The Colour of Water, Darkness of Oil

Oil and Water as the saying goes, don’t fit together. “Pouring Oil onto Water” is a signpost to something fairly catastrophic, a kitchen incident maybe or something a lot worse. Nevertheless we need to see these two elements for the conflict they create, and how they shape the binary condition of the present.

Water is never one colour. The waters of the Caribbean and the Greek Islands have a radiant blue that is not mirrored by the English Channel, the North Sea nor the Baltic. But they flow with life energy. Godfathers have the best beachs. Water is also subject to our despairs about pollution, how tainted it has become by corrupt organisations, their profiteering and shitshow maintenance.

Oil, on the other hand: we cannot seem to shake off the dependency. Oil is always Black. Wind farms have their own limitations in terms of environment, but it’s not simply that. It might go back to an old expression, “greasing the wheel”, holding on to the essential freedom of flicking an engine on and moving from A to B. Doing what you want when you want. Is this freedom? The price to be paid after all said and done?

How does this impact music? Was it set 58 years ago in the relationship between Woodstock and Altamont?¹. Change came happen in a flash, but is this still true?

Firstly, we can see Oil in this equation as sounds and music that achieve a certain, essential permanence in the way things go (or not) – there will never be another Beatles, nor Rolling Stones, nor Nirvana nor Joy Division. Their achievements set a Gold standard. Black Gold? Water Gold? White Gold? Rolled Gold?

As for water, how did all the above managed to flow with this – in the context of their own time and the hours spent – and how their legacy has become the oil for record companies and indeed the audience. A Record Store Day release that sells for £40 on pink vinyl… the countless box-sets? It’s the Oil Industry at work. Vinyl is a fossil fuel.

New sounds barely get a look in, how can they? New bands can barely survive without the grease of social media exposure even if they can find a venue open to host them cost-efficiently. And how do they get there on public transport? They can’t and they cannot. Unless they have the wheels to support them.

Allied to this are the dynamics of the fast food industry as applied to music and culture. Binge eating is widely diagnosed as being harmful. What about binge listening, binge viewing on Amazon Prime and Netflix? That’s another oil industry factor where choice becomes another word for our addiction to convenience, staying at home as the new alternative to doing little else but nothing.

Oil and water have to co-exist. This seminar shows chemistry that makes such a fusion possible, a gathering rather than a divorce.

Take a step outside and discover another perception, it might be the beauty of a sound bath… saving water in the process.

<small>1. Joel Selvin, Altamont – Rock’s Darkest Day, Dey St./Harper Collins, New York 2016</small>

Buy tickets: eventbrite.com

Mount A, which Touch released on CD in 2006, is Hildur Guðnadóttir’s debut solo album. Recorded alone with her cello, it marked the beginning of a deeply personal body of work created as a space to “hear my own thoughts”. Twenty years later, its music continues to resonate, inspiring new orchestral reinterpretations on This Will Be Us. This edition also marks the album’s first-ever release on vinyl.

Pre-orders

Without Sinking

Released in 2009, Without Sinking saw Hildur Guðnadóttir expand her solo catalogue through collaborations with close musical friends, including Skúli Sverrisson and Jóhann Jóhannsson. Deeply personal yet shaped by a shared creative spirit, the album remains an important part of the musical journey revisited on This Will Be Us, where several of its tracks are reimagined for orchestra.

Pre-orders

Saman

Originally released in 2014, Saman takes its name from the Icelandic word for “together” and reflects Hildur Guðnadóttir’s distinctive approach to combining cello and voice. Woven into rich, layered textures, the two become part of a singular musical expression that lies at the heart of the album. Twenty years after her debut, this chapter of Hildur’s early catalogue is revisited on This Will Be Us, which includes new orchestral versions of “Bær” and “Birting”.

Pre-orders

On Sir David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, Verity Sharp presents a mixtape that celebrates the ways in which recorded sound and acts of listening-imagining can bring us into a close relationship with other species. Assembled as a collaboration between artist and researcher Rebecca Lennon and writer Ella Finer, the mixtape moves through musical and sonic worlds that variously abstract, reimagine and commune with human and more than human presences. Breath, vibration, rhythm, waggle – we meet the heartbeat of a swan, the voice of a whale, the purr of a cheetah, the sonorous lives of bees, foxes and street dogs. Finer’s concept of “the wild life of sound” speaks to something that the sonic and the creaturely realms share in common: a freedom from ownership, a resistance to neat categorisation, a space where connection can happen.

