Touch Newsletter #214

Welcome to the Touch Newsletter #214. Releasing on Friday 1 November, “The Heat Equation” is a 100pp book + CD showcasing a new portfolio of photography by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio’s last performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for a solo CD on Touch. NB: we request that buyers outside Europe please buy their copies from forcedexposure.com (North America) or kudosrecords.co.uk (elsewhere).

Jay Glass Dubs returns to The Tapeworm with a cassette in an edition of 150 copies titled “Two Devotional Songs For Spacemen 3 In The Style Of Love Inc.”. Releasing 8 November, it is available to pre-order now.

Also releasing 8 November and available to pre-order now is the debut album by Tears|Ov, “A Hopeless Place”. Its title track is now available on digital services, with a video for album track “I Stand on the Cable” playing at fourthree.boilerroom.tv

On Thursday 6 November in Cologne, Achim Mohné and Philip Marshall present Mohné‘s “Vodou/Rara” 10” at the splendid A-musik record shop during a late-night shopping evening – from 7pm onwards.

Finally, a reminder of Jana Winderen’s schedule in Los Angeles, 5-9 November.

Jay Glass Dubs
“Two Devotional Songs For Spacemen 3 In The Style Of Love Inc.”
TTW#120

Cassette only – limited edition of 150 copies. Written, mixed, produced and mastered by Jay Glass Dubs, Athens, 2019. Illustration: TAHNKS Berlin. Releases 8 November – pre-order now.

Tracklist:
A: Devotional Song One
B: Devotional Song Two

Dimitris Papadatos is a composer, musician and sound artist based in Athens, Greece. The main concern in his work is an apposition of disparate elements that assume a re-appropriation of historically applied methodologies while questioning forms of empowering them. The biggest body of his work reflects issues as copyright, spirituality and originality, undergoing a constant state of transfiguration of its outsourcing. His project, Jay Glass Dubs, is an exercise of style focusing on a counter-factual historical approach of dub music, stripped down to its basic drum/bass/vox/effects form.

Pre-order Jay Glass Dubs “Two Devotional Songs For Spacemen 3 In The Style Of Love Inc.” on Bandcamp
More information on www.tapeworm.org.uk

Tears|Ov
“A Hopeless Place”
WHO#14

Gatefold LP in an edition of 200, and on digital services. Mastered and cut by Jason Goz at Transition Mastering Studios. Artwork: Deborah Wale. Photography: Wolfgang Tillmans. Releases 8 November – pre-order now.

Tracklist:
A1: A Hopeless Place
A2: I Stand On The Cable
A3: All Else Is Bondage (For A.)
A4: Dancing Without
B1: Trapdoor Ant
B2: Overstimulated Arcade Rat
B3: Family Feudal
B4: A Hopeless Place

Founded in 2015, Tears|Ov are sound artist/self-taught musician Lori E Allen, classically trained cellist/mixed media artist Katie Spafford and illustrator/prison psychotherapist Deborah Wale. The trio first collaborated on Lori E Allen’s ‘Tears of the Material Vulture’ cassette on The Tapeworm, a re-imagination of a brief collaboration with Madame Chaos of cut-up cablecasts, 1995-1996, on Manhattan Neighborhood Network and Television in New York City. That release served to resurrect a hibernating creative practice between the three friends.

“A Hopeless Place” was initiated by a commission from Wolfgang Tillmans to perform at the Tate Modern’s South Tanks, part of a concert series curated by the artist in parallel to his 2017 retrospective at the gallery. “We were asked to play a gig at the Tate in March 2017” recalls Lori. “I’d already started on some of the tracks, but it gave us an opportunity to present them as a composition around their connected themes. Sometime after the gig we decided to capture the work and turn it in to an album.” [continue reading…]

Pre-order Tears|Ov “A Hopeless Place” on Bandcamp
Stream the title track from Tears|Ov’s “A Hopeless Place”
Watch a video for “I Stand on the Cable” at fourthree.boilerroom.tv

Joséphine Michel, Mika Vainio
“The Heat Equation”
CODEX 2

100pp book + CD
Buy “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

Book contents: 69 photos, a portrait of Mika Vainio by Joséphine Michel and an introductory essay by Jeremy Millar. Art direction: Jon Wozencroft.

