#Project Object Netlabel

[fluidsf]

Fluid Sonic Fluctuation 114

ranter’s bay & Pablo Orza: ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene)

as kindly provided to me as a review copy by ranter’s bay of Kaczynski Editions

released March 27, 2020

Welcome to review number 114 on this blog in which today I’m featuring an album which I received as a review copy from Kaczynski Editions label head and experimental musician ranter’s bay (Niet F-n). This album is called ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) and is a collaborative album between ranter’s bay and Spanish multi-instrumental improviser Pablo Orza and features 7 tracks, carrying the title ἄρχων and counting upwards from 1 to 7 as 7 separate parts. After reviewing Síria’s excellent album Boa-Língua this album does follow quite nicely from that one as again we’re inside the territory of expressive sound manipulation, performance and improvisation, albeit this time in a much more abstract, live recording like fashion of pure sonic exploration and with ranter’s bay and Pablo Orza also working more with elements like objects and exploring their electric and acoustic instruments the aim of the music is more free-wheeling than Síria’s album. Indeed looking at the background info from these two artists we can find more of an Electroacoustic Improvisation type of approach they take to making music. ranter’s bay is Niet F-n, an Italian sound artist, audio engineer and experimental musician who besides this project has also released music as Zero23, ranter’s groove and 23RedAnts. Niet F-n has also created music for theatre pieces by Licenciada Sotelo and Marco Regueiro in Spain and by Mending Dance Theatre in Taipei and has contributed sound design and performed at a variety of international arts festivals and centres. Under the name ranter’s bay Niet F-n has released music on Spettro Records and Crónica and has been featured on a self-released 2-CD compilation by Monolyth & Cobalt. Under his various other names he has released music on Creative Sources, Etched Traumas, a self-released EP by Martin Hoogeboom and Setola di Maiale. Niet F-n releases all his music under the open source Creative Commons license so a lot of his music is also available as a free download from various sources. Pablo Orza is as mentioned, a Spanish multi-instrumental improviser who’s played with various groups including Annamoviek, Karst Collective, maDam and OMEGa as well as done collaborations with improvising musicians such as Wade Matthews, LAR Legido, Patxi Valera and Javier Carmona and eventually became part of the Galician Spontaneous Music Orchestra (O.M.E.Ga) which consists of 20 Galician musicians focussing on a stylistic mixture of approaches to real time sound creation. Pablo Orza has released solo music on Creative Sources and collaborative works on alg-a netlabel, zeromoon and pan y rosas discos. Besides his music Pablo also creates visual artworks in the form of collages, illustrations, paintings, sculptures, installations and more and his collage work can be seen as the lovely blue tinted cover of this album. Kaczynski Editions is the label by ranter’s bay himself, which released ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) and forms a home of both his own works as well as music by several other artists active in (Electro-Acoustic) improvised and Psychedelic tinged experimental music. The fairly new label releases music mostly on limited edition tape format in often quite special packaging featuring rich artwork and as the label’s “manifesto” mentions that “Music is the only weapon” the spirit of Kaczynski Editions is especially that of creating a revolution through Avant-Garde music and art which I definitely find inspiring as especially now it’s a good time to continue sharing imaginative art and music. Before we dive into the music of the album I’ll mention that the presentation of my review copy features the album’s 7 tracks as 16-bit/44.1kHz CD quality files as well as the album cover in good resolution and a short press release text in both Italian and English, besides the texts this is very similar to what you’ll receive in the Bandcamp download version.

ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) starts with first track ἄρχων 1, featuring some nicely clean electric guitar improvisation, metallic object performance, glitches and various electric noises backed by a mysterious but calming resonant sounding field recording of what sounds like a park filled with people lazing in the warm spring sun as well as drinking coffee or tea in the various surrounding cafés we’re off to a pretty good start in terms. Indeed ranter’s bay and Pablo Orza offer us plenty of lovely abstract sounds to explore, whether it’s the rippling reversed quality of Pablo’s guitar or the electronic and processed sounds the duo produces that include quite squelchy liquid like metallic scraping, auto panned and delay effected drum samples as well as mechanical repetition. In terms of exploration the piece does find the duo in quite an inspired position in terms of their performance but both this piece and the next track I’ll get to do take some time to get going as the sparse, scattered nature of the sonic elements make the pieces feel a bit more like extended sketches in which there’s still a lot of trial of approaches going on. The dissonant low end guitar rumbles Pablo creates in the second half as well as the way the pointed sonic elements integrate very natural with the field recording as if being in the same sonic space in a literal sense does show promise and a good ear for immersion in sound however. ἄρχων 2 follows a quite similar sound palette to ἄρχων 1 though without a background field recording and with a generally much more metallic ambience to it. A lot of focus is put on the percussive qualities of the guitar, objects and electronics all creating various movements and actions, often scattering, clashing, sometimes distorting but like in ἄρχων 1 at times the clean sustained tones from the guitar do peek through the irregular bursts of improvised sonics. Other highlights about the sonics of the piece include the distorted auto panned crunches, CD player like glitches as well as bell like percussion hits that appear at several moments within the piece, the piece also does feel more like building towards a kind of structural development near its end, almost, but does still feel a bit like a collection of sonic puzzle pieces which aren’t yet integrated with each other but do offer some enjoyable sound investigation. ἄρχων 3 is when the sonic elements really do start to get integrated, as the piece follows more of a Drone based approach, with low pitched tones buzzing around in warm waves of at times quite Rhodes piano like sound, sometimes glitched up a notch but often quite continuous in their trajectory. ranter’s bay and Pablo Orza’s electro-acoustic performances do blend together smoother as well with Pablo’s guitar adding lovely tonal metallic bits combined with pleasant reversed tonal clusters. The high pitched clicking elements in this piece are also used in a great manner, with sounds like CRT like buzz, insect like clicking and music box like tinkling adding lovely organic elements to the piece which is also more successful in terms of immersion as the mixture of sonic elements here seems to suggest imagery like a calm night of quiet introspection in which your ears are all opened to all little electronic and natural sounds around you. The TV recording of a man talking as well what sounds like the audience reacting in a mixture of laughter and applause that appears in a filtered form adds a lovely element of surrealism to the piece as the broadcast gets reduced to a mixture of fuzzy hums and noise, reminding us that before modern digital TVs our grandparents and maybe even ourselves still experienced the lo-fi manner of looking at the world through a thick tube with at times crumbling mediocre sound, which does have a certain charm to it and has certainly become a good inspiration of various EAI and Noise artists. The structure of this piece flows smoother as well, a great highlight on this album. ἄρχων 4 follows, a piece which has a considerably more abstract sound to it, being more like a playful kinetic sound sculpture. The piece, which continues the metallic textural focus of the tracks before feels quite like a montage of various mechanical procedures, with a lot of crunchy, glitched elements adding a great organic touch to the piece. Loops of some of the object sounds and reversed sound adding some great bits of rhythm to the piece, at times even sounding like straight hi-hat rhythms but the additional cello improvisation also does give the piece an oddly satisfying “melodic” kind of sound to. While the cello is as abstract and choppy sounding as the objects, the relatively focussed subdued focus of the notes played makes for a fun, absurd kind of microscopic melodic fragments which seems to guide the piece in an alien manner. A very fun and playful short piece. ἄρχων 5 afterwards is a more “atmospheric” piece in a choppy manner with the droning guitar tones recalling ἄρχων 3’s warm tones. A pretty laid-back piece which varies the know familiar ingredients especially in terms of the objects and electronics with distorted sonic elements returning as well as the appearance of some enjoyable repeated percussive metallic clanging, stuttering and glassy liquid like as well as hollow and resonant filtered bits of sound. Another fun piece. ἄρχων 6 takes us on a bit of detour again with a rich immersive soundscape in which ranter’s bay and Pablo Orza seem to depict a river landscape blended with gentle beeps and signal sounds from mysterious electronic equipment. The piece is also quite spacious in its stereo image, though I have to also point out that the pieces on ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) in general do mostly have quite a lot of space in their sound and both room and artificial acoustics are also often audible, giving the pieces a slightly metallic but also deep sound. The duo’s sound sources blend in particularly well into a unity on ἄρχων 6 as the object sounds suggest soft rocks, human activity in the water and other small organic sounds, whilst Pablo’s guitar creates additional scratchy sounds as well as mysterious tones and what sounds like manipulated tape recordings. A wide stereo ambience that pops up at the beginning of the piece, strange whispering as well as the sound of sparrows at the end of the piece add some great details to the immersive, story telling like flow of this particular piece. Another great piece showcasing the duo’s strengths on this album as they move beyond familiar EAI territory into a more distinct personal approach. ἄρχων 7 closes the album and could be considered the duo’s “freak out” piece as they move into some wild Noise territory with some amusingly hilarious sounding dadaist distorted plunderphonics manipulations of music and Pablo’s guitar backed by more minimalist but effective synth squelches and glitches in the sides of the stereo image. Whilst it’s admittedly a bit harsh, this closing piece does showcase the duo at their most humorous and playful and makes for a fun finale of the album which is intense but also a pretty easy listen due to the duos audible enthusiasm within their performance. So there you have it, ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) is an album on ranter’s bay & Pablo Orza bring us 7 solid pieces of Electroacoustic Improvised music and on which we can follow their route of exploration finding their own combined musical unity. Whilst its first pieces are more of a journey to find which combinations work through experimentation, the duo’s abstract, percussive and melodic elements quickly lock into place afterwards finding ranter’s bay electronics and objects and Pablo’s guitar creating both kinetic sculptures and richly mysterious soundscapes. The album is very playful and the concise timing of the pieces as well as good feeling for structure through improvisation make the album quite a bit more accessible to listeners new or unfamiliar with EAI than albums by other artists can be. The microscopic melodies and drones as well as fun dadaist like absurdism in some of the piece give the pieces a sweet personal touch too. This is a great listen for fans of EAI, as well as new listeners, fans of more electroacoustic centred Glitch, Sound Art as well as listeners who like abstract music a lot. Check this album out.

You can order ειμαρμενη (Heimarmene) by ranter’s bay & Pablo Orza as Limited Edition, regular CD and purchase as digital download from the Kaczynski Editions Bandcamp page here: https://kaczynskieditions.bandcamp.com/album/--2

[tinymixtapes]