Featuring Chris Watson & Jana Winderen

Produced by Alex Yates
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002vl6r

CD/DL – 4 tracks – 23:41
Touch TO:131
Releases 1st May 2026
Available now on Bandcamp

Track listing:

1. Nók Bpàa
2. Naga
3. Muaythai Chiangmai
4. Wai Phra Kao Wat

The third in an ongoing series of collected international audio diaries; the premise is quite simple: the two meet at a mutually agreed upon destination along with the facilitation of something to record audio of these experiences on. The intent is to capture and augment these sonic documentaries of their travels which then are sculpted into soundtracks. This is done by sourcing the culture, environment, persons or events that make their voices available. The result might be pleasantly kind and floating or unpleasantly rough and jarring unveiling a light or dark world.

In February 2024, CM von Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla met in Chaing Mai, Thailand over the course of 9 days. Recordings were made at 31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit, Wat Umong (Suan Buddha Dhamma), Wat Phra Singh, Wat Phra That Dot Suthep, Loi Kroh Boxing Stadium, Wat Chedi Luang, Mae Wang Mae Win, Was Pha Lat, Wat Phra That Dot Kham, Wat Rong Khun Chaing Rai, Rong Suea Ten Temple Chiang Rai Ancient City, House of Opium Museum Chiang Saen, The Mekong at The Golden Triangle Chiang Saen, One Budget Hotel Chiang Saen…

von Hausswolff and Shukla rounding off another whirlwind 9 days in Southeast Asia in the unusual setting of the Lanna Kingdom (Kingdom of a million rice fields) of Northern Thailand. A multifaceted location where Thailand shares borders with Myanmar, Laos and China in what is known as The Golden Triangle, a commercial trade zone between the nations. This frontier region is home to hill tribes, countless Buddhist monasteries, stupas, The Mekong River, mountains and forests. All of which can be heard on this recording. Always finding themselves in the most untypical of off the beaten tourist destinations and settings, CM von Hausswolff and Chandra Shukla use the Northern Thai backdrop for more sonic tapestries and meditational sound weaving. Perhaps not always in the calming of ways but more often in the midst of noise laden cacophony.

Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering.
Photography by Travelogue
Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd.

Info & tickets
Theme Events

A Short History of Happiness

The big unanswerable question – how do you measure happiness? What does happiness mean? Is it simply a perception of one’s self which is beyond verification? In this sense it is close to the mystery of consciousness, personal and beyond digital – and AI algorithms, for the time being at least. Can ChatGBT make you happy? It will sure try and convince you that it can.

Is it to do with one’s personal experience of pleasure, of contentment? Good food and good sex? Pure luck in the scheme of the way life pans out? Being well off? Well not that, obviously, because there are plenty of examples of the filthy rich who are avowedly unhappy, hiding bigger problems with their steady accumulation of more and more. Sexual pleasure seems to be way down the list of people’s experience and priorities right now. Falling birth rates just one indicator of this global anxiety. Libido, desire, tactility, all under fire.

Happiness needs a collective energy. I don’t think it’s easy to be happy if not many other people share the spirit of what’s in the air. Is it primarily about human, personal relationships and how one weathers all the challenges of intimacy between the home and the world? – this, maybe.

Can we still say that the quest for happiness is the prime motor behind perception, feeling and behaviour? Or just give up?

The question of happiness is not bound first and foremost by privilege and money, though obviously that helps considerably. Happiness has its history over centuries but there is no way of knowing what was what, and when or where. This painting by Gabrielle Münter was part of Kandinsky’s “Blue Rider” project from 1912/13. Did they know that WW1 was imminent? Perhaps, perhaps not. The subject – Olga von Hartmann – was the wife of Thomas, a composer and close collaborator with Kandinsky and later, Gurdjieff.

Shortly after, in 1916, history might find happiness in the exuberance and daring of Dada. Things are so fucked up in the world, just do whatever you want. Cut it all up. Over 100 years later, there has to be another way for us to break the castle of abstraction caused by living with this spectre of increasing automation and constant surveillance. To not resort to violence… instead, the instinct could be, withdraw, regroup and think afresh.

