OOH-sounds

The seven tracks traverse underworlds, infused with fantastic realism, where odd sounds materialise like poltergeists of digital folklore. Creepy voices emerge from the hell-like nether, intertwined with clusters of gelatinous percussive sounds that trudge to the surface. Earthy streams of crackling white noise carry volatile sonic particles that bounce off walls with short delays and reverberations, giving an almost visible form to the space. 



But it is not always serious. As soon as you come across the curiously long titles of the tracks (which are rough translations of the Minecraft manual into Italian) a subtle irony emerges. The imagery appears to be harmless and eventually, as in a video game, you can switch to safe-mode and refill your health-bar along the way… 
No panic attacks in the soft-occultism of FANTASTICO INTERIORE 😉 

Taking this idea one step further, Guffond proceeded to explore the programming environment MaxMSP, a customisable interface which allowed her to blur the lines between human input and machine directives even further. Across the three extended pieces which make up Alien Intelligence you can hear the results of Guffond’s inquisitive approach as she coaxed the machines into bringing their own ideas to bear on the music.

The tension inherent in this thematic duality is mirrored by the contrast between glacial ambience and chaotic interference across the album. On ‘Serge & Maxine Variation One’ the presiding mood is a slow and patient one, as undulating waveforms rich with harmonic overtones spill out over one another across 10 minutes. The track’s latter passage, driven by steadily intensifying oscillations, is then interrupted with an unexpected flurry of pitch shifting. This kind of complex technical movement features more prominently at the start of ‘Serge & Maxine Variation Three’, which then gradually shifts into a gentler ebb and flow of rising and falling frequencies.

Angled slightly differently and residing on the B side of the album, 15-minute quiet epic ‘Serge & Maxine Variation Two’ bookends a louder passage of synth work with serene, sustained notes that ring out a sort of hymnal melody. Throughout, the movement in the music evolves in subtly modulating, hypnotic, ways, but there are also unexpected turns or melodic diversions which feel much more incongruous. In its closing stretch, the notes dart around more freely as though played by hand, but it’s hard to be sure whether these shifts in the otherwise delicate tonal music were a human conceit or a programming by-product. In the end, the two inputs logically become one.

As Guffond says herself, “More-than-human logics emerge, a kind of alien intelligence that questions an assumed central position of human subjectivity in socio-technical assemblages and considers the philosophical, socio-political and cultural implications beyond music practice in an increasingly technologically mediated world.”

As AI creeps into art as much as other aspects of modern life, Guffond applies her playful instinct to the theme of these works by reconsidering machine intelligence as ‘alien’, crediting its contributions with a more robust yet enigmatic identity in the creative process, leading to an end result which is far from artificial. 

The driving force behind the record is the Habesha musical tradition, distinctive of Jermay’s childhood – samples of the masinko, an Ethiopian and Eritrean one-stringed instrument, are used extensively – transposed into rhythmic structures onto which Isgrò playfully grafts elements of footwork, ghetto house, as well as gqom and singeli—a space-time gateway of complicity and experimentation.

Plethor X’s soundscapes are Afro-futurist ecosystems of explicit messages—’Don’t use the N word’ is distinctly heard in ‘Negro’—coalesced with frenzied percussive textures built through destruction. With ‘Bet’ we experience Muna Mussie’s hypnotic recitation of Tigrinya words drawn from a set of nursery rhymes and words emblematic of Eritrean culture. The voice of Mussie, who shares the same origins as Jermay, serves here as a vehicle to express a certain identity melancholia, the repetitive mode sounding like a soothing process of reconciliation. PAN-affiliated producer STILL makes his own contribution by reworking Plethor X’s material in ‘Fendika’, raising the rhythmic tension with his signature colourful, plugged-in dancehall style.

That with Europe is a bridge to an indefensible continent, with a predatory, plundering nature, sold as ‘civilisation’. In ‘What You Mean’, Isgrò and Jermay conspire against their own Eurocentrism, regurgitating it from within.

The package is complemented by remixes from OOH-sounds affiliated artists nobile, Losssy (formerly unperson), Glass and WEȽ∝KER. Their brilliant versions of ‘Bet’ are a further investigation of the evocative potential of Mussie’s voice and expression of the collective nature of this project.