Feature: 2017: Favorite Labels

When I was a shithead high school kid playing in my first punk rock band, I’m pretty positive that my cohorts and I dedicated much more time to hanging out in a Denny’s booth sketching logos and fine-tuning our astoundingly under-researched shortlists of the record labels that would ideally release our first earthshaking longplayer than we ever dedicated to, ya know, “writing” and “practicing” songs. But strangely, I don’t think this sort of thing happened because we were “lazy.” I think it’s because, a lot of times, the brand name counts even more than the music does. And I guess we all kinda understood that, even back then. Sure, we may all walk around our lives most of the time pretending like our choices and justifications are all pure and internally driven… but — as the introductory statements to three solid years’ worth of these Favorite Labels lists all ably point out — that shit is a straight-up hallucination. What we all really need at the end of the day is to feel assured that we’re part of a bigger story. We want those choices backed up by some weird, impossibly infallible guarantee. On a grand scale, this whole project represents nothing less than the most utterly serious of metaphysical business: nothing and no one stands on their own. Individuals are forgotten. Lines have endpoints. Organisms wither and die. We see this. We know this. We hate this. Brands, on the other hand, endure. Those glorious abstractions known as “classifications,” “families,” “institutions,” and so on can’t be killed. In other words, we’re not just talking comfort here; we’re talking Immortality. But even on the level of our day-to-day exploitation and/or enjoyment of culture, it holds true. For example, even now, as I try to reconstitute the narrative, some of my favorite records of 2017 didn’t just “come out.” They “came out as editions on Sean McCann’s Recital program.” As a writer, I found it downright difficult to parse and explain the evolution of certain monikers without using Hospital Productions as a scaffolding or to discuss this-or-that artist without shouting-out Posh Isolation. And I���ve got to fess up to the fact that, as a fan, I attended several shows and bought several records based on their Don Giovanni tag alone. Is any of this compulsive brand-association particularly justified or fair? Objectively, no, I guess not. But that’s exactly the point: categorizing frail, transient little things into grand structures that transcend the worth of each of those little peons when tallied individually not only provides a nice distraction, but it also helps cocoon us — however temporarily and delusionally — in a cozy and structured-yet-flexible hammock rather than leaving us all sailing naked through the silent, freezing, soulless, limitless, and immeasurable depths of deep space at a million miles an hour. So, um, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just go head and keep clinging like grim death to all the delusional institutions I can get my mammalian hands on. In fact, here’s 14 or so that you might find handy too. Take ’em or leave ’em. –Dan Smart --- Noumenal Loom [$EGA & THE RAINBOW STREETS · TOIRET STATUS · PASCALE PROJECT] Since 2013, Noumenal Loom, run by Garrett Crosby, a.k.a. Holly Waxwing, out of Birmingham, Alabama, has been pogoing around the globe to gather together all sounds exciting and excitable. So far, the label has pepped us way up with seminal releases by aggregative electronic wizards Foodman, Giant Claw, and Seth Graham, while concurrently winding down with gentle albums from the lovably chill likes of Tuluum Shimmering and Angel Dust Dealers. Their 2017 roster opened with an addictively danceable cassette from DJ Voilà, and whether the label has been exploring techno, funk, smooth jazz, or muzak, it’s been an idea of bodily movement that has unified all of this year’s tapes and albums. We’ve window-shopped with Haha Mart and loosened into a swaying groove with Jasper Lee and Earthly. Bouncy releases from Pascale Project and $3.33 scrubbed the dance floor clean, and, to round out the year, the label just dropped two back-to-back bath bombs by $ega & The Rainbow Streets, a new project from Kenji Yamamoto, and some mind-boggling impishness from Toiret Status. Amidst all kinds of paralyzing madness outside, spaces and sounds that invite such movement feel distinctly joyful and freeing. –Cookcook --- Hands in the Dark [BYRON WESTBROOK · BRIAN CASE · MATT JENCIK] Even French label Hands In the Dark’s name dallies with the corporeal, alluding to a sense beyond the visible, a prickle or a tickle when the lights are off. Label founder Morgan Cuinet has compiled a walloping roster of experimental artists whose work mines the occult affect of sub-bass, the pilomotor reflex to binaural wizardry, and the pineal proprioception to the encounter between ambie(/a)nce and the human ear. It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the artists represented — among them Matt Jencik, Brian Case, and Byron Westbrook — positively bodied the electronic music scene in 2017. Even from the pirouetting opening seconds of Westbrook’s “Dance and Free Fall,” the opening track off Body Consonance, tendrils of sound coagulate and consummate with the ear, consonate with the flesh, palpitate along with the temple’s pulse. Mastered by Helmut Erler and TMT favorite Rashad Becker at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, these delicately fashioned transmissions massage and clench, stimulating the viscera and churning the gut. Hands in the Dark has quietly built a catalog of ambient music with gumption, a dance music for the synapses and for the goosebumps. The future is now: forget your antidepressants and anhedonia. With hands and feet and neck and back — in the dark or in the light — we’re getting sensual. –Benjamin Eckman Bieser --- Nyege Nyege Tapes [RIDDLORE · OTIM ALPHA · MAKAVELI] Luck’s acute attribute is having enough faith in letting go of the good and/or bad; a bird shits your in hair: half-think you won the lottery, but you keep thinking, a bird shit in my hair. Communication will forever be sharpened through adverse arts. Nyege Nyege Tapes bugged on 2017 with some excellent cultural deep-dive for listeners to gnash. What hit first was the jux-flow of “Ukuti” by Disco Vumbi. Immediately after, Riddlore’s Afromutations banged so hard, listeners lost direction of “Why?” and pursed immediate: “What timeline does Nyege Nyege Tapes abide by?” The third release defined another unique MC’s entry, Gulu City Anthems by Otim Alpha, baring a certain soul that comes more with the certainty of songwriting than production. Mysterians’s Joyride on Judgment Day was a gem that power-washed nodes on a level of intellect we won’t find until all the pieces of blasted-ambience have fit. But most importantly, Sounds of Sisso vibes on such a level of reappropriative, cultural instinct, one forgets to even find the magnitude of hype, purely grappling at the textures of rhythm. Nyege Nyege Tapes defines the stripped-down airfare to where prestige and lister-expansion take the next step. –C Monster --- Recital Program [ROGER ENO · DICK HIGGINS · MARY MAZZACANE] Whatever happened to the classics? Did we just get over them? Or rather, did they get over us? Is it still possible to remain just a little bit old-fashioned in a world that’s progressing at an exponential rate, when what happened even yesterday is archaic, forgotten, meaningless? For one, maybe study up on Sean McCann’s Recital Program, which spent yet another year shattering the glass walls between “high” and “low” art, proving again that everything is fascinating if we just look a little closer. Between exploring the lost lineage of the Mazzacane/Connors family, exposing the ever-tumbling wordplay of Dick Higgins, and issuing regal, flowing piano works from the likes of Michael Vincent Waller and Roger Eno, Recital kept its cool amidst a musical landscape that continues to