Double LP compilation featuring Italian dancefloor music from the end of the Afro/Cosmic scene to the beginning of the Italian Rave era, between 1987 and 1994.
Stunning bit of research by Andrea Dallera (Dualismo Sound) and Gabriele Casiraghi who’ve been meticulously digging Italian bins. After endless sifting through this crucial time in Italian dance floor music, we are presented with their final distillation of this transitory period between 80’s afro cosmic and Italo’s peak into early 90’s rave and Italo house era. In their words: “The whole concept was born as we started to find records that were into a kind of hybrid zone that was clearly pre-announcing some of the huge musical changes brought by the 90’s. The sound at play can be understood as looking closely to Belgian New Beat, Uk’s Acid House and German early Techno but still connected with some dynamics of the ‘80s sounds: lashing snares and catchy melodic phrases joined by filthy acid bass lines, highly compressed kicks and ‘World music’ samples are just some of the most recurring elements.” Hands down mandatory for any dance floor oriented record collection.
INFO is pleased to announce Voices Fill My Head, Kristin Oppenheim’s second double LP release on the label documenting her early sound works from the 1990s. Recorded between 1993 and 1999 in her Brooklyn studio, Voices Fill My Head features eight pieces composed solely of the artist’s voice. For listeners who were fond of Night Run, Oppenheim’s first release on the label, this record reveals yet another important chapter in Oppenheim’s oeuvre.
Since the early 1990s, Oppenheim has produced vocal compositions for gallery and museum settings, making compositions not as music, but as repetitious sound installations designed to drift back and forth across wide stereo fields. Oppenheim’s installations saturate space, touching on fragmented memories that blur the lines between reality and abstraction.
Kristin Oppenheim is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for installation art based in writing, performance, film, and sound. She is represented by greengrassi in London and 303 Gallery in New York.
Since the early 1990s, Oppenheim’s work has been exhibited internationally. Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions including the 45th and 46th Venice Biennale, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Among others, She has had solo exhibitions at MAMCO Musée d’Art Modern et Contemporain, Geneva; at Secession, Vienna; KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; at FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Oboro, Montréal; the Jewish Museum, New York; and at the Villa Arson, Nice.
Her work has also been seen in exhibitions including “X”, at FRAC Des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou (2021); “Sound Museum” at D MUSEUM, Seoul (2020); “H(a)unting images. Anatomy of a shot” at Fundación la Caixa, Barcelona (2017); “Never Ending Stories” at MAMCO Musée d’Art Modern et Contemporain, Geneva (2014); “The International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena de Indias”, (2014); “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”, ‘Nuit Blanche’, in Paris (2013); “NYC 1993: Experimental, Jet, Set Trash and No Star” at New Museum, New York (2013); “Women Artists from the Centre Pompidou” at Seattle Art Museum, (2012); “Volume” at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2011); “Silence. Listen to the Show” at Sandretto Foundation, Turin (2007); “Don’t Call it Performance” at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2003); “Voices” at Witte de With, Rotterdam (1998); “Young and Restless” at Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997); “29’ – 0 / East” at New York Kunstahalle (1996); “Threshold” at Fundacao de Serralves, Porto (1995); “Murs du son” at Villa Arson, Nice (1995); and “Encounters with Diversity” at PS1 MOMA, New York (1992).
Kristin Oppenheim’s work is included in public collections of the Art Foundation Mallorca Collection, CCA-Andratx in Mallorca; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the FNAC Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris; the FRAC Des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou; MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; MAMCO Museum d’art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.
INFO is a label and interdisciplinary platform highlighting unique applications of sound in the field of contemporary art.
Written and conceived by Stephan Crasneanscki, ‘LOVOTIC’ is a concept album by Soundwalk Collective, composed in collaboration with lauded actress and singer/songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg, Featuring veteran techno stalwart Atom™, rising singer/composer/performance artist Lyra Pramuk, celebrated actor Willem Dafoe, and writer/philosopher Paul B. Preciado, the album will be available from April 1st via the new Berlin-based Analogue Foundation.
Inspired by a relatively new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships – and even love – between humans and robots, ‘LOVOTIC’ interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this phenomenon. The project ventures into a future where sex, intimacy and desire are reformulated through the connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence.
In an age of such hybrid entanglement with the machine, human identity requires the construction of new forms of intimacy, gender, and sexuality. At present, however, such technologies are primarily used to produce programs of limited sexual iterations that do not question the preformatted categories of gender and sexual orientation. In contrast, on ‘LOVOTIC’, Soundwalk Collective ask whether the future of sex and sexuality could instead be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope. Where does the impulse of preference come from? What sets of words from our vocabulary can be communicated to the AI mind to generate a new identity for desire? Could the machine be another technology that brings us closer together?
Sonically ‘LOVOTIC’ is unidentifiable, artificial, and genuinely futuristic, occupying an amorphous androgynous netherworld at the borderlands between biotic and android. Traditional musical signposts are virtually non-existent, instead offering a mercurial, formless sound which mirrors the flourishing of gender fluidity it suggests could be on the horizon.
