★Touch
Trian: Recent Works
Trian (Recent Works) is Claire M Singer's debut on vinyl and this double album gathers most of her previous output on the Touch label. During recent years Singer has focused on writing and performing a mix of organ, cello, and electronics with regular performances at Union Chapel, where, as Music Director, she runs a diverse program of concerts and educational workshops around the chapel's organ, which was built by Henry Willis in 1877. Solas ("Light" in Gaelic), which ccupy the first three side…
Agora
Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remix and Bécs. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even ha…
Genera - Live at AB Salon, Brussels
A lifelong expatriate, Bana Haffar was born in Saudi Arabia in 1987 and spent much of her childhood in the GCC. Having trained as a professional bass player and a classical violin player, she has now embraced electronic music fully, exploring live modular synthesizer performance. She is an enthusiastic proponent of the latest Moog and eurorack technology and has a growing discography of releases (VENT, Make Noise Records) in the last couple of years that highlight a unique melodic direction. Thr…
Albania, There Where the Avalanche Stops
**300 copies** For one week in every five years, two thousand singers, dancers and musicians along with fifty thousand spectators make their way to the small town of Gjirokastra in southern Albania for the Festivali Folkloric Kombelar. In the great castle overlooking the town, they participate in the incredible National Folk Festival of Albania, hoping to attain the highest level of interpretation and win one of the many awards available at the festival… the banner, even. Considering the compara…
Sensudestricto
Has there ever been a better time to fuck off to the stars? Is a prison breakout ‘escapism’? Crisis carve some wound-space to let the dreams back in. In nights we turn to fire, in flight we burst into stone, where are the exits in this theatre of the damned? Strict luggage allocations – guitar (David Knight), saxophone (Stephen Thrower) – and all the electronics your thoughts can carry. Headspin echoes, round and around, tilt wind-sails at a dark horizon, cut a stutter through the distance barri…
The Debatable Lands
In December 2017, Howlround (Robin the Fog) was invited to
perform at "The Winter Solstice Soundscapes" for the recently opened
record store "Vinyl Café" in his home town of Carlisle, Cumbria.
Inspired by the reception to his first ever performance in the great
border city, he covered his parent's dining room table with the same
equipment, stretched loops of tape around his mum's seasonal
candlesticks when she wasn't looking... and this LP is the result. The
only equipment used on the alb…
Soundings
Soundings, Simon Scott's debut studio album for Touch finds the composer and sound ecologist using field recordings from various cities around the globe; modular synthesizer treatments; live strings and laptop electronics to create an album of transition and shifting time zones. The recordings were edited and composed in hotels rooms across the world as Scott was constantly on tour as the drummer for Slowdive, who successfully reformed in 2014. "Hodos", the album opener, begins with 85 mph Storm…
Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone
Touch issues Jana Winderen's Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone.
The marginal ice zone is the dynamic border between the open sea and
the sea ice, which is ecologically extremely vulnerable. The
phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the oxygen on the
planet. During spring, this zone is the most important CO2 sink in our
biosphere. On Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone the sounds of
the living creatures become a voice in the current political debate
concerning the officia…
Ecce Homo
Ipek Gorgun's Ecce Homo explores the lighter and darker shades of the human psyche, behavior, and existence, and humanity's ability to create beauty and destruction. What lies in the essence of such complexity has become a core idea for the album, while Gorgun seeks to figure out if there is a true meaning to being human, and human being. Starting with "Neroli" as a human fascination with nature and finalizing with "To Cross Great Rivers"; a never-ending, hopeless dream of the mankind to conquer…
Elusive Balance
Ozmotic is a multidisciplinary artistic project, deeply fascinated by the dynamics of contemporary society, by architecture, cities, and vast uncontaminated spaces. Ozmotic creates world sounds characterized by an intense tonal variety and a refined rhythmic research. The interaction between electronic music and digital visual art in real time is an essential trait of Ozmotic's aesthetic. Having previously collaborated with Fennesz, Murcof, Bretschnider, and Senking, Elusive Balance is their thi…
Invisible Threads
Mark Van Hoen on Invisible Threads: "In mid-2016 I did a brief tour of the west coast with Philip Jeck, Simon Scott, Daniel Mensche, Lee Bannon, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Pye Corner Audio, and Marcus Fischer. The music of all these great artists and the experience of playing these shows with them all informed what would become Invisible Threads which was primarily composed and recorded in the latter half of 2016. I had not played live at dates in such a dense cluster for many years, and the exposure t…
Semper Liber
Semper Liber consists of a series of duets featuring Marcus Davidson, Hildur Gudnadottir, Mike Harding, Charles Matthews, Clare M Singer, Maia Urstad, and Anna von Hausswolff
and are drawn from recordings made at Spire events since 2009. Mixed by
its curator, Mike Harding, at the Völlhaus, and mastered by Mark Van Hoen,
this powerful four track collection -- to be played as one piece --
explores the sonics of the mighty organ in all its thundering glory.