self-implode. In reclaiming the opulent world of the classical for the underground of today, McCann’s label creates its own sort of beautiful order out of chaos, a theater in which the mundane and the ornate can freely converse and even trade places for a while if they so choose, unshackled from the class boundaries that so often keep the two camps railing against one another. Whatever happened to the classics? They’re living among us now. –Sam Goldner --- Music from Memory [BENE FONTELES · DUB OVEN · GAUSSIAN CURVE] “Music from Memory” is a misnomer and double entendre both. The records released by the Amsterdam label can’t be from memory in its most common meaning, simply because they have almost never been heard by “the masses” before. The music does, however, come from what could be called a place of memory. It has the ability to instill nostalgia for mysteries, to create attachments to unlived experiences. What started with the phenomenal Vito Ricci full-length in 2015 and was constituted with the Dip In The Pool reissue in 2016 has, this year, become a stalwart of archival transcendence. Although it’s often titled a “reissue label,” every 2017 release out of Music from Memory feels incredibly new. Psychedelic Brazilian music comps feel dime-a-dozen these days, but 2017’s Outro Tempo pillars over them all. The clunky disco of Dutch DJ Richenel feels a step ahead of contemporary house nostalgics. What the label provides is a sort of one-way mirror, looking at a past that was dreaming of its future. The attention to detail and arduous curation that goes into every record from Music from Memory highlights not where we went wrong, but what was done right. –E. Fosl --- The Worst [MINOGAME · X.NTE · ANCIENT ORIGIN] The Worst couldn’t be more misnamed. Since January, the Tennessean netlabel has birthed a baker’s dozen of the squelchiest/geekiest/sugar-sludgiest breakcore the bowels of SoundCloud have to offer. Spearheaded by visual-artist-cum-producer Minogame, the imprint functions as the post-internet era’s answer to the Smithsonian Folkways, cataloguing cyberpunk transmissions from the web’s uncharted territories: aside from surface-level nods to Warp’s cheeky humor and penchant for cluttered drum-breaks, much of the label’s output represents the hyper-individualism within a late-capitalist state that has driven us deep into our own curated aesthetics for solace. The aforementioned Minogame’s a tribe of one, signified by their Lascaux-like scribblings and math-rock source material. The prolific Ancient Origin is also a culture unto itself, one informed as much by Animal Crossing’s pastoral tradition as it is by mid-aughts crunk mixtapes. Visit The Worst’s Bandcamp, click a record cover, and assimilate: this is an expansive charting a miniature world. –Jude Noel --- Profound Lore [BELL WITCH · SANNHET · FULL OF HELL] I’ll be real: last year, I hadn’t heard of Profound Lore Records. Sure, I knew a ton of their past releases, like those of Krallice, Altar of Plagues, and Nadja, but I wasn’t fully conscious of the brilliant and gnarled web that tied them all together. The fateful moment that changed all that was the December release of Ash Borer’s superb The Irrepassable Gate, which was one of the most truly badass black metal records I’d heard in years. I became obsessed, and I started paying attention to Profound Lore (run by the great Chris Bruni). Enter 2017. I came into this year ready to chomp on anything Profound Lore released, and what a fucking year they’ve had. Pallbearer’s Heartless was a thrilling, prog-tinged doom journey that was as compelling as anything the band has done. Full Of Hell’s Trumpeting Ecstasy was an impeccably produced and excellently paced grindcore album, one of the year’s best in the genre. And then there was Loss’ magical doom odyssey Horizonless, whose grizzly howls brought an appropriate sense of melancholic yearning for listeners in 2017. And let’s not forget Sannhet’s aggressive and relentless So Numb, a refreshingly powerful exercise in instrumental metal. But, in my opinion, Profound Lore’s crowning achievement for the year was Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper, a breathtaking, bass-laden drive through the great beyond via glacial doom metal. The label capped the year off with this month’s epically unsettling 7xLP Rainbow Mirror by Prurient, a release that delivered a whole new set of mysteries and moods for us to relish as we slide gracefully into 2018. I raise my glass to you now, Profound Lore, as I have many times in my life, whether knowingly or unknowingly. You have brought a significant amount of beautiful music into the world this year. Thank you. –Adam Rothbarth --- End of the Alphabet [AKE · OMIT · MARHAUS AND MEEK] I have often wondered the existential meaning behind Noel Meek’s End of the Alphabet label. I can conjure many shortsighted missives about the location of New Zealand, the idea of the letters X, Y, and Z being largely ignored and underused, or perhaps the notion that those same letters are quite weird and therefore loosely lumped together. So I’ll stick to a combination of all three, which is why EotA is such an ear-opening experience. Whether it’s via Meek’s own releases and collaborations, or those spotlighting both his New Zealand and its surrounding — and equally ignored — regional sounds. Considering how stuck Western culture seems to be, I’d rather delve into the XYZs of our globe than the ABCs. –Jspicer --- MOTOR Collective [KLEIN & LACK · SABERTOOTH · R. GAMBLE] Tucked away in the fogs of the Pacific Northwest, this year the gang at MOTOR Collective did not “break through” so much as further refine their version of dance music — moody, spacious, and deep, yet grounded enough that you can actually move to it. MOTOR releases (as well as their excellent parties and podcasts) feel less like music for the club as we know it and more like the jump-off point for some head-trip gathering in the forest; the sense of a group yearning for this vision carries across records as varied as R Gamble’s Realistic Spaces and Heidi Sabertooth’s The Hear Of Now (both highlights for the year). That you can still hear the tape hiss on many digital versions of MOTOR tracks (as opposed to the hyperreal, LOL-perfect rendering of so much modern electronic music) speaks to what the label is going for. Like mighty ponderosa left in the rain, it’s imperfect and gently warped, still sturdy, and full of personality. –Dylan Pasture --- PERMALNK [DETENTE · LEO HOFFSAES & LOTO RETINA · BENOIT B] The Parisian label PERMALNK has been offering what it calls an “empathetic image of the world” since 2014, but it wasn’t until this year, with three strong releases, that it brought that image into clearer focus. The empathy of DETENTE’s Basic Dwell is reserved for the world’s smoldering and static-charged bits, where its energy is locked up, and from whence it manifests in stuttering impact and action-movie fidelity, accompanied by the grungy tremolo of guitar. Léo Hoffsaes and Loto Retina collaborated on Early Contact, the intimate story of a woman’s day out with her son and husband as her second child squirms in her belly, with uterine gurgling joining airy string melodies in a duet of nervous anticipation that spreads, as if contagiously, from narrator to listener. Far from both the incidental onslaught of Basic Dwell and the human intimacy of Early Contact, Benoit B’s Ethereal Drops addressed itself to the world as if to a fantastic, New Age-adjacent vision of nature. Its tracks, like the standouts “Sparkling Stream” and “Diamonds Rain,” combined a high, animalistic chirp with pads colored in shades of balearic and trance, constructing an image that, like artist Tavi Lee’s album cover, carries about it a worldly air, even in its bold color palette and surreal bending of the edges of its “natural” forms about one another. In 2017, PERMALNK has accomplished something rare in releasing three albums with little in common aside from an adherence