★Entr'acte
Feireenesse
One of the strongest and most mysterious Entr'acte's in a while features baroque electronic fractals with nods to classic Coil and the cascading weirdness of Anthony Manning, brought to you by someone/s operating under a veil of anonymity as "Six Swords" for London’s Entr’acte, who’re forever keeping listeners on their toes... About as cryptic as they come, Feireenesse is a beguiling suite of eight exquisitely elaborate Atalanta Fugiens - diligently mercurial compositions of evolving melodic and…
RX22: Two RX11 Drum Machines, Nine Suspended Speakers, A Microph
“RX22 combines the sounds of two RX11 Yamaha drum machines. Built in the early 1980s, these drum machines have independent outputs for each element of the drum set — hi hats, rides, claps, shakers, etc. I connected a wireless transmitter to each output that sends the signal from each element to a different mini speaker (a total of nine is suspended from the ceiling). I used the main out- put to simultaneously send the combination of all the elements to a stereo PA. The wireless transmission has …
Medication
Welcome return from erstwhile Oslo punk David Gurrik, a.k.a. Human Inferno, with a killer slab of advanced caveman electronics for Entr’acte. Gurrik was last spotted as Human Inferno on his outré label, Sonmoi, in a class split with Lasse Marhaug, and Medication marks his most substantial output in many years. Away from his involvement in “school politics” and the “local community”, it’s probably fair to say that music is a controlled vent for his life less normal, whether singing deadpan about …
Technological Music Vol. 2
A series of calculated disasters wherein compositional intent is exercised to varying degrees before and or after the moment of performance. The Irreproducible Results are single-pass, unedited improvisations featuring borrowed gear configured to maximise complexity and minimise predictability. The remainder are heavily edited constructions utilising detritus of the aforementioned experiments, with the Pulse Matrices continuing a game of formal telephone begun on Vol. 1. Tools include oboe,…
Rafia Longer
John Wall, computer, editing sound manipulation. Alex Rodgers, voice, real and computer-generated, text-to-speech. Mastered by Jacques Beloeil. Edition of 200 copies "Wall and Rodgers’] last two collaborations have intermingled Rodgers’ leftfield drawling voice amidst microscopically-forged electronic tracery. The texts (by no means the arbitrary stream of consciousness they sometimes appear to be) have always felt more-or-less paramount, but that doesn’t equate to clarity, and in the first of…
Algorithms for Electronics, Fake Woodwind and Strings
“I’ve been working on an algorithmic system for live audio visual performance and composition for a few years now. AFEFWAS (3) is a sequence of five fragments of differing lengths and contrasting energies which are recordings of its output. At the heart of this system is a source of random data, in this case generated using the Cauchy probability distribution, which can be shaped by the performer both in realtime and by a careful choice of starting conditions. This data source is used to create …
Pods Of Punishment
Pods of Punishment, like parallel collection Seeds of Paradise (Idle Hands), is a journey into tube-amped molten bass and media fragments. It reveals Strategy’s strong science fiction threads and fixation on radio as a musical medium: its ghostly disembodiment, its persistent familiarity, and its spontaneous impact on the sounds around it.
"The unstoppable Paul Dickow a.k.a. Strategy shapeshifts between dub, techno and the ambient spaces between on 'Pods of Punishment' for Entr'acte. Covering al…
DS16
Daniel Leznoff and Matthew Salaciak are musicians from Montreal. Daniel iscurrently the guitarist/keyboardist in Pierre Kwenders’ touring band, a gig that has brought him to France, Italy and across Canada. Demonstration Synthesis is his anything-goes project, driven by curiosity, technology and musical freedom. Matthew has spent the last few years building a recording studio and has recently begun putting out musicunder the name Variant, a project that sees him working with Montreal native Max …
Work 2006-2011
Wall and Rodgers have worked together informally and irregularly for the best part of two decades, but it has been since Wall took the leap into improvisation, roughly five years ago, that the potential for their collaborations to become something more solid has evolved. So the pair have worked together, either just informally in Wall's studio or out playing live gigs since 2006, and they have produced a body of material that Wall has then sculpted into the composition that appears on the CD. Th…
Work 2011 - 2014
John Wall, computer-generated sounds, severe editing, arrangement and composition. Alex Rodgers, voice, computer-generated sounds. This work was compiled from improvisations, independently-recorded fragments and pre-written texts over the specified period. A second edition of Work 2006 -2011 (E114) is also available. Mastered by Jacques Beloeil and John Wall.