Warning!: Extremely low frequencies …
The Bird Was Stolen
Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, Strafe Für Rebellion, or Strafe F.R., is a long-term collaboration between the artists Bernd Kastner and Siegfried M. Syniuga, which started in 1979. After a long period of hibernation, The Bird Was Stolen
marks their return to Touch following four previous releases in the
'80s and early '90s. From their early connection with the local scene,
centered around the Ratinger Hof in Düsseldorf, Strafe went on to
develop a unique and influential form of sound sculptur…
Cloitre
Issued on compact disc for the first time. Originally released digitally in 2014. Thomas Köner and Jana Winderen, recorded live from the cloisters at Evreux Cathedral, Normandy, France by Franck Dubois on June 14th, 2014, as part of L'Ateliers. With thanks to Denis Boyer. Limited edition CD in card sleeve; Remastered by Thomas Köner; Photography by Jon Wozencroft."Cloître, [Winderen's] live collaboration with Thomas Köner from earlier this year effortlessly forges a fiction by bringing together …
The Future is a Forward Escape into the Past
The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is the latest album by Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and composer Yann Novak, and his second for Touch. It considers the relationships between memory, time, and context through four vibrantly constructed tracks that push Novak's work in a new direction while simultaneously exploring his sonic past. The Future is a Forward Escape Into the Past is composed as a sonata -- a single gesture broken into four parts -- that meditates on the…
Touch Movements
In a 24/7 world, there is no greater challenge than "to be in command of one's own time". Is it true that the ability to download anything, at any moment, constitutes freedom? Has the '"value" of music, art and design been stripped bare? "I Google, therefore I am"... Touch Movements has been compiled over the course of three years. It is a response to many requests for Touch to publish a fuller account of Jon Wozencroft's photography for the cover art of the project. The book follows the music, …
Still Life - Requiem
Conceptualized (2010-2013), composed and produced (2014-2017) by Carl Michael von Hausswolff in Palma (Majorca) and Stockholm. Still Life - Requiem is a musical piece consists only of sounds emitted and extracted from physical matter using emission spectroscopy as the sole basic technology. Acknowledgements to Linköping University (IFM), Sweden. Still Life - Requiem consists of one piece with the same title and is divided up into two to fit the LP format. The piece is, as the title suggests,…
Iklectik
Typically enchanting electro-acoustic enigma from Philip Jeck, forming a richly abstract narrative from the reactive fizz and and timbral thizz of smeared shellac textures and their keening, dissonant harmonics Philip Jeck studied visual arts at Dartington College of Arts in the 1970's and has been creating sound with record-players since the early 80's. He has worked with many dance and theatre companies and played with muscians/composers such as Jah Wobble, Steve Lacy, Gavin Bryars, Jak…
Dark Matter
Derived from an audio library of cosmological activity collected between 1993 and 2003. It was gathered from various sources including NASA (Cape Canaveral, Ames, The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Arecibo), The Very Large Array, The National Radio Astronomy Observatory and various educational institutions and private contributors throughout the USA.Lustmord writes: “The Universe we inhabit is a vast expanse far larger than we are able to comprehend. As we attempt to understand its underlying str…
Sublunar
Presented live in Los Angeles. Source material originally developed as part of mas gestos y mas caras, a collaborative performance with Rafa Esparza and Yann Novak, presented at the Hammer Museum on July 8, 2016. Robert Crouch is an artist and curator whose work encompasses sound, performance, and technology. As an artist, he locates his work with the intersection of post-phenomenological listening practices, conceptual sound art, and contemporary electronic music. At its core, his wor…