to the label’s noble mission statement and, more importantly, an uncanny coherence as individual works of art. –Will Neibergall --- Posh Isolation [CROATIAN ARMOR · DAMIEN DUBROVNIK · KYO] In some secret file on Loke Rahbek’s hard drive, one can find my full frontal nudes along with a genetalia garden of many other bodies, desecrated and devalued, for they all were exchanged, vulnerability for vulnerability, with a cassette tape of Croatian Amor’s 2014 album The Wild Palms. In the commodification of the world, all things are abstractly identified with an exchange value, where even vulnerability has a value, for the body is as expendable as every other image. Yet, here we give one’s inability to give as a gift — one’s vulnerability. The self-interest of commodity economy is abdicated in preference of a gift exchange. Here, Rahbek creates an artificial space to find other people. Posh Isolation’s forays beyond noise and industrial to lyrical ambient and minimal techno belie industrial music’s foundation in the incommunicable dissonance of the world of industrial capitalism, where seeking to be heard above the din is a project worthy of art. By fetishizing the empty object in the artificial space of performance, this bubblegum industrial forges impossible connections that, though artificial, become pleasurable and therefore real. Through pain directed inward, as if pierced by a great many arrows, we confirm that one’s self is irreducible to the abstract identification of the commodity, as Saint Sebastian his beauty. The ultimate need to make contact snaps one out of artificiality. In 2017, the cold has become a little bit warmer and a sort of sincerity is resuscitated. –Evan Coral --- Don Giovanni [SCREAMING FEMALES · AGUA VIVA · LEE BAINS III & THE GLORY FIRES] What’s opera, doc? Opera is text by tune splitting story, Italian for “work.” Opera is Don Giovanni, some Austrian seraph’s diminishing sevenths flicking humans into shouting until the sound shakes our hearts. Hearts and mouths shout, so listen: Joe Steinhardt and Zach Gajewski played in a bad band at Boston College, made their own 7-inch, and voila: opera via Don Giovanni. It’s music label as New Brunswick new alternative, nixing commercial interruption so artist and audience are fleet free as a Mozart minuet to trade roles and help each other. “Anyone can do anything and not just that, everyone can do everything. No one’s fucking special,” Steinhardt reminds us. In an ashen historical moment, those words are totem for remembering the good work of “nobody lives unless everybody lives.” Don Giovanni is Aye Nako’s rim shot disrupt-punk and the geography-atomizing Lee Bains III & The Glory Fires. It’s Irreversible Entanglements, unmetered jazz outfit as union collective and A Piece of Water, the Buenos Aires tidal pool dream of Agua Viva, a body’s buoyancy over oppression. It’s La Neve’s American Sounds, a non-binary bodying the electric song as new national anthem sans strict script and the breaking “Glass House,” Screaming Female’s yowl of a collective body’s mission to re-member shards of 2017’s ill-reality into something better for every body. The music label model is the original resisting force, the libretto punk show, a two-fold work of labor output and piece created. Don Giovanni refuses repenting like the title character and screams high C’s into hell, a Looney Tunes promise that everything is movable except good work. Don Giovanni is the good work, opera for us by us. No one’s fucking special. Everyone’s fucking special. –Frank Falisi --- Piratón [MINICOMPONENTE · UPGRAYEDD JESSICA · AMAZONDOTCOM] OK, you caught me; Piratón Records isn’t as prolific as some of these other labels. As far as I can tell, it currently only exists as a Bandcamp page, and since its founding in 2015 by Mexico City musician and music journalist Carlos Huerta (a.k.a. Josué Josué), there are only four releases, all available for free streaming with a “name your price” option for download. One of them, Ruido’s 2015 FUN LP, is a totally bonkers instrumental hip-hop/chip-tune/synth punk thing. Two of them are compilations in a series called No hay más fruta que las nuestra, which means, “There is no fruit other than ours,” a play on a quote by Mexican social realist painter David Siqueiros: “No hay mas ruta que la nuestra” (“There is no other route but ours”). This year’s No hay más fruta que la nuestra 2 is why I’m writing this blurb. Like its 2016 predecessor, it features all kinds of music by female artists from Latin America and Spain. TMT favorite (Upgrayedd) Smurphy is on it, along with 11 other incredible ladies whose work spans pop, punk, rap, techno, and folk. It’s basically all I’ve listened to this year (besides, like, DAMN. and A Crow Looked At Me, so you know it’s good but ultimately responsible for way fewer tears). Snarkiness aside, I hope that somebody finds this at least half as empowering as I did this year. Life fairs a little better when your music’s this good. –Jazz Scott --- Hospital Productions [LUSSURIA · RAINFOREST SPIRITUAL ENSLAVEMENT · NINOS DU BRASIL] 2017 was the 20th year in the business for Dominic Fernow’s Hospital Productions. The label celebrated with tastefully grim releases that fit nicely under the three categories of Fernow’s own projects, Vatican Shadow, Prurient, and Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. Like Demdike Stare’s DDS and Oneohtrix Point Never’s Software imprints, Hospital Productions never strays far from Fernow’s infernal circle of influence. The label eschews the convenience of modern platforms, preferring physical record stores and distributors like Boomkat and Bleep to platforms like Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Aesthetically, the labels seems to occupy a razor-thin void that exists between the chic, palatable throb of ambient techno — the sort of jilted, swooning sound that intellectual architecture students in horn-rimmed glasses and ket-heads in crop tops can bond over — and the always unpalatable, unpredictable underground noise scene. The latter is the spawning pool of Hospital Productions, a realm of cut-and-paste cassette art and “noise tables,” which basically kept the National Audio Company in business until avant-garde electronica and Urban Outfitters found tapes to be a fashionable medium again. It’s a dangerous game Fernow plays: with every high-bias, 180g limited-edition release at the luxury price point, he runs the risk of playing to the “market,” whether ironically or for personal gain. Industry politics aside, the music is of scrupulous quality and gluttonous proportions. Hospital Productions is committed to releases of staggering, atmospheric scale: the monolithic physical LPs and cassette boxes are like dense artifacts, adding to the imprint’s quasi-archaeological mystique. Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement put out a few large cuts, coming over two hours on a reissue of Green Graves. The project also put out an eight-cassette compilation titled Water Witches, one of many such bricks of tape that the label would drop. Another eight-hour box set of 8xCS was released for Dust Belt’s brooding, dark ambient on Ecocannibalism, and then of course there was the 6xLP release of Prurient’s massive Rainbow Mirror, which was co-released with Profound Lore. The club side of Hospital Productions is equally grim: Ninos du Brasil released their second full-length, Vida Eterna, a bludgeoning set of trance-inducing Latin rhythms, as well as another 12-inch. Natural Assembly put out The Fantasy of Love, a mix of post punk and deep house. Shifted drew a converging plane between metal grooves (the rhythmic kind) that sound like they’ve been rubbed out of literal metal grooves and outsider techno beats on Appropriation Stories. As much as I hate the “outsider” term, there’s still not much of a vocabulary for the sort of undanceable, fringes-of-the-club-basement beats that Hospital represents so well. –Ross Devlin http://j.mp/2iT0sDJ