CD features a recording of Mika Vainio live at Contra Pop, Ramsgate, 16 August 2016. Mastered by Russell Haswell.

“The Heat Equation” is a 100pp book + CD showcasing a new photographic work by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio’s final performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for his proposed 2017 solo CD for Touch.

Following their previous collaboration on “Halfway to White” (Touch # FOLIO 001, 2015), Michel and Vainio had been planning a second production, and in March 2017, Michel visited Vainio in Oslo to show him the first examples of the photographs she had been taking for this purpose. Included in the book, as a postcard insert, is Michel’s tender portrait of Mika Vainio taken at this meeting.

Shortly before Mika’s untimely death in April 2017, the project took an unexpected turn. The recordings for the new album for Touch were nearing completion but his sequencer broke down and the project needed to be restarted. The collaboration turned into a complementary exploration between Michel’s both quasi-scientific and lyrical photographs, a perception of a world on the edge of discovery – whether it be born of physics, medicine or space travel – and the legacy of Vainio’s musical vision, with its vast imaginary of matter, and its tension between heat and icy precision.

The photographs and the music interact through a variety of climates, where the microcosm and the macrocosm, the animate and the inanimate, the telluric and the cosmic coexist – and sometimes fuse.

In August 2016 Vainio performed a blinding set at the Contra Pop festival in Ramsgate, which was recorded off the desk for the purposes of the festival’s annual compilation CD. With Contra Pop on hiatus in 2017, it wasn’t until June 2018 that the festival organisers contacted Touch to introduce the idea of a compilation. At which point, as if miraculously, Vainio’s counterpoint to Michel’s work rematerialised in the form of this live festival recording. Mastered by Russell Haswell, Mika Vainio’s new music is the equal of anything he released in his lifetime.

Bound in a linen cover with foil blocking, Michel’s photography is expertly printed on 200gsm Arctic Silk. The Heat Equation is released in an edition of 750 copies, accompanied by an introductory text by artist Jeremy Millar, “The Devouring Drop”, art directed by Jon Wozencroft and the latest development in Touch’s new series of “ear books”.

Buy “The Heat Equation” on Bandcamp

NB: we request that buyers outside Europe please buy their copies from forcedexposure.com (North America) or kudosrecords.co.uk (elsewhere).

Jana Winderen in Los Angeles, November 2019

We are delighted to welcome Jana Winderen to Pomona College (Nov 5 & 6) and Fulcrum Arts, Pasadena (Nov 9)

Pomona College
Free to members of the public

5 November, 4pm – The Hahn Building: Presentation of her work “Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone”

6 and 7 November – The Bridges Auditorium: multi-channel demonstration of the work, which you can find on her Bandcamp site

8 November, 2pm – Long Wave on Dublab, presented by Mike Harding with Gabi Strong & Ian Wellman. Tune in to Mike Harding's monthly show on Los Angeles-based experimental radio station, Dublab. Jana Winderen will discuss her latest work and also the challenges confronting artists in the modern era, with professional field recordist Ian Wellman and artist and musician Gabi Strong.

9 November – Fulcrum Arts - Free Radicals: On the Provocations of Awe
Free with RSVP

Fulcrum Arts, the Williamson Gallery at ArtCenter, and Pitzer College Art Galleries will present the symposium, Free Radicals: On the Provocations of Awe, a program of Fulcrum Arts' AxS (art + science) initiative.

Theoretical cosmologist Janna Levin will deliver the keynote presentation, and the symposium will also include presentations by Rana Adhikari, Bill Anthes, I.R. Bach, Nancy Baker Cahill, Beatriz Cortez, Ciara Ennis, Tom Hall, Ian Ingram, Karen Lofgren, Kyle McDonald, Rebeca Mendez, Chris Parks, Archie Prakash, Brittany Ransom, Christopher Richmond, Sasha Simochina, Jana Winderen, The World in a Cell, and Jenny Yurshansky.

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 102…

Guerrilla Audio
www.simonfisherturner.com

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The previous Touch NewsLetter can be found here