Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #196. We are delighted to release Anthony Moore’s first solo album since the 1990s, “Arithmetic in the Dark”. A member of Slapp Happy, and previously collaborating with Pink Floyd, Peter Blegvad, Dagmar Krause and others, from 2000 to 2004 he was the principal of the Academy of Media Arts in Köln, Germany. You can read more on his new website reflectionsonsound.com, where archive material will be added in the future.
Touch Radio 144 now broadcasting – “24 Hour Estonian Spring” by Michèle Peron & Peter Caeldries. Estonia has a rich and powerful nature orchestra, and this might be because two thirds of the country is covered with forests and bogs which are often almost untouched. Estonian nature sound is sometimes discrete and quiet, sometimes powerful, but it is always magical…
The Wormhole is The Tapeworm’s sublabel for other formats. It opens 2019 with two CD/DL releases by Blood Music (“GPS Poetics”, influenced by Pomery’s research into poetics and ethics) and Armin Lorenz Gerold (“Scaffold Eyes”, a 45 minute audioplay produced in November 2017 for KW Institute for Contemporary Art’s Compound series.)
Tone 66 | Anthony Moore “Arithmetic in the Dark”
Download only - 10 tracks - 67 minutes
Artwork & photography: Jon Wozencroft. Additional bonus pdf supplied.
Track listing:
1: Switched
2: Particulates
3: Synthi AKS waves
4: Spinturn
5: Entangled
6: A chime of psalters
7: Hoedown
8: The psaltery sea
9: A likely outcome
10: Arithmetic in the dark
“I like to imagine a time and place where arithmetic is done in a natural way by simply experiencing the unique possibility offered by sound, that of distinguishing simultaneous differences; the non-displacing waves of either AND both. Despite the observations of cool cats like Bill Sethares on the subjective nature of the octave´s perception, one fact remains unfailingly true. An octave is a doubling of frequency - the higher octave has exactly twice the number of vibrations per second than the lower. I am imagining a planet without the invention of writing, even of symbols and scratchings in the sand where, on hearing the sound of a child and an adult singing together, a listener is doing a multiplication by two in a mathematics without signs; arithmetic in the dark.
The album consists of a set of 10 works which focus on repetition and change. The pieces evolve mostly through the active perception of the listener. Saccades and oto-acoustic emissions are evidence that perception is far from passive reception. The transmitting ear determines much about what it takes in.” – Anthony Moore, Arles, November 2018
Download “Arithmetic in the Dark” on Bandcamp
www.reflectionsonsound.com
Touch Radio 144 | Michèle Peron & Peter Caeldries
13.01.19 – Michèle Peron & Peter Caeldries – “24 Hour Estonian Spring” – 1:13:32 – 320 kbps
Estonia has a rich and powerful nature orchestra, and this might be because two thirds of the country is covered with forests and bogs which are often almost untouched. Estonian nature sound is sometimes discrete and quiet, sometimes powerful, but it is always magical.
This sound piece features the magnificent performance of the orchestra over a period of 24 hours in the spring. The recording opens with a dawn chorus in the Alam Pedja nature reserve. It then travels to the primeval forest of Järvselja and the wetlands south of the Ahja jõgi, close to Lake Peipsi and the Russian border. The latter is a boreonemoral, drained peatland and swamp forest area.
Chirping birds, croaking frogs, a barking deer and a rumbling thunderstorm make up the choir. The star performers, howling wolves, end this nature symphony just before the sun rises over the forest.
Great care has been taken to make the sound piece time and rhythm coherent as well as biogeographically consistent. Man-made noise such as wood-working has been kept as it is, an integral part of the soundscape. The intention is to render the reality as is, not to change it: quiet sounds have remained quiet and might require more concentrated listening on the part of the listener.
The music of nature moves slowly. The recorded piece invites the listener to an immersive experience. Take the time to listen through the full length and hopefully be transported.
Our thanks go to Robert Oetjen and Triin Libe of the Palupõhja nature school, to Andrus Kannel as well as to Mariell Jüssi and Rene Valner who have helped make these recordings possible.
Subscribe to the TouchPod podcast of TouchRadio via the iTunes Music Store
Play “24 Hour Estonian Spring”
www.touchradio.org.uk
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
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
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
Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Twitter – @touchmusic | @ash10_3 | @the_tapeworm
Instagram – @toucharchive | @the.tapeworm
Touch on Facebook | The Tapeworm on Facebook
TAPP 01 | Touch app for iOS
Download the free Touch iOS app at the iTunes App Store
Click here to unsubscribe
The previous Touch NewsLetter can be found here.