[fridaynightbordercrossing]

INTERVIEW WITH MINUIT DE LACROIX

Minuit is not a character, is a being of flesh, bone and spirit that appears on the Tijuana scene around 1994 or 1995. First, with a series of drawings with gothic and dark imagery. Later he started to roll tapes with noises, and then achieve a strange combination of industrial, goth, pop and classical music, which did not go unnoticed.

Later, he achieves an unclassifiable style. Thus, we find someone with great talent in production and execution, also collaborating in projects such as Mosquito. Currently, who at the time was also called "an avant-garde talent not recognized in Tijuana", lives in Europe, making music and collaborating with all kinds of artists, here is an interview.

THE MYTH "From the beginning, some time ago, the way to know it is in the lyrics of my songs. Traumas like the breakup of my long-standing relationship with a witch, have changed my ability to express what I am, because it is your heart that you put in the songs and that is what I believe that goes to show the personality of each artist".

"If you remember, I started drawing for several fanzines before anything else. Around 1994, I started to read live poetry and roll some experimental music cassettes (influenced by groups like Art Of Noise, Orb, Skinny Puppy, Einstürzende Neubauten, Tear Garden and Mr. Bungle). With that I opened the shows of many local bands here and in Tecate. By then, I had already graduated from the music academy".

INFLUENCES "Hmmm ... Well, I grew up under the influence of Renaissance and Futurism, they are polar opposites, but in general, almost all the artistic periods have influenced me in some way. Aesthetic encounter not only in the music of the world, but in all the arts, feminine beauty and architecture. All those things are very important factors for the creation of Minuit".

THE OBJECTIVE OF INVOLVING IN VARIOUS PROJECTS "It is  a return to rebirth, I can not grasp the idea that you owe it to one thing alone. Interestingly, the first time I appeared on a cultural calendar, they put on "multimedia show". I have had the good fortune of participating in two films and a short film, I am working on two others of a kid who makes independent films here in Tijuana and I have received a couple of proposals from other people. I'm very interested because there is not a big stretch between the characters and the actor, I'm terrible, but nobody stops me".

DISTANCE BETWEEN THE PAST AND THE FUTURE "In my drawings, having gone through a surreal stage, i stop doing it so as not to repeat the same technical errors. Poetry turned into prose, and although my songs have a style that still does not disappear, my musical arrangements became less and less complicated".

BEING A REFERENCE OF THE TIJUANENSE "UNDERGROUND" "I do not know the references, because in Tijuana there is no longer a underground like there are in many cities of the republic. In one stage the scene became a society and many people decided to follow trends. One thing is to have ideals and stay working with your concept until you do it and another thing is to leave aside what you bring inside and do whatever it is that you want to be a success. I know people who sacrificed their identity for fifteen minutes of fame and not only is it a pity, but musically it became a shame".

MINUIT SPEAKS ABOUT MINUIT "Well, for the time being I have dedicated myself to producing other artists, recording the best I can, writing and participating with different young creators. When someone sees a guy with long hair, they think  he's a rocker. I do not have a goal to see myself in such a way, but I know that there are people who see me in different ways, but people will believe what they want to believe and that does not alter my way of being. What interests me is to be active in different projects with different individuals and different women (ahem ...) ".