The beginnings of this project date back to the summer of 2022 when pardo and glass started recording some improvisations in a small studio with the aim of making an experimental guitar record. Over time, the drafts developed into mesmerizing slabs of guitar textures, simultaneously immense and intimate. No material was better suited for more eaze to add to the recordings her transversal and sensitive approach, linking the past and the present.

Ranging from gentle ambient folk to winding pedal steel passages, from twinkling electronics to distorted drones, ‘paris paris, texas texas’ is an album that’s not just “atmospheric”, it conjures its own unique atmosphere from thin air. Like a snake shedding its skin, the record slowly mutates from track to track – an epiphany, a transformation, a tangible and perceptible moment. Despite its distant trans- Atlantic origins, it evokes a warmth and intimacy that is hard to deny, an emotion that has perhaps been held back for too long. A landmark release in OOH’s catalogue, capturing the magic of its curation and sensibility in one sublime record.

Dania and Clervaux first worked together in 2015, when the former’s Barcelona-based Paralaxe Editions label released the latter’s ‘Two Changes’ duo LP with Beatrice Dillon. Clervaux later helped mix and master two of Dania’s releases – ’Voz’ and ‘Foreign Body’ – himself having moved to Spain, and by 2021 they were playing shared bills at shows, completing a mini-tour of the UK in Summer 2022. It was at this point that the idea to collaborate first emerged, and Clervaux sent over the a weighty unfinished drone piece built around fragments of strings from Verdi’s La forza del destino (‘The Force of Destiny’), an opera said to be cursed since it first premiered a century-and-a-half ago. Passed through tape delays, these snippets are augmented by a continuous sub-bassline and a droning shruti box, moving very slowly across three chord changes, ending on a resolving major by the end of the piece.

Dania completed the piece with extensive vocal performances recorded at her studio in Barcelona, responding to and expanding the music into new directions with layers of wordless singing to highlight Acción y Destino’s harmonic march. As Clervaux puts it, “the music suddenly had the sense of being finished, after years of being in progress.” The artwork comprises an edited image of the Rokeby Venus, painted by Spanish master Diego Velázquez in the mid-17th century. The painting was later butchered by suffragette Mary Richardson with a meat cleaver in 1914 to protest Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest. The image, like the music, is filled with suggestion, creatively echoing past in present, and grafting existing works into new textures. [Words by Tristan Bath] 

Making an enthusiastic transgression into noisy tones, “Joy Of Joys” has a friendly way of presenting difficult material. The rough and ready cheapo electronics sparkle in full electrifying mode, welding an ascetic gamut of aural hypnotics with a wormhole of uncompromising loop brut. Clanks, bangs, twangs and creeping, ragged globs of sound bloom on the bones of repetition to focus on the swinging stream of dirty anarchy. Stepping out of any context and genre disciplines, S&S finds new sonic trajectories in “Joy Of Joys” which perfectly sit in-between a wobbly cabal of international sub-underground acts: the idiot-avant strategies of LAFMS, early Mego bad digitalia, no-brow enthusiasm of Wolf Eyes family, micro-DIY ethos of Chocolate Monk and the sheer hellish nonsense of US noise circa ’00s.

Clouse was already established as a landscape painter with a series of faux naïf paintings charmingly accompanying his releases. With his heart full of passion for abstract minimalism, he continued these narrative forms but was always in search of the confidence to paint non-figurative art. The first step into the chaotic abyss is coming from his sonic side by abandoning the beat and riff layers of his previous works to complete nakedness and reductionist courage. At once Clause makes an evolutionary lurch into extremes as well as taking us back to basic forms in “Joy Of Joys”. He creates an entire new parallel world to Shit & Shine with his maverick imagination presenting us with one of the most mutant releases to bear his name. [Arthur Kuzmin] 

Drawing heavily on field recordings, samples of popular and obscure folklore music and complemented with his trademark digital processing, Dylan Henner created four pieces, each of which represents a new city one is able to visit. Processed, mangled source material entwines with striking choral passages and environmental sounds, while Henner also supplies his trademark ambient pads, marimba passages heavily influenced by minimalist composers and tape textures. The cities – of bells, of factories, of rain puddles and of choirs – each presents an environment characterised by curiosity and wonder. The sense of place and the narrative arc is clear; here more than ever before, Henner’s compositions find parallels with literature.

