Table
“Hit record and mixed tracks from 2017-2018. Turns out I made an album, by mistake. Old school BM guitar-&-drum machine, a Linn-Drum & a Fred Moten sample, Serge drone, FM synth kicks & a YMO interview & a robot, ‘shut up and listen to him play’, 808 acid funk, 280bpm Gescom memories, a taiko ramen break rounded & a just intonation poem - abc, the whole alphabet: performance from within fugitive study. I like to enjoy myself.” – Simon Pomery, London, 28 December 2018.
Blood Music is Simon Pomery: London-based, Irish-born producer, musician and maker of the “infinity-poem”. The name Blood Music is one English translation of the Japanese word “Kodo”: “mind-before-thought”, “children of the drum”, “music heard in the womb”, or rather, “blood music”. He has two 12”s on Diagonal Records – “Blood Music EP” (2013), and “Chicks/Badgering” (2015) – digis on dingn\dents and self-released works.
“GPS Poetics” is influenced by Pomery’s research into poetics and ethics: Fred Moten’s writings on poetry and improvisation from “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”, Joan Retallack on Gertrude Stein, John Cage and aleatoric composition in “The Poethical Wager”, and Édouard Glissant’s “Poetics of Relation”. The notion of “the centre” is exploded in favour of fugitive research into the relational. The result here is a live mix of cross-genre blood musics, given to that most freely proliferating, streamable, downloadable, capitalist communication of consumer taste: the DJ mixtape. Pomery’s use of text and voice in Blood Music continues his investigation of text-sound compositions of the 60s and 70s. His “infinity poems”, which are algorithmically produced for print as well as for his a/v show “SPEED READING WITH BLOOD MUSIC”, provide the visual art and language for his relational poetics.
Blood Music has played Berlin Atonal (Germany), Elevate (Austria) Les Urbaines (Switzerland), Ochiai Soup (Tokyo), Club Stomp (Osaka), La Cheetah (Scotland), UH Fest (Hungary), Les Atelier Claus (Belgium), Incubate (Holland), a water tank in Lewisham and at Cafe Oto in London, where Pomery curates PRAXIS (2016-now), a series of events devoted to text-sound compositions.
Buy or download on Bandcamp
Buy from the TouchShop
More information on www.tapeworm.org.uk
@blood_music
1.2.19 | Touch presents… at Iklectik, London
Heralding new vinyl releases from UnicaZürn and Howlround.
UnicaZürn follow up “Transpandorem” (2017) debuting a new vinyl release “Sensudestricto” (2019). In performance: Stephen Thrower on keyboards and reeds, David Knight on keyboards and guitar and David J Smith (Guapo, Stargazers Assistant) on percussion.
Robin the Fog and his tape machines delve deep into “tapeloop techno”; his most recent album, “The Debatable Lands” marks a new, heavier direction for Howlround, thick knotty tangles of dense, pulsating bass are an echo of Robin’s early days making bad dance music, while the abrasive snarls of feedback swirling around these tracks point to his more recent embrace of indeterminacy and chance composition.
Click here to buy tickets
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 83…
Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com
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