THE SCENE "I've watched from afar a handful of bands in Tijuana that have the potential to become part of national rock, it's just a matter of not losing it. As for the Tijuana electronics, I see that there is an emergence of young people who are experimenting and I know that they can take their ideas to a foreign audience ... ciao ".

A MOMENT OF TIDE   To reflect a little what happened at the time when Minuit appeared on the scene in Tijuana, I leave this with what I collaborate on Trac! Trac! Trac! about TIDE in 1997. The text is originally in English.

TIDESTORY PER MINUIT TIDE has finally released the long awaited new recording, which is called Back Hand Fourth. After three previous attempts in the study, they have finally succeeded. "We have been trying to release this film for a year and finally we have achieved it," says Italian keyboard player RuBella Badoglio. Eccentric, TIDE is one of the most constant musical ensembles in his musical work currently in Tijuana. Despite its taste for the abstract, TIDE stands out as being of that rare species that has its own vision and sound, not because they want to sound different, but simply because they ARE different. Therefore, TIDE has managed to generate loyal followers, which are given by the recommendation of others.

I had the good fortune to talk to them. I hope you enjoy.

Back Hand Fourth, the new recording, have you heard it ?, "Yes, in fact, it's already been recorded", says Why? Known: A Rider - singer and composer, besides not so virtuoso guitarist-.

M: "Thats rare! (laughs), it's more strange than the others. The sounds are more demented, we're doing more analog overdubs live, a lot more weird things. Everything had been more acoustic in the past. We definitely try to make music for people's brains more than for anything else. It is more intense on this occasion because of the nature of our history. They are more intense songs, this makes it more rare and more professional at the same time ". October 15, 1997 is the date where they celebrate 2 years of launching what they call "settes".

"I think it's the last TIDE recording for me," says MALice-Terror, vocalist, who says: "It's the most beautiful and at the same time the most difficult recording we've made. I feel that it reflects all the fights that have taken place about where we are going with this. " The difficulties in developing Back Hand Fourth, were from the beginning to not be satisfied with what came out initially. The first problem arose with the same formula with which they had previously composed. In October of 96, the recording was finished, but in December it had not been released due to technical problems with the editing equipment. In January of 1997, RuBella Badoglio moved to Sicily, Italy, which caused her to start working on her own solo project, SpunoS.

M says: "We had to delay the launch date indefinitely." FatAlien Youth was out of the project and Why? AKnown: A Rider? began to disappear little by little after recording: "I think I was angry and bored, totally annoying to say the truth. I was on the edge, I felt like a school psycho!.That's how I describe that moment in my life". MALice-Terror also accepts his interest in leaving the band: "I had to review what happened in my life, mainly I was wondering, what do I do with these people? "

"If this had a soundtrack, it would undoubtedly be that of the sound of turbulent violence, so I would describe it", says RuBella Badoglio: "I really appreciate our relationship as a valuable jewel, but it is only possible to make a song if each one of us decided if it is a good step for TIDE. I think it's in all aspects, a recording that is very difficult to hear, in particular it took me a long time to like it, "admits RuBella, who also adds:" If someone else heard this album for a month, it would end to please him, it makes sense to be this way".

MAL-ice Terror, on the other hand, is more direct about it: "It sounds good, it's a great album. It is very different from what I had done before. I think we achieved a real sound, the guitars flow delicately. Never, in fact, I've heard something like that before it was recorded, I'm perfectly happy with what we were trying to capture on the recording. " RuBella agrees: "This recording has a greater diversity than any group in a demo has musically. TIDE has become a band with a sound, which was a necessary evolution, but ... ". MAL-ice says: "It's very natural, together with a lot of people who start playing music and obviously, from there you have to come out with your own sound without trying to look for it, you can ask that to Staura or Bodhisattva and they'll ask you they are going to say, A SOUND IS BORN".  

UPDATE   After this interview, Minuit explores Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Tulum and other sites of the Riviera Maya, where he starts with photography, exposing in two groups. Likewise, it explores sounds through experiments, which were used in various events.

Obtains a partial support of the Program of Support to the Artistic and Cultural Promotion for the registry of sound investigation in Basque Country, Catalonia and Madrid of sounds of the nature, as well as of environmental noise of transport, which leaves in a disc called Luto Ibérico , which appeared on CD and digitally through Abdicate Cell, netlabel in Norway.

He starts a dance music project called Random Rooms, with which he toured in Spain, culminating in Barcelona. He later started MDL, a minimal techno project, with which he has participated in events, a film in Poland and a short film in Germany, where in Berlin, he has presented concerts with CDM. He teaches electronic music courses in Germany and Spain, as well as developing projects through his studio in Barcelona.

(Interview published in Tijuana Metro in 2002. TIDE Story was published in Trac! Trac! Trac! In 1997)

[pleasantlyelectronicnerd-blog]

Fotografias Mostram Desmanche De Avião Hércules Brasílico Preso Na Antártica

Dimensionamento e Instalação de um Sistema Fotovoltáico Solitário como Fonte Escolha de Pujança Eléctrica da Sala das Tecnologias de Informação e também Comunicação. The Web Archive Aplicativo Library is a large collection of viewable and executable programa titles, ranging from commercially released products to public domain and hobbyist programs. The Soulerin Collection represents the pre-Confederation library of St. Michael's College. The Northwestern University Archives, established in 1935, holds material relating to every aspect of Northwestern's history, including non-current official University records, papers of faculty members, and records of student organizations- as well as publications, photographs, audio-visuals, artifacts, and more.