‘Città Impercettibili’ is a peculiarly poetic, strangely warm collection of pieces. Listening feels like watching the cities go by through a car window; one barely gets a proper look, there’s a tangible sense of not having seen enough, but also a deep appreciation for what one was able to catch a glimpse of. A striking, deeply imaginative work by one of contemporary ambient’s mysterious figures, echoing and paying homage to Calvino’s masterwork.

“Of a city you do not enjoy the seven or seventy-seven wonders, but the answer it gives to your question.” – Italo Calvino. 

Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin’s work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled.

Much like Sinatra’s own spatial residency immortalized on “Live at The Sands,” “At The Libra Hotel” showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests’ whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light.

Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of “At The Libra Hotel,” powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, “you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

Words by Nick James Scavo 

Careful spatialisation, superimposition and layering help to produce an immersive, hyperreal listening experience that highlights and satirises problematic facets of mindfulness media.
Recordings of various sound matter possessing the extrinsic sign value of modern mindfulness and relaxation; resonating bowls, bells, breaths, nature, birdsong and rain are transformed into visceral sound objects that contain the essence of their original form yet weave in and out of the reality-abstract continuum. With this, the work plays with notions of the familiar and unfamiliar. Disembodied voices lead the listener through a hypnotic maze of hyperreal sonics. Intricate, tactile sound material that echoes the modern phenomenon of ASMR merges with trance-inducing drones. Environmental field recordings combined with synthesised simulacra conjure the sensation of being situated in a liminal space. Sound is used as an abstract intrinsic force, that carries the listener out of a stable sense of reality, as well as a semiotic device that combats this drift from reality and brings the listener firmly back into the monotony of ‘real’ life. A grapple between grounding realism and escapism is present.
The narration navigates the listener through this struggle, the voice mirrors the post-modern sentiment of the disobeying, sentient machine. Firstly it appears familiar and human but gradually it decays and suggests an increasingly questionable rationale. The voice distorts and reveals itself to be nothing more than another instance of technology designed to control and subjugate critical thought. It is important to make clear that this work does not aim its critique at mindfulness or meditation in and of itself but towards the corporate institutions that attempt to commodify such practices, whilst stripping them of their cultural and geopolitical contexts. Sonic aspects of these practices have been hijacked, used fetishistically as distractions from the contexts of malaise and as lures towards the sustaining of a pacified, individually conscious self. This piece aims to reclaim the power of sound, not for control or manipulation but as a vehicle for eliciting critical thought, as a means of engendering communal, shared experience and, importantly, as a conveyor of parody and humour. 

Initially even delivered to the label purely in mono, the tracks were transferred onto tape and stereoized by label-mate and friend Glass (of Caen France) to give them a more spatialized image. Intensely pulsating tracks sit alongside more atmospheric, noisy cuts; slick, bouncing rhythms deteriorate into decaying, static-infused, nervous patterns. It’s music simultaneously infused with hi-vis, technological sheen as well as a hectic, fragmented energy. (Adam Badí Donoval)

ENHANCER’s tracks unfurl with an instinctive flow, pulling/pushing in all the right places and guiding the listener through aural aqueducts. WEȽ∝KER are just truly properly at it again. Dive in, isn’t it?
(Calum Gunn)

The album’s artwork is the result of an all-Mancunian collaboration with sculptural artist and dead-powder virtuoso Nicola Ellis. Photographed by Glen Cutwerk and Bazz Patel, shot in the spleen of Salford’s The White Hotel. Drippy, oily notes with a hint of flesh.

She notes “During the time of creation, I began to develop deep, unrequited feelings for someone close to me, and my dreams began to consist of doing quotidian things with this person, but in environments that were geographically or architecturally impossible. The Texas Hill Country would open up to a neon-lit New York City that we’d walk arm and arm through. We’d go shopping at malls containing caverns and rivers next to Hot Topics and Macys.”