‘LOVOTIC’ is available as an artist edition double LP pressed on transparent vinyl, featuring a hand engraving on each side. It includes a 16-page booklet containing lyrics and painted artwork, both by Stephan Crasneanscki.
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.
Where To Now? records are proud to present Beatrice Dillon’s follow up release to the widely well received ‘Blues Dances’. This three track 12” sees Beatrice step things up a gear in terms of intricacy, experimenting wildly to add to her already astute palette of timbre and rhythm.
‘Face A’ leads the record with the unmistakable skronk of saxophone cutting and jamming over the skeletal pulse of Beatrice’s signature dubbed out techno landscape. Initially the inclusion of saxophone acts as an aural abstraction or diversion to extract a little freedom from the pumping cavern of dark dub techno atmosphere punctuated with the mechanical juddering saw-bass, but as the piece develops and we become deep into the groove the inclusion of wild sax snorts trips us up and become the focus itself as new levels of complex melodic and rhythmic detail become apparent within this otherwise structurally obedient space. Taking it’s cues from Rabih Beaini, Miles Davis ‘Big Fun’ era, Dresvn and Keith Hudson, undoubtably ‘Face A’ is a compelling, complex trip… heads down but arms flailing.
‘Face B’ continues the theme but takes the listener far deeper into the cavern. Here the concern is more the effects of space within song, a moment where Beatrice allows herself to move away from the floor to find a little more room for playful experimentation. The saxophone is further treated with a plethora of effects to compliment the array of dub signals that scatter and skip around the basin.
The record closes with ‘Sonnier (Walk in the light)’ which strangely somehow manages to feel jazzier in its components, even in comparison to a pair of tracks riffing on a manipulated free-jazz sax part. It sounds strangely unsure of its world, adding to this whole loosely slung, loping feel which somehow fits amongst the stern, brooding, and efficient synth play. Beatrice masterfully manages to create a piece here that grows in intensity without ever increasing in pace or texture, every drop is intended to stir the listener a little more than the last. There’s a sense throughout all the pieces of having rhythm imposed or even inflicted upon the listener but this is certainly not a conflict of ideas… there is optimism, harmony and above all – wild groove nestled within Beatrice’s world of mutant shuffle.
credits
releases 21 August 2015
Written and produced by Beatrice Dillon, tenor saxophone on ‘Face A/B’ by Verity Susman.
Mastered by Rupert Clervaux at Grays Inn Road.
Sleeve drawing Sam Porritt, ‘We’re tripping myself up’, 2012, ink on paper, courtesy of the artist.
French pioneer experimental rock band formed in the early 90’s by Lionel Fernandez, Erik Minkkinen and Nicolas Mazet, Sister Iodine is a rare band who with “Blame” is releasing only now their 5th studio album.
Disappears. A New House in a New Town. Sleeperhold Publications.
Sleeperhold #5.3.
“Disappears” with their release called “A New house in a New Town”. Chicago’s Disappears are Brian Case (also of the Ponys and 90 Day Men), Jonathan van Herik, Damon Carruesco and Noah Leger. Their latest album “Pre-Language”, released on Kranky records, features Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on the drums. Disappears’ druggy, rythmic rock music has often been compared to Neu!, Spacemen 3 or Jesus and Mary Chain at their noisiest.
This output features the demo versions of 2 new songs and a rework of “Love Drug”, from their acclaimed last album “Pre-Language”, recorded in a single track at their rehearsal space The material could not be more unpolished and this rawness only adds to the magic of the songs. The blown-open sound and potential of these versions is enormous. Brian’s barked, deadpan vocals remind of The Fall’s Mark
E. Smith, while the music shivers on. The drumming on this release is taken care of by a drumcomputer, adding a dry rhythm to underline the repetitive nature of the 3 songs. Disappears’ haunting basslines, monotone singing and shivering guitar sound are just enough to convey the mood of 21th century suburbia, with its nihilism and loneliness, the perfect soundtrack for hazy nights. In a unique blend of krautrock, minimalism and garage the group evocates desolation, despair and catharsis. This record seems to build up to an explosion that never seems to arrive. Their smoggy, narcotic sound makes everything come to a stop and builds up in a dynamic thrust, only to stop again. This is truly a thrilling release. Disappears’ interplay between tention and release is seamless and compelling.
——
The etched artwork on the b-side of this vinyl was done by Belgian photographer Stine Sampers. The diptych she created, captures the mood of the music so perfectly one could see it as the 4th song of the album.
Sampers’ pictures seem to dissect the beauty of the empty, simple moments within the human lifespan. Her pictures capture the hidden self of her subject. It seems as if the spectator is allowed to gaze into a world that’s completely indifferent to his/her presence. Her work is highly personal, helping her cope with love, loss and regret.
But Sampers doesn’t just register. By taking a picture Sampers builds a visual narrative around the subject, similar to a diary entry. They often speak of despair or disillusion, as often as they evoke happiness. There is no in-between in Sampers’ work.
