Published in 2007 as a catalogue for the solo exhibition of the same name by Ina Wudtke at Studio Voltaire London, edited by Dieter Lesage. 4-colour print with 56 illustrations. Limited, signed editions available. Supported by the Berlin Senate Scholarship to London.
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Sarah Parsons condenses video stills and fragments from the songs’ lyrics into a 208-page booklet. A visual exploration in search of this material’s manifold nuances & defining essence.
Klara Ravat’s room scent questions how we perceive the space around us. To be applied while listening to the music, the scent triggers different sensations as ‘Tales of Another Felt Sense of Self’ evolves, finally leaving an afterglow when the work ends & ambient noise reclaims the room.
Booklet designed by Sarah Parsons, Room Scent developed by Klara Ravat.
Includes unlimited streaming of Tales Of Another Felt Sense Of Self via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
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Trance has been the flagship for electronic music across the globe during the nineties and early zeroes. The sound’s trademark optimistic and euphoric aspects has brought some of the most compelling musical pieces of its time, and undoubtedly had a significant influence on future electronic music to come. Yet, its historical significance has been highly overlooked.
Hypnotised is the first encyclopedia to cover the global trance movement during its most prolific years. The 322-page book spans a near-complete discography of supposedly essential albums, labels and releases, alongside exclusive photos and in-depth interviews with influential artists and label owners.
In a city where advertising plays the leading role, how long can a style resonate? Dentsu2060 is an intricate work, a true to life representation of the city in its drifting vanity. By weaving seamlessly field recordings and melodic light points, Tasho composes an unexpected reflection to the upcoming 2020 Tokyo Olympic ceremony or the illuminated soundtrack of a trendy drama. His 9 compositions channel the voice of his city, offering a new, spectacular world view – overexposed under the artificial lights.
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A collective effort from a vital scene in Kampala, KIKOMMANDO takes its name from Ugandan street food of flat bread and beans. As a ‘food of soldiers’ offering maximum energy for minimum funds, the eponymous mixtape, video series and book project is an equally nourishing and ambitious proposition. It all began in the East African summer of 2018, during a two-month residency at the Nyege Nyege label and collective’s villa, in collaboration with their sublabel Hakuna Kulala. Producer and PAN artist Simone Trabucchi (aka STILL) opened the door to his temporary studio in the city and a crucial cross-cultural collaboration was born.
“The intention was to record as much as possible,” Trabucchi says about KIKOMMANDO’s musical showcase of eight Kampala-based artists, coming from the spectrum of musical influences, crossing trap, drill, cut ups, kuduro, electro, smooth jams—the list goes on. In creating a sonic space to support the expression of its featured singers, poets and emcees, the mixtape ties countless styles and flows into a single snapshot of a particular part of the Kampala music scene, at a particular point in time. The invective of rapper and street legend Blaq Bandana’s “Nkwaata” is laid over a spare and brooding ambient. Kampala Unit trumpet player and first-time singer, Florence, rolls a thick melodic texture through the organic clicks, knocks and atmospherics of “Bae Tasanze”. Jahcity’s unique lyricism combines a personal take on traditional music and soulful-reggae with a jerky, wobbly collection of drops and donks.
Meanwhile, Ecko Bazz applies his grimey vocals and rhythmic, introspective words to lead single ‘Ntabala (Rolex Riddim) at a particularly pertinent moment of self-reflection. “I was trying to listen to the voice inside myself and wanted to achieve a higher level of understanding of things, life,” he says about the themes that he felt inspired to explore with Trabucchi at the recording desk. The accompanying video, shot on a rooftop in the Kampala neighborhood of Ggaba, is one of a series of slick and high-definition films complementing each one of the KIKOMMANDO tracks. These also include contributions from Ugandan emcee and key Hakuna Kulala member Biga Yut, don dada of the GabaGaza gang Swordman Kitala (with Omutaba on percussion) and South Sudanese poet and singer Winnie Lado.