In some ways, oneiric is one long love song. The album begins with “a romance” and household sounds – a running sink, whooshing air in the background, some kind of snipping – before piano, strings, and electronics float in. The composition swells until it’s a patient, synth-driven waltz, soaring to dizzying heights with maurice’s autotuned vocals cresting atop a noise section. Within that static, it’s easy to hear her vocals buzzing with new love and dream.

Throughout the album, maurice uses field recordings, panning, and ASMR tactics to brandish her personal universe – one that rides a line of possibility familiar to plunderers of the dream world. Field recordings of stoned walks through her neighborhood make way for teeming, digital instrumentation and vice versa. Others come along for the voyage such as emo ambient cohort Claire Rousay on the album’s most subdued composition “heartbreaker” and the devastating Philadelphia-based musician Lucy Liyou providing rich, evocative vocals on “uninvited.”

oneiric is fantasy without the irony – it’s a portrait of an artist excavating her own desires while navigating the ontologically real. It’s an exhibition of the liminal space between the diurnal and the fanciful, one that manages to summon that feeling universally even though it’s the result of a personal inspection. Across these six songs, maurice makes a claim on basking in the farfetched, even if it’s a Sisyphean myth – but if you’re gonna roll a rock up and down a hill for eternity, let it be a pretty one. 

Initially, the work begins with a long phase of development involving many decisions to determine a suf ciently complete and autonomous modular system. The performance is then fully entrusted to the computer which, through its exceptional capacity to generate multiples, is able to combine and permute the data as desired. And potentially reveal some singular combinations that the system’s creator would not have considered? Perhaps also clumsiness or oddities.

Here is a selection of these computer proposals
pulled from several captures and grouped together as 10 tracks / 10 visuals with no subsequent modi cations (except for editing and mastering). Each track comes from a combination of sequences, sound engines, sound processing and mixing determined by the computer.
This same process was then adapted to generate graphic abstractions using data structures and combining primitive shapes, colors, sizes, layers…

A sort of ‘romanticism of steel’ sets the narrative mode of the eight tracker where moving chords progressions, pounding beats, synth washes and eerie vocal intrusions alternate grounded physicality and propulsive sways with unfathomable angelic hues and electro-acoustic subtleties.
Making use of a wide range of analog equipment and the invaluable help of drummer Seb Forrester, A/N’s textural sound stream tempers its gleaming chrome finishes by means of sonic shocks and sublime coatings of distorted warmth.

From the bubbling arpeggios of ‘Mentir En Temps De Crise’ and the organic texture of ‘Disparaître’, to the clustered sound particles of ‘Chromé’ and the instant-classic attitude of ‘Avoueur Condamner’ (Andy Stott, Lanark Artefax) ACIE E R R’s contrasting sonic energies bring openness and versatility into focus.

Steel is one of the world’s most-recycled materials ☺ 

Based on mental techniques, such as lucid dreams, semiotic squares, zen practices, sound manipulation, and a surgical use of language, the process of creation was freestyle, led by meditation and music therapy.

“…from a position of powerlessness, it is through the enforcement of mind as a clava that archaeofuture resistance is supposed to function as a practice against convenction and domestication… a low intensity exorcism for millenary hauntings”

The first steps were to create a starting environment. Each sound was considered as a living organism. Some were alone, isolated and tiny, others existed in myriads or organized swarms, or stood, enormous and bulky, dragging with them colonies of parasites and courtiers, disappearing in depth or gushing then evaporating. All moving together, interacting, aware of their collective presence, distorting and damaging the environments they crossed.
This ecosystem concept is extra-perceptual: it is implemented in the sound production methodology. Software is generatively arranged and modulated. A whole set of parameters are in constant inter-modulation, sometimes with feedback systems. Our gestures react to the sound produced during long generation sequences, by impacting variables at given times, not chosen in advance but always in reaction to our immediate perception of sound.
After this phase of exploration, the focus was on writing, following the idea of form, speech, gestures, figures, micro rhythmic movements, pretextual pulsations, in order to extract from these infinite systems the most striking drama. The desired musical time was close to painting, a time that would be painted by listening, in which the attention is oriented and walks freely, like our eyes on a canvas.
Our most precious goods are sometimes hidden in the background, reflected in the briefest sound objects, which took a long time to calibrate.
Always, in music, we privileged painter’s reflexes. We think music, as well as prose, shall drug, entrance, be intimate, otherwise it fails to touch the soul. It was about writing music that one can get drunk, feel, see more than is written, in an infinite variety of representations which remains blurry for the mind.
Musique qui cherche le point où les couleurs donnent l’être, et où en chaque espacement se rémunère un premier souffle…(YY) 