In July 2011 the United Nations General Assembly voted for a happiness index to be created. The World Happiness Report this last year, 2025, has Finland at number one, which is curious given the cold climate and the reportedly high suicide rates. Following Covid lockdowns, the Hikikomori phenomenon in Japan presents an earlier extreme response to the pressures of everyday life – over a million people (predominantly young males) choose to isolate themselves in their homes, only opening their doors for food deliveries and using their internet connections as their one window to the outside world.

“Turn on, tune in, drop out”. Timothy Leary, 1967. (We need an upgrade of psychedelia, the anti-retro version). Not “Turn off, tune out, drop out”. The 2026 remix. Isolation is not the answer.

Happiness is not a warm gun.

Reading:
Franco Berardi, Quit Everything – Interpreting Depression
Dario Amodei – The Adolescence of Technology: Confronting and Overcoming the Risks of Powerful A!
Tamaki Saito – Social Hikikomori: Adolescence Without End

Today, 11th March 2026, is our official 44th anniversary…

Since its founding in 1982, Touch (based in London) has created audio-visual productions and live events that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

First contact with New Order after their concert at the Newcastle Mayfair on 11th March 1982… ‘Video 5-8-6’ appeared on our very first release, Feature Mist, released in December of that year.

You can follow our progress year by year here…

DL only – 1 track – 23:41
Touch V33.60
Releases 22nd February 2026
Available now on Bandcamp

Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft

Fennesz writes: “The piece was recorded in the last days of May 2024. I discarded my original concepts for this piece right after starting the work. This was partly due to the fact that I happened to listen to a piece by Roland S. Howard that day, who I consider one of the greatest guitarists. So, I started again with a blank canvas. I focused on the essential components and instruments that had defined my work so far: guitars, string instruments in general and samples thereof, as well as a few synthesizers with a particular focus on the now largely forgotten synthesis principle of physical modelling. Microtonality and the decay behaviour of strings were important to me. The piece, conceived as a sound installation, is meant to blend into everyday soundscapes and occasionally stand out. However, it can also be listened to at full volume on headphones.”

‘The Last Days of May’ was previously released on Longform Editions.

In 2024 Christian Fennesz contributed a new composition titled ‘The Last Days of May’ to Volume, the innovative music series presented by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, 5-21 July 2024. ‘Threshold’ is a new music programme devised in collaboration with Longform Editions, the Sydney-based, internationally renowned online ‘gallery for listening’. For the duration of Volume 2024, recordings of four world-premiere compositions were played at the thresholds of Naala Badu and Naala Nura – the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ north and south buildings.

1 hour listen made up of 17 tracks – DL & 20pp booklet
Touch V33.90
Releases 2nd January 2026

Planet Ocean – A new album from Chris Watson and a listening Party have just been announced DL & 20pp pdf booklet

Mastered By Simon Scott

Out Now: chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com/album/planet-ocean

***TONIGHT RSVP Listening Party: chriswatsonreleases.bandcamp.com/merch/planet-ocean-listening-party

In the late 1960’s the first colour photographs of earth taken from outer space revealed this to be a blue planet. It took images captured from 98,000 nautical miles away to trigger a new focus on environmental issues. This attention also revealed that more than 70% of this planet is occupied by the seas and oceans, the largest and most sound rich collection of habitats.

‘Planet Ocean’ is a celebration of the sounds, rhythms and textures of the oceans worldwide, a gathering of tidal voices pushed and pulled by gravitational forces from above and below the surface.

The photographs that complement ‘Planet Ocean’ are by circumstance land and water-based. They are intended as a parallel narrative to the sound recordings, deliberately 20 in number so as not to fit with any notion of pairing with a specific location. There is a chemistry between the close-up and the epic vistas together with personal moments at the margins by the water’s edge. That seductive and dreadful beauty – are you going in? – “no, it looks freezing!” – but actually the world is melting in front of our eyes.

Wave wash releases negative ions into the air and together with the associated sound they bestow a sense of well-being and stillness when faced by this awesome power. 57 years on from 1969 we need to remind ourselves of the ancient relationship we have with ‘Planet Ocean’. A place where we evolved from and which continues to support all life on earth and in the waters all around.