This latest collaboration by electronic composer John Wall and his old sparring partner, poet Alex Rodgers, gets off to a terrific st…
Minor Differences
André Vida is a Berlin-based saxophonist, composer and lyricist. He has developed a series of practical approaches to improvisation using restrictive outfits, animated graphics-based score installations and self-made instruments. His solo saxophone pieces are a synthesis of these areas of improvisational research, combining body, instrument, song-forms, and voice. In this case the pieces are made in the moment and memory, with shifting time matrices. Over the course of a two-minute walk, some fo…
There
Engrossing debut album from Iranian sound artist, Pouya Ehsaei, sublimating samples of traditional Iranian music to "reveal the rage hidden beneath its melancholia." 'There' was produced in 2010, using fractured and brutally processed instrumentation indigenous to Iran to isolate a palpable feeling of tension articulated with a timbre unique to the artist's background. In the course of its six pieces we perceive a stark and grinding sadness from his aerated arrangements, gleaning elusive emotion…
Oxide
Oxide, in two parts, is the digital transfer of Super 8 and 16mm films that have been subjected to rust growth pre- and post-photochemical processing, with subsequent magnetised rusting recorded to tape using various sizes of tape head. The version presented here is a single-screen, digital iteration of the film performance Oxide (ii)+(iii) which was developed during an embedded residency with Sound and Music and no.w.here lab, London, in 2011. Beyond making Oxide (ii)+(iii), the moment of proje…
Ghost Selector
1. Slow Shrine 2. Digital Prayer Processor3. Rain Dream 24. Kyoto Generator5. Mt. Midoriyama Winds6. Foggy Shrine 7. Metal Mountain, Blurry Mountain8. Digital Incense9. Residual
All tracks except Slow Shrine and Rain Dream 2 mastered by Brian Pyle.
Insula
A multi-channel composition for electric organ, commissioned by L’ull Cec for The Game of Life Foundation’s spatialisation sound system (consisting of 192 speakers and 12 subwoofers, using the Wave Field Synthesis technique). Performed on 20 June 2012 at Fabra i Coats, Barcelona. This recording is the stereo version.
Travaux
Composed entirely from field recordings made at Rue Sainte-Beuve in Lausanne, Switzerland, between 2012 and 2013.
Abeyance
*Edition of 200* Minimalist Chicago trio return to Entr'acte with a mesmerising 40 minute study of whispering keys and crackling lower case noise. But don't get it twisted - this is not some beige modern classical, nor is it a rough copy of Basinski's 'Disintegration Loops' - it's perhaps best compared to a location recording of Morton Feldman duetting with an industrial air vent at midnight in a breezy and secluded location. The first quarter of the piece is used to shape the surroundings…
Crritic!
Two interlocking pieces dedicated to Hans Keller, Desmond Leslie and Lester Bangs. I Only Asked uses an interview recording — questions only — to modulate various sound parameters, and is a reworking of a piece first performed at Café OTO, London in March 2011. Hatchet Job is based on a computer speech recording of all the negative reviews Moliné has penned for The Wire magazine in the last ten years. These amount to around 50,000 words.
The Patient
During his final illness (tuberculosis of the larynx) at the sanatorium in Kierling, Kafka was not supposed to speak, an injunction he obeyed most of the time. He communicated with Dora Dymant, Robert Klopstock, and others by scribbling notes on slips of paper. Usually these notes were mere hints; his friends guessed the rest.”—Max Brod.
Inspired by and incorporating fragmentary notes written by Franz Kafka on his deathbed to communicate with friends andfamily, The Patient draws from the texts …
Live At Maria Matos
The Swifter is a trio featuring Andrea Belfi (drums and percussion), BJ Nilsen (electronics) and Simon James Phillips (piano). Their eponymous debut LP was released by The Wormhole in 2012; a follow-up album is in preparation. On this occasion, The Swifter (joined by special guest David Maranha on organ) was recorded live at Teatro Maria Matos, Lisbon, by Pedro Alçada on 2 February 2013.