But what if we were to fuel spontaneity and embrace a pluralistic vision, by accepting the impossibility of absolute creative competency? Perhaps we would produce material that not only confronts the prospect of failure but actively accommodates it, as a viable aesthetic framework.

Scott Young’s work is an attempt to unlearn certain ‘normalized’ approaches to sound, representing a jolt to the system, a wild construction of invention and misdirection, one that reconnects us with the value of disarrangement. The non-hierarchical layering of sound and image on ‘Post Peace’ defies linearity and rationality. On the collaborative composition ‘Tuck’, written with Manchester based artist Joe Beedles, the two create music in reverse, inspired by a fictitious review written about the self-same piece. This sense of freeform originality is mirrored by the intimate portraits that Italo-Australian visual artist Rebecca Salvadori has produced for the artwork. A series of autonomous forms that transcend straightforward classification.

Unerringly raw yet mature, Young’s music evolves as an organic cycle, encompassing spry, cerebral, dub-inflected dynamics. Full of duality and enterprise, never conclusive.

On ‘Post Peace’, there’s freedom in forgetting what you know. 

It is “inter-objective” — it consists of all kinds of other/multiple entities but it is not reducible to the sum of its parts.

This music reveals the present and its psychic dimension, no titles could have been more relevant.

Justin Tripp and Brian Close’s new kaleidoscopic hyper-music-entity expands their GEORGIA project in a high-dimensional phase space. A great work of cognitive music mapping that plots all the states of a system — Lovely bubbly HTML.

The eight tracker long playing make extensive use of the vocal participation of Paris/Berlin-based artist/DJ MARYLOU aka OISEAU DANSEUR and Gabi Asfour of visionary NY fashion collective threeASFOUR.

C-60 (mins.) limited edition MIXTAPE from artists´outstanding sonic contributions to the LNT experience. This is a cassette-only release that includes private link to all the full-length A/V sets and aims to support sustainability in our communities and give value to our actions.

Artists have been encouraged to heavily reuse content taken from the Internet to contaminate their sonic contributions, in a process of reverse exploitation of web protocols to maximise the impact of our presence—leaving no traces.
Whatever is found and reusable in the World Wild Web data-forest will be a possible source of the disruptive agency of artists. To warp and repurpose those materials into a sonic scribe of collective consciousness is what Leave No Trace has set out to investigate.

LNT also took part to the COMMON Multiverse Initiative by Currents.fm.

LNT artwork is curated by PHASE art-collective.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST: we want to suggest to the public some starting links for readings / donations to associations / foundations that work to promote and support diversity in the great outdoor.  
During the playful approach and research for visuals material to be re-used in LNT we were faced with a narrative (we grabbed things mainly from YT) of racial and gender discrimination in the great outdoor and related activities / sports. A sort of environmental imperialism, which often manifest under the guise of protecting “wilderness.”
We therefore opted for walks and hikes filmed in subjective vision, a few ones with alternative ‘characters’ or hilarious videogame representations of the standard narrative.

www.americantrails.org/resources/the-arch-of-history-is-long-but-it-bends-towards-justice
lots of links to take action / donate (American Trails)

www.theguardian.com/travel/2020/dec/02/the-bame-women-making-the-british-outdoors-more-inclusive
The BAME women making the outdoors more inclusive (the Guardian)

www.routledge.com/Afro-Nordic-Landscapes-Equality-and-Race-in-Northern-Europe/McEachrane/p/book/9781138207110
Afro-Nordic Landscapes. Equality and Race in Northern Europe – Edited By Michael McEachrane
(a Paul Gilroy´s tip) 

Holy Similaun seems to frame its attention on the matter between and around standard musical objects—rhythm, melody to name two— overturning normal hierarchies and apparently reorienting the listeners towards the scenery rather than the ‘action’. The voids, the gaps, the structural falls and the physical impact of sounds are the core of that “negative space” in constant change.