Released November 7, 2025.
Now available on Bandcamp

CD + DL –  tracks

Track listing:

1. Turadh 19:14
2. 57.0908° N, 3.6939° W 02:34
3. Rionnag a Tuath 06:28
4. 56.9500° N, 3.2667° W 02:42
5. Gleann Ciùin 18:59

“Gleann Ciùin is the second album in a trilogy that explores two narratives: my journeys across the vast landscapes and weathered peaks of the Cairngorms in Aberdeenshire, and my exploration of the rich, resonant tones of pipe organs, contemplating the weight of history and the timeless beauty of these majestic instruments.” Claire M Singer

Organ, cello and electronics performed by Claire M Singer.

Special thanks to Robert Ames, Hugh Brunt, Angus Farquhar, David Flemming, Christine Furnish, Matthew Hynes, Iain Mac a’Phearsain, William McVicker, Zoë Miller, Meg Monteith, David Robertson, Donald Shaw, Andrew Stevenson, Richard Thomas, Ash Todd and Roger Williams.

The recording of this album is generously supported by Arts Council England and PRS Foundation’s Composers’ Fund in partnership with Jerwood Arts.

Published by Touch Music/Fairwood Music (UK) Ltd.
All tracks written, mixed and produced by Claire M Singer
Additional mixing by Fiona Cruickshank
Mastered by Denis Blackham
Art Direction and photography by Jon Wozencroft
Additional photography by Ash Todd

Tickets & info
Theme Events

Clairaudience

It’s a natural thing to want to know “what happens next” and there are plenty of online Nostradamus types who want to tell you the worst of their fears. More seriously, it’s over 15 years since Mark Fisher wrote that “It’s easier to foresee the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”. This also turns out to be (very possibly) mistaken, because it is now apparent that both could happen at the same time. The ending of the Chinese support of Apple’s manufacturing base and market supremacy, the invasion of Taiwan and the capture of its semiconductor technology could turn the world economy to shit in a week. This is neither polemic nor conjecture according to FT investigative journalist Patrick McGee.

The business of predicting the future is not the same as clairvoyance. How can thinking ahead involve other senses beside vision and be beyond the exceptionalism of individuals claiming a special psychic talent? Hearing, and more specifically, listening to the future… I thought a good word might be ‘clairaudient’ and was gently surprised to discover a more collective term, Clairaudience. 

There is an urgency to evolve the significant work undertaken by Pauline Oliveros (and many others) who first wrote about an emphasis on ‘sonic awareness’ in the early 1980s, which she evolved into her continuing practice and dedication to ‘deep listening’ later on that same decade. Oliveros died in 2016 and a posthumously-published work ‘Quantum Listening’ continues the connection she insists between sound and consciousness.

Clairaudience might begin by taking your ear pods off and not living your personal life on headphones (metaphorically) – what do you now hear? Silence is golden, or would it be the opposite end of the spectrum? You hear too much? Builders drilling in the street, people shouting at each other for no reason, but you might also hear the birds and what they have to sing. You might suddenly remember the sounds your mother used to make in the kitchen when you were a child. You might hear a new noise across the way and wonder, “What the fuck was that?”. It wasn’t an immediate danger, but it was seriously alive, and I heard it, just for that moment. What could it be, where is it going? Listening is transformative. Autumn is the time of year when trees dance in the wind, and the wind sends debris down the street, rattles the window panes, blows away the cobwebs.

Having struck a chord of foreboding with the expansionism currently underway in China, North Korea and elsewhere, it is as well to remember that many Eastern philosophies present the entry points to a renewed emphasis on meditation and contemplation in the West. And so to Clairaudience – the emphasis is on the ‘audience’, not on the musicians, sound artists nor the rise of ambient AI soundtracks. Oliveros favoured special locations with which to disseminate her sounds – caves, amphitheatres etc. with their special acoustics. This is obviously not always possible. It is first about paying attention to the sounds around you, finding a quiet time to listen in to your own surroundings, to sense the subtle sensations that the everyday can conjure. Yes, modern life is loud and there’s no such thing as silence (© John Cage) but in the spaces in between you might find a resonant frequency.  