Also accompanying a ‘visual mixtape’ of moving images for each song on KIKOMMANDO is a recording diary of sorts, where Trabucchi compiles a vibrant collection of pictures, colours and textures reflecting the its heterogeneous sonic palette into a book. Together this multifaceted, interdisciplinary project showcases, what Lamin Fofana’s liner notes describe as, “amazing originality, complexity”, while “embracing dissonance”.
Trabucchi’s personal take on a kind of ‘digital dancehall’ defined the sound of his ground-breaking rumination on Italy’s colonial history on debut STILL album, I, in 2017. KIKOMMANDO is a different proposition entirely, where he finds new ways to complement the personality and skills of its contributors sprung from a constant stream of visitors arriving at the Nyege Nyege Villa’s makeshift studio. “It was a dialogue,” stresses Trabucchi, who has always preferred collaboration as a means to escape branded and stereotypical identities, while creating something new. “I created the musical platform to make the singers confident, and challenged them at the same time. Working together accelerates ideas and reveals that nothing is your invention alone. That’s why KIKOMMANDO is a mixtape to me, and not an album.”
Includes a set of stickers & mixtape download code.
The mixtape is mastered by Rashad Becker, featuring artwork by NMR. Tracks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 11 & 12 mixed by Ville Haimala. Tracks 5, 6 & 8 mixed by Lorenzo Dal Ri.
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Next up on the label’s DIY branch Ediciones Capablanca is the sophomore album by Belgian free jazz/ improv composer Els Vandeweyer, ‘Trash’, composed entirely on a trash guitar.
Limited edition of 100 yellow cassettes, housed in typed, numbered and signed handmade paper sleeves with flower, in black jacket.
Made
to give value
to scrap again.
I found a broken acoustic guitar
on a big pile of garbage
in my uncle’s garage.
I could have it.
—
credits
releases September 1, 2021
All music by Els Vandeweyer.
‘Yellow Flower’ features lyrics from ‘In Back of the Real’ written by Allen Ginsberg.
Recorded and mixed by Lazlo Haegner at Butterama, 2020-21.
Mastered by Borja Caro.
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In her artistic practice, Magda Drozd is deeply concerned with listening. The artist and musician not only investigates the ways her audience listens but also continually hones her own auditory sensibility. For her second album, 18 Floors, Drozd trained the latter on the Lochergut, an iconic residential estate in Zurich’s Kreis 4, which she called home for several years. Over the past two years, she compiled a corpus of field recordings in and of the apartment building, which became the basis for an examination of how sound produces knowledge. The result challenges current assumptions about buildings, urban living, and the ecologies of cohabitation. In the context of her project, Drozd conceives of the building as a living organism rather than a collection of static material. The field recordings served as raw material for the compositions, which were woven into eleven speculative tracks consisting of analogue and digital sounds, including violins, guitars, synthesizers, drum machines, and Drozd’s voice. The music moves between sound art, ambient, and experimental electronics, occasionally showing flashes of pop, indie rock, and R&B.
Drozd’s album, released one and a half years after the COVID-19 outbreak, could not be timelier—even though the conception of 18 Floors predates the global pandemic. The album’s actuality derives from Drozd’s sense of the importance of the home, which has become glaringly obvious in the age of Corona. She concentrated on what was close by when attention was habitually lavished on far-away places. In this process, she examined the constitution and potential of her home, and her preference for documenting what might be over what actually is defines her avant-garde attitude. The result is an album that creates a space for what is transient, uncertain, and unstable. And it creates a space for opportunities, which we need now more than ever.—
18 Floors is Drozd’s second album. Her debut, Songs for Plants, was released on vinyl and digitally by Präsens Editionen in 2019. Her follow-up enters the label catalogue among releases by Samuel Reinhard, Belia Winnewisser, Martina Lussi, and Leo Hoffmann.