Netlabel music is creative expression shared freely. Over the years, the Archive has saved over 510 billion such time-stamped internet objects, which we term  captures. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment programa. Ainda consoante estudo, seção de produção de pujança eólica, à sustentação de hidrogênio, geotérmica e solar criará e também absorverá dezenas de novas carreiras, a partir de mecânicos de vegetação até cientistas, engenheiros e até profissionais de vendas e marketing. Demonstrations include the Talking Glove, AutoDesk's Cyberspace project, the Virtual Hand, GestureGlove, CyberGlove, CyberCAD, Virtus Corporation's WalkThrough. You know the story... and if you don't, please start listening immediately! The Web Arcade is a internet-based library of arcade (coin-operated) video games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, emulated in JSMAME, part of the JSMESS software package. View thousands of films from the Prelinger Archives! Special collections of the Caven Library include the McKay Educational Resources collection, the Walter Allum Preaching Library and Rare E-books Collection. It is available for free broadcast and distribution by public access, college, and commercial televisor stations. Maior duelo à utilização econômica da força eólica e solar renováveis é sua geração e também sustento flutuantes. It included everything but loading screens, but it was shown that black screens before the loading screen comes up is also system-dependent.

[acornometrics]

The Urge to Compose . . . a Traffic Jam Fugue

In the spring of 2014, composer/educator Danny Clay faced a dilemma. He had asked his elementary school music classes in grades 1 through 5 to create their own sound key/music notation systems comprised solely of sound-making objects they could find around the classroom. Each class constructed their own systems and began to compose and play music employing them.

Composer and music educator Danny Clay

Danny was quite impressed with the results, but the kids had reservations. "This is not real music," some of them complained. "Why is that?" Danny asked. "If this was real music, real composers would be using our notation to write music" was a common reply. So Danny set out to recruit his real composer friends to write real music using his young students' notation systems. The resulting activity recently spurred Danny to launch Project Object - Netlabel on SoundCloud and on Facebook.

When Danny posted Facebook and Twitter appeals to composers to help  his kid musicians believe in what they were doing, we got pulled into the vortex. We commented on Danny's posts how much we loved what he and his students were doing. He responded "Why don't you try it too?" The next thing we know, we had the 2nd-graders' sound key in hand and instructions form Danny to "let our imaginations run wild!"

Danny Clay's 2nd-graders' sound key/notation system

Being industrious sorts, we set about trying to figure out how we could compose music from these elements. Fortunately, our old friend John Cage, whose 100th birthday anniversary inspired this blog in the first place, instigated the thinking that got us going: chance procedures. And before too long, voila! We had created Did you catch the license plate on that fugue?

The title page from our composition score

Our process notes from the score tell the tale pretty well: 

The Journey from Sounds to Music

Composer and elementary school music teacher Danny Clay asked us to compose a piece of music using a sound/notation system invented by his students, for them to play. He sent us his 2nd-graders’ sound key. 

There are 12 musicians in Danny’s 2nd-grade class, organized into four groups of three. We decided to write a fugue, because it would be fun to play and to hear, a four-part invention, where each part is performed by a group of 3 players. We think of each musician like a percussionist, in that each player has the full battery of all six instruments available to him/her. Everyone in the group plays each sound in each cell as directed by the score.

Inspired by our art-hero John Cage, we used chance procedures to develop the fugue. We thought of music needing to deal with sounds (a given, from the 2nd grade sound key), time (by stringing sounds together in a defined order), rhythm, and volume or dynamics So we rolled the dice to: 

assign each sound (or note) in the key a sequence number

assign and order groups of three notes into four sound “cells” which gave us an ordered progression 12 notes/sounds long, arranged in four cells (or measures) of three notes each

determine the dynamics of each sound to be played, either loud or soft.

determine for each of the notes, how many times it would be played within the cell, 1, 2, or 4 times (resulting in each cell containing 12 beats). 

We then determined the flow of the first line would consist of playing the four cells in the determined order, then playing the four cells again with the order of notes in each cell reversed, then playing the four cells again in the original order. 

To create the fugue effect, we offset line 2 from line one by shifting one cell to the right and wrapping the last cell of line 1 around to the beginning of line 2. We continued the shifting and wrapping one cell each time to create lines 3 and 4. 

These four lines of music looked like four lanes of traffic, making us think of the cells as cars. That gave rise to the title Did you catch the license plate on that fugue . . . a Traffic Jam Fugue. As we prepared the individual performance scores for each part, we realized that the fugal structure of the work is not readily apparent. So we decided to portray the full score, all four lines together, using the four toy cars of different colors (assigned by chance) to represent the cells. This enables the performers to visualize the shifting and wrapping structure of the whole piece. 

We hope this composition brings the 2nd Grade Musicians of Zion Lutheran School much fun and enjoyment as they learn to play a piece written in the sound/notation system they themselves invented. 

Arlene and Larry Dunn 

Oberlin, Oho

April 8, 2014

Here, are the other key elements of the score, the matching of car colors to the music cells and the four parts of the fugue, A, B, C, and D. 

All that remained was to hear our work come alive in the hands of the 2nd-grade musicians. And that happened this week when Danny created the Project Object sites and posted our piece for all to hear. 

Danny asked us for our reaction upon hearing the work played for the first time. Here's what we told him:

Composing Did you catch the license plate on that fugue? - A Traffic Jam Fugue was a thrill ride every step of the way. But nothing could have prepared us for the rush of first hearing it realized in sound by the very 2nd-graders who invented the sound key/notation system we used. The version they have recorded so far is a two-part invention; the four-part invention is yet to come as they continue to work on the score. Nonetheless, their performance somehow subtly soothes with its relatively quiet dynamics, yet almost overwhelms with its complex textures. They play with a free, manic energy and a diligent seriousness of purpose. Perhaps only 2nd-graders could bring such a deep commitment to realizing the possibilities in this score. We can’t wait to hear more.

And apparently  Danny and the kid musicians are enjoying playing this piece as much as we enjoyed making it. 

Thank you notes from Danny and the 2nd-graders

So, without further ado, go listen to the piece on SoundCloud. Enjoy!