Ansatz leaves a sense of the unfinished—distant ambient mutant techno echoes in a Neo-Tokyo-3 soundscape.

Holy Similaun seems to frame its attention on the matter between and around standard musical objects—rhythm, melody to name two— overturning normal hierarchies and apparently reorienting the listeners towards the scenery rather than the ‘action’. The voids, the gaps, the structural falls and the physical impact of sounds are the core of that “negative space” in constant change.

Ansatz leaves a sense of the unfinished—distant ambient mutant techno echoes in a Neo-Tokyo-3 soundscape.

Instead of the “blank slate” problem, Gunn’s challenging take is quite the opposite: how to fit a large amount of pieces together to form a cohesive whole and keep many different combinations of sounds and textures in focus, avoiding decision-making paralysis. Whether it’s algoritmic destruction (LOCUS, TWELVES), synthesis techniques (ASSUMPTION, WALL OF FULL-STACKS) or awkward electro rhythms and future-dark-ambient-dub-ish sounds (INVARIANT, OFFSHOOT, SOLVED PROBLES XII) Gunn manages to glue his big-data-archive via a ‘sympathetic filter’. He works on common elements and physical properties of sounds, coagulating and enhancing unnatural timbres and weird architectures into an enthusing organic whole by playing with sound processing, effects and his signature coding steroids—techno-angel’s share for the ‘big picture’…

From the ambient interludes of ‘my broken nails’ / ‘Foreign body’ / ‘Fragmented memories’ to the elaborate narratives and discontinuous apexes of the title track ‘crY’, to the junglist extravaganza of ‘Appointment Scheduling System’ and the hectic course of ‘multi-functional prosthetic hand’, this work strikes the listener by contrasting pleasure with inadequacy, excitement with frustration.
Creating, tweaking, sampling / re-sampling and arranging mutual material remotely—Glass deliberately worked in separate studios, limiting their meeting to pleasure and strongly encouraging the active participation of all parties in the whole process and in general discussions. The making of this release ended up building a community—sure thing! 

Shelley Parker opens with LET THE BODY, a collaboration with choreographer and dance artist Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome. The work considers what emerges through disorientation and reorientation around pleasure and permission in the body, positioning dance as a form of political expression. Entirely composed from recorded sounds of the dancer’s bodies moving in space, the three tracks represent an excerpt of the longer performance originally commissioned by Arnolfini Bristol 2016 and recently programmed and performed at I.C.A. London 2020.

On the flip side Peder Mannerfelt throws an unsettling adaptation for Roland TR-909 of the well- known classic ‘Music for Pieces of Wood’. Far from being any sort of academic gesture this recording comes from a rather profound Steve Reich phase (pun intended) of the Swedish producer in which a score, found by chance, of this iconic piece was deciphered thru a DAW and transformed into sound by an equally iconic drum machine. The process of mechanization—a founding concept of the original composition—finds in MUSIC FOR PIECES OF 909 a new [magic] dimension, unironic and full of meanings at the same time, confirming Mannerfelt’s acute take on experimentation and Reich’s genius in a singular movement.