The Terraforma Journal is a new editorial project by Terraforma. A biannual publication exploring the intersection of sound, art, ecology and culture at large. Issue #1 focuses on the expanded notion of the festival—intended as a collective, multi-lateral, interconnected manifestation of dynamicity. The theme unfolds through a multiplicity of layers to acquire new and unexpected definitions. Terre Thaemlitz, Fabio Sargentini, Shiraz Arts Festival, Beuys 2021, Alice Bucknell, Angela Rui, 2050.plus — among many others — explore this angle and translate their vision into the printed matter. Every issue of the Terraforma Journal features a specially commissioned cover, starting with a labyrinthine interpretation of Daniel Sansavini and Studio Temp.
Terraforma Journal is an expansion towards a renovated feeling of togetherness and exchange.
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Entitled “Mixtape”, this catalogue brings together works by Dominique Hurth from 2008 to 2020. It comprises one text booklet with contributions by Daniela Cascella, Sonja Lau and the artist herself; one image booklet with 136 images from installation shots of Hurth’s work and one audio-tape (45-min each side) with recordings, music and sound material inherent to the research behind the works. The chosen format reflects on her interest in object-biography, technology and its history.
“We listened to historical recordings and futurist sounds, to tracks taking in everything from minimal wave and Detroit techno to hip-hop and chansons. We listened to the voices of the first speaking dolls that sounded like little monsters, to the voices of Sarah Bernhardt and Serge Gainsbourg as he burned a 500 Franc note on French TV. To Clarice Lispector as she lit a cigarette while being asked why she continued to write. We listened to music created in laboratories, music that was sent into outer space. We listened to lyrics and then languages and voices w couldn’t understand. Machine-generated sounds. Sounds created on celluloid. James Joyce reciting four pages of Finnegans Wake to Charles Ogden in the late 1920s. We listened to advertisements for vocoders and to music with vocoders as the primary transmitter of voice and the main musical instrument. We listened to France Gall singing — or rather, screaming — into the microphone at the Eurovisio Song Contest at the age of nineteen about being a doll made of wax and a doll made of sound. To a litany of okays sung by The Destroyer in a song by the Residents. To the breathing of Pauline Oliveros’s accordion. To the Holy Ghost in the Machine. To Minnie Riperton’s voice in the background, to atonal music, and to computer-generated hand claps. Electronic communication with the dead.
Jazz.
A countdown to zero. We listened to beats.
The several hours of sound that we listened to eventually became two side of forty-five minutes each — Side A and Side B. Condensed and edited in this way, this mixtape actually conceals and contains several other mixtapes, recalling all the other tracks that burst out of the edges of the magnetic band.” (”Mixtape(s)”, D. Hurth, 2020)
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A rich collection of essays tracing the relationship between art and sound.
In the 1970s David Toop became preoccupied with the possibility that music was no longer bounded by formalities of audience: the clapping, the booing, the short attention span, the demand for instant gratification. Considering sound and listening as foundational practices in themselves leads music into a thrilling new territory: stretched time, wilderness, video monitors, singing sculptures, weather, meditations, vibration and the interior resonance of objects, interspecies communications, instructional texts, silent actions, and performance art.
Toop sought to document the originality and unfamiliarity of this work from his perspective as a practitioner and writer. The challenge was to do so without being drawn back into the domain of music while still acknowledging the vitality and hybridity of twentieth-century musics as they moved toward art galleries, museums, and site-specificity. Toop focused on practitioners, whose stories are as compelling as the theoretical and abstract implications of their works.
Inflamed Invisible collects more than four decades of David Toop’s essays, reviews, interviews, and experimental texts, drawing us into the company of artists and their concerns, not forgetting the quieter, unsung voices. The volume is an offering, an exploration of strata of sound that are the crossing points of sensory, intellectual, and philosophical preoccupations, layers through which objects, thoughts and air itself come alive as the inflamed invisible.
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