Further reading:

Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher
Apple in China – The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, Patrick McGee
Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Mediations
Stasiland – Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, Anna Funder
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
The Listeners, Jordan Tannahill
Perfection, Vincenzo Latronico

CD + DL – 11 tracks

Track listing:

1. Exocannibalism
2. Edgelord
3. Cloudbreak Swell
4. Moonbeams
5. Morphine Angel
6. Bon Pour L’Orient
7. Olvido
8. Janus
9. Vasuki
10. Ozymandias
11.Honey

Pre-order from Bandcamp now

‘Morphine Angel’ released 22nd September 2025
Released 31st October 2025

From 2019 to 2022, Gorgun drafted the record twice, then deleted most of her sketches. By the time she opened a new session, she had gone through an accidental electrocution, a cancer diagnosis, and an allergic collapse that nearly suffocated her.

During treatment, chemotherapy left her in a cognitive fog known as “chemo-brain,” forcing her to relearn the craft of composition from scratch. While rebuilding her own focus, she watched her friends, relatives, and musical heroes battle illness, recover, or slip away.

The result is ‘Earthbound’: a final, third iteration recorded in the quiet intervals between sunshine afternoons in the park, surgeries, funerals, long walks by the sea, emergency rooms, and snow-lit nights — above all, between days spent searching for sound and music. Yet, rather than foregrounding those ordeals, Gorgun surrendered to them, composing as a witness to the post-COVID world limping back to life in Janus; to the wavedrops rejoining the sea in Cloudbreak Swell; to a joyful stargazing experience in Moonbeams, to the attention-seeking power-drunk swagger in Edgelord; to memory dissolving at the doorway — the doorway effect — in Olvido; or to the way Middle-Eastern artists are ever more exotically consumed while their homelands splinter in Exocannibalism and Bon Pour L’Orient.

Artist statement:

“During treatment, I lost the very inner critic I used to rely on — and secretly longed to silence. So, this is probably some of my unconscious accumulation of musical memories coming to the surface.

It would be oh-so-convenient to call this a ‘survival album’, but it is not that, since there is no one to fight, nothing to win. I have only undergone some profound experiences and thankfully, returned with music. The rest is ineffable.

Each track carries its own story. Yet, the album’s core is simple: noticing each moment passing by while surrendering to being restricted by the earth, and witnessing the world as it is, without seeking transcendence for a change.”

Earthbound will be available on CD and digital platforms.

Reviews:

Tickets & info

DB: “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg. I think the potential of what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.
JP: Isn’t it just a tool?
DB: No, it’s not. No – it’s an alien lifeform…”

David Bowie interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight, 1999

26 years later, many are waking up to the realisation that digital systems, social media, the internet, Meta-Apple-Google-Amazon (the MAGA oligarchy) are quite the opposite of liberating forces. A Venice wedding is the latest distraction. And yes, they are aliens… it’s exhilarating for them.

“I programme my home computer/Beam myself into the future”
Kraftwerk, Computer World, 1981

PCs became reasonably affordable in the late 80s (the MacSE, with a hard disk of 20mb, cost a heavy £2000 in 1988 – it’s all relative). There was no easy domestic internet connectivity at that point, dial-up came some years later – it wasn’t until broadband became commonplace in 2004-5 that the internet finally entrenched itself in everyday existence.

The realisation in 2025 is simply What the fuck has happened, and why is it that so many feel that the present world is completely fucked?

The mainstream media supermarket aisle of horrors – more wars than at any time since WW2, extreme right wing politicians and policies more repressive than they have been since the 1930s; poverty, starvation and suffering endemic. Climate change. The allowance of genocide. Systemic breakdown; a world of water swimming in the sewage of corporate corruption. A mental health crisis. Gender wars, culture wars. Male violence. The tip of the iceberg. And then an article about the perils of doomscrolling!

‘Realisationism’ begs the questions Whatever next, what the hell are we meant to do now?