Known as Mycelium, this fascinating wood-wide-web very much resembles the intricacy of the human neural system—transporting carbon, water and nutrients from one tree to another. A mutualistic symbiosis that Taeggi similarly establishes with the rather rare arsenal of sound machineries he had access to at Willem-Twee synthesis studios in Holland—a center for experimentation inspired by Berio and Maderna’s Studio di Fonologia RAI in 1950s Milan.
In the process of tweaking and feeding electric impulses and sound signals into instruments of the likes of the iconic ARP 2500/2600 and a number of testing/measuring units from the 50/60s—originally not conceived as musical instruments— Taeggi engages into an exchange of nutrients and information, while abruptly sabotaging un-welcome elements, hence accelerating the sound superhighway towards spectral psychedelic tension—a process he seems to be extremely in control of. Taking a step aside from his usual minimal approach to address more complex structures and augmented mind-sets, Mycorrhiza sounds at times like gamelan from the future: a lucid excursion into a form of “ritual-computer-music” with a conspicuous penchant for detail, alluding to a continuity between pseudo-cerimonial and laboratory-like computer music, steering clear from any reference to a specific creed or religion—imagine Stockhausen drinking the Amazonian sacred brew Ayahuasca..
The swarming micro-movements of “Cuttleburrs” multiply in a series of crescendos marked by sudden falls, saturated drums incursions and tense sonic clusters, introducing the more explicit gamelan percussive tones and compositional forms of “Kodama” and “Icaro”. Recorded on the ARP 2500, “Mycorrhiza” uses white noise generators, resonant bass and spring reverb to conjure up a magical fungal diorama, which expands into the spooky shadows of skeletons and demons of “Phantasmagoria” and the spectral mystics of “Oculus Cordis”—the Eye of the Spirit — in which Taeggi grapples with the same sine-wave generators that Stockhausen used in his seminal “Studie I” and “Studie II”.

The rather elusive producer XDCVR certainly works here under the influence of cyberpunk literature, but focuses on a less elegant and romantic vision of the future imagined by Gibson, to name one..Working on a limited palette of FM sounds *10100100000 alternates beetween nervous electronic, dark ambient and slower tempos over intentionally raw and not ‘well-mannered’ architectures. Strange algorithms lead sounds into unusual broken patterns, modeling a vividly imagined allegory for the constant fragmentation, poor concentration and—often—neuroelectronic void of our time.

From the anarchism of 1s & 0s of ‘The New Politics Of Youth’ and ‘3rd Left 5 Down’, to the binary mood board for the hyper fashion conscious of ‘I bought some fufu Cav Empt bc wots more Cyberpunk than buying fake designer clothing from China?’, to the full hi-vis in triple black climate arpeggios of ‘X001ver’, to the post-post ambient hangover of ‘Wintermute’, ‘_X003’ and ‘*For Internal Use Only’—where Second Woman seem to blend with Basinsky—to the Hanckock-on-Crystal downtempo of ‘The Hollow Construct Of Lonny Zone’, *10100100000 is a kind of bird’s-eye view of the fragmented surface of current aesthetics— bit-coin mining machines run in the background… 

Inspired by true events, the short film directed by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Afronauts tells an alternative history of the 1960s Space Race. Contrary to what Gil Scott-Heron thought at the time though, whitey was not the only one trying to get up on the moon. In Zambia, shortly after independence, science teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s dreams of space travel led him to establish the new nation’s very own space academy. Without resources—the £7,000,000 grant from UNESCO never came through— he hoped to launch a spacegirl —17-year-old Matha—and two cats into space before America or Russia could.
“I always thought of Afronauts as a science film and kept that idea close while working on the score. By using chance operations and controlling for certain variables, the music came together as a series of happy accidents, much like many scientific discoveries do.”

Former scientist and drummer of the US indie rock band Dirty Projectors, Brian McOmber—who is building a consistent and awarded career in film composition—edited this score to picture out of roughly 10 hours of improvised material with help from Toronto-based producer Liam O’Neil, singer Dave Hamelin and Jimmy Shaw from the band METRIC. Together, they performed live for two days, repeatedly improvising along to a rough cut of the movie, inspired by a story that follows the controversial scientific zeitgeist of the twentyieth century and the universal human desire to discover the unknown.

With a relatively small palette of sounds the soundtrack succeeds in giving body to a single set of contrasts from melancholic tension to dream-like euphoria, in which McOmber seems to ‘discover’—more than compose—this music through a playful and empirical creative process that strengthens the spirit of Bodomo’s Afronauts vision.

What do you do when you can’t quite get “out there”? 

Inspired by true events, the short film directed by Nuotama Frances Bodomo, Afronauts tells an alternative history of the 1960s Space Race. Contrary to what Gil Scott-Heron thought at the time though, whitey was not the only one trying to get up on the moon. In Zambia, shortly after independence, science teacher Edward Makuka Nkoloso’s dreams of space travel led him to establish the new nation’s very own space academy. Without resources—the £7,000,000 grant from UNESCO never came through— he hoped to launch a spacegirl —17-year-old Matha—and two cats into space before America or Russia could.
“I always thought of Afronauts as a science film and kept that idea close while working on the score. By using chance operations and controlling for certain variables, the music came together as a series of happy accidents, much like many scientific discoveries do.”