“One day, my sister said, Bri, who is really good with machines and tech, is going to invent a technology that eats all the data that exists about people online so people can be free of being made to be what data says they are. …
Yeah, and then you’re going to invent a technology that means you can stop surveillance following people who are travelling from one place to another, because that surveillance isn’t anything to do with the real journeys people have to make in the world. And we’re going to call that technology Campervan.
Yep, I said. And we’ll call the tech that eats all the saved data Colon.
Colon and Campervan, my sister said. They’re the future. We’re the future. It is this simple.”
Ali Smith, Gliff, Hamish Hamilton 2024

A bridge from the closed world of the earbud to the power of live performance…

MBV, You Made Me Realise, live concerts 1991–present, aka “The Holocaust encore”.
“20-40 minutes of white noise, the volume of which was alleged to be around 130db, which apparently is about the same as a jet taking off from 100m away. Er, anyway, without being too gushing (I sent a text to a friend describing it as ‘sound as beauty as fire as fire as fire’… ahem), it was incredible”.
Andrzej Lukowski/Lucy Johnston, Drowned in Sound, 2009

This weekend, 28th June 2025 at Glastonbury. Neil Young on the main Pyramid stage. Charli xcx on The Other Stage. The old meets the new, or rather doesn’t. The ‘authentic’ vs an autocued synthetic rapture. A festival is both a playlist and it isn’t. You cannot listen to both/and. In this sound seminar you will! There has to be hope, beyond Realisationism and ongoing binary paralysis.

CD + DL – 8 tracks – 56:36

Track listing:

1: Far and Beside
2: Sonneur
3: Luminance
4: Far in the Distance
5: Grus
6: Fringilla
7: Far Behind
8: Closer

Pre-order from Bandcamp now

Released 27th June 2025

Idylla is the third of part of a trilogy of nature-based recordings that Polish composer Michał Jacaszek has recorded for Touch. The first, Catalogue des Arbres (Touch TO:94), was a collaboration with Kwartludium that celebrated the earlier inspiration of French composer Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue des Oiseaux (1958). Gardenia (Touch TO:117) was a response to a field recording workshop organised by Francisco Lopez in Limpopo province in South Africa, on the border with Botswana, the participants living in a subtropical nature reserve in the middle of nowhere.

Idylla takes Jacaszek’s unique approach to field recording a step further. Faced with the spectre of AI and the progressive blur between digital simulation and the natural world, Jacaszek has made a series of source recordings and then used MIDI technology to isolate key sounds before scoring them for classical instruments and the vocal treatments performed by the 441Hz Choir from Gdańsk, under the direction of Anna Borkowicz.

It is said that there is nothing new under the sun. Here is a collection of recordings that are poised between a lamentation for a disappearing world and a joyous reflection upon the beauty of being sat by a river, listening to birdsong amidst the movement of trees in a soft wind. Idylla consolidates Jacaszek’s work as being amongst the most essential of any contemporary composer, its symphonic quality matched by its beauty and detail above and beneath.

Mastered by Denis Blackham. Photography and design by Jon Wozencroft.

DL – 1 track – 53:45

Order from Bandcamp now

Designed and built by Sir Christopher Wren between 1672 and 1684, St James’s Church in Piccadilly was badly damaged during the Blitz in October 1940 and restored after the war by Sir Albert Richardson.

Following the release of Venice20 and an epic new work, Mosaic, this was Christian Fennesz’s first London concert since the Touch40 nights at Iklectik in June 2022. The vast and vaulted space was well-suited to his soaring sound. With support from Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, this 53 minute set finds him in tremendous form.

Recorded by Lee McFadden and mastered by Denis Blackham.
Photography/design by Jon Wozencroft.

Recorded by Lee McFadden, 11th April 2025

Concert hosted by Baba Yaga’s Hut

DL – 1 track – 17:14

Now available on Bandcamp

CSound & Violin is the sister piece to CSound & Saz, both realised with the sadly deprecated software of a gui programmed by Richard Boulanger and his team for interactive engagement with the historic, computer programming language, Csound.

The crucial element common to both works is that the source of every single sound heard is derived solely from the instrument named—first sampled, then distorted, fragmented, and stretched. CSound & Violin was commissioned by the virtuoso violinist Richard Moore (no relation) as a collaborative project to stage live performances in which he improvises to the accompaniment of the real-time manipulation of his sampled violin. With each performance, for both Richard and myself, the composition evolves, and whilst never identical, repeated themes emerge.

This version of Csound & Violin is a live recording taken from the stage of the Stadtgarten in Cologne 2023, organised with the generous support of reiheM. I am grateful to Touch for bringing the two works under one roof.