Former scientist and drummer of the US indie rock band Dirty Projectors, Brian McOmber—who is building a consistent and awarded career in film composition—edited this score to picture out of roughly 10 hours of improvised material with help from Toronto-based producer Liam O’Neil, singer Dave Hamelin and Jimmy Shaw from the band METRIC. Together, they performed live for two days, repeatedly improvising along to a rough cut of the movie, inspired by a story that follows the controversial scientific zeitgeist of the twentyieth century and the universal human desire to discover the unknown.

With a relatively small palette of sounds the soundtrack succeeds in giving body to a single set of contrasts from melancholic tension to dream-like euphoria, in which McOmber seems to ‘discover’—more than compose—this music through a playful and empirical creative process that strengthens the spirit of Bodomo’s Afronauts vision.

What do you do when you can’t quite get “out there”? 

“The 4 units of musical material ‘Path in, J Lover One, Yomi, Umbo’ came into one together through a kind of dream logic” explains Coates . “They are contradictory, non-developmental and block-like, sitting across from each other like David Lynch’s Rabbits”. Hence each section seems to seek for completion and fallacy at the same time in a form of non sequitur disjointed conversations. From the heavily processed cello intro of ‘Path in’, to the instant avant-classical Reichian ‘Yomi’, to the infectious breakbeat brutalism of ‘Umbo’, Coates enhance the plasticity of music to help to reconfigure familiar styles or patterns from known feelings and corresponding language. This plasticity is the way to unlock mental fixations, move things around and make fresh compartments for pleasure.
Instictive and rational at the same time, Spatial’s approach is fueled with illusory contours and tricky alternations of concreteness and abstraction. The attention of the listener is continuously shifted to something different—new—when you think you hold the vision of his music it is the exact moment you find yourself in parallel sonic territory. In Gestalt psychology, ‘Reification’ is the generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based—and this pretty much nails Spatial track’s concept. Interruptions, syncopations, subtle noise interventions appear in a liquid uncatchable pattern in which the whole is something else than the sum of its parts. ‘Residual’ follows pulling all these elements out of frame in a process of misplaced concreteness— interpretations are elusive.
All cover pictures for the Decouple ][ Series are taken from Alice Bonfanti’s ‘Transparent Things’ [1997] courtesy of the artist. 

Four tracks operate under the same blurry skies, polluting semantic memories with augmented-nostalgia and a sense of failure of the collective, but managing to see a possible future through suburban fractures.
Far from being a mere technical exercise with an objective look, Hegenrax emotionally dilates inside an intimate inner space as to want to reach a more intensive zone beyond – outside – standard perceptual thresholds—and this process sounds joyously modern and classic at the same time.

…‘what I can say is that Thursday 1st November 2018… in Berlin, Richard played tracks from the likes of Second Woman, Zuli, Royal House, M.E.S.H. and Bicep, bit it wasn’t until the 38 minute mark — when he mixed together Holy Similaun’s with Skee Mask’s — that he pricked my ears.’. (Tom Durston, Inverted Audio)

All cover pictures for the Decouple ][ Series are taken from Alice Bonfanti’s ‘Transparent Things’ [1997] courtesy of the artist.

When asked to give some thoughts about his work, the reply was a slew of stock images and short quotes: text analytics, psychometrics, data storms, predictive technologies, ethics of psychological profiling… S.T.A.S.H. is revealed through rapid suggestions and music hybrids in which overload of inputs and frenetic absorption re-elaborate into a true personal stylistic mash – today’s media.

When asked to give some thoughts about his work, the reply was a slew of stock images and short quotes: text analytics, psychometrics, data storms, predictive technologies, ethics of psychological profiling… S.T.A.S.H. is revealed through rapid suggestions and music hybrids in which overload of inputs and frenetic absorption re-elaborate into a true personal stylistic mash – today’s media.