(anthony moore st leonards feb 2025)

Tickets & info

www.resonancefm.com/schedule/2025-04-04

The Whole Point of No Return
Resonance FM, Friday 4th April, 5.30pm
Presented by Mark Aitken

Once you’ve left, there’s no coming back to exactly where you were. Mark Aitken and guests walk and talk and discover that things will never be the same again. Episode 2: The sight of immediate reality is like an orchid in the land of technology (Walter Benjamin). Join Mark Aitken and guest Jon Wozencroft as they work out the whole point of no return. With music by Michal Jacaszek from his forthcoming album (Idylla, Touch).

Today, 11th March 2025, is our official 43rd anniversary…

Since its founding in 1982, Touch (based in London) has created audio-visual productions and live events that combine innovation with a level of care and attention that has made it the most enduring of any independent company of its time.

First contact with New Order after their concert at the Newcastle Mayfair on 11th March 1982… ‘Video 5-8-6’ appeared on our very first release, Feature Mist, released in December of that year.

You can follow our progress year by year here…

Now available

Released on 7th February 2025, when Bandcamp donated all their fees to MusiCares, a charity supporting artists affected by the fires in Los Angeles during the winter of 2024/5

DL – 1 track – 41:03

The Classic, 321 Queen Street, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

Philip Jeck
Sandoz Lab Technicians
Sam Hamilton

With thanks to Zoe Drayton and the Audio Foundation & Rosy Parlane
Photography & design by Jon Wozencroft

The Pressure on Expression

There are (arguably) more communication channels open to us than ever before, the digital convenience that makes sending a message more effortless than tying up one’s shoelaces. What has grown in difficulty is to find a space to say and develop new ways of seeing and listening that transcend this multinational grid. Telephone calls used to be expensive, now they are more or less free. Posting a letter used to take time and effort, now an email does it in minutes if not seconds. Music? – click here. Meeting up in person, once a frequent pleasure, is now equally likely to be a remote video call or a last minute cancellation (I’m too busy!)… Does this world of ours add up to a greater freedom of expression?

“We cannot prohibit that which we cannot name… Even when we are outwardly mute, speech is active within and our skull is like an echo chamber”. [George Steiner, ‘The Language Animal’, 1969]

“Music – like everything else – has become ‘information’… Digital formats were supposed to give music more room to stretch out. But music, in its frigid digital form, is unexpectedly brittle. Instead of stretching, it shatters… Promising to meld all people in a global mind, digital culture leaves the actual minds of real people fragmented, their shards scattered across the landscape.” [Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel – Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2005]

Possibly, the future of sound reached its apogee in August and September 1977, not as a result of the primal scream of the Sex Pistols, but with the launch of the two Voyager spacecraft by NASA that sent music, sound recordings and images to possible extraterrestrial civilizations in an attempt to document and project the summit of human cultural achievement to an unknown future situation? From Bach to Blind Willie Johnson, with a prescient inclusion of world music from societies not then part of the Western musical paradigm, the recordings were mastered onto gold-plated copper, electroplated with a pure sample of the isotope uranium-238, which has a half-life of 4,468 billion years (yes, the mind boggles). While NASA plans to shut down its contact with the Voyager spacecraft in 2025, it is envisaged that the vessels will reach constellations (already visible to cosmologists) in about 60,000 years time, and will then continue on their journey for an eternity to deliver this record. 

Known as ‘The Golden Record’, how might its content be curated half a century later? An essentially USA-driven initiative, it was a romantic and vitally analogue landmark in the history of recorded sound, but the only vaguely contemporary inclusion was Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B Goode’. The Beatles ‘Here Comes the Sun’ was vetoed by their publishers EMI. (Would that happen now?). The Rolling Stones, Elvis and Bob Dylan were considered as back-ups but rejected. Electronic music doesn’t get a look in. No doubt AI would be enlisted to help compile a 2025 version of the record. In the current US matrix of MAGA (Meta Amazon Google Apple), what would it sound like (shit?), and how would 40 years of digital recording impact upon its message? What would the aliens make of dark ambient? What if they are all working from home?

The Voyager Golden Record – www.ozmarecords.com

Daniel K.L. Chua/Alexander Rehding, Alien Listening, 2021

Liz Pelly, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, 2025

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