★Touch
800 000 Seconds In Harar
'CD digipak. CM von Hausswolff says: 'I was approached by my old friend and Radium 226.05 colleague Ulrich Hillebrand, now director of Angered Theatre in Göteborg. He informed me that there was a new play in the process of being written by author and theorist Michael Azar called 'Jag r en annan' (I is another) stemming form the famous letter written by Arthur Rimbaud in his youth. The play uses Rimbaud's life from being a young poet in Charleville ending with him being the trader in Harar,…
Cross-Pollination
Plenty of praise has been lavished on veteran musician, field recording expert and BBC sound recordist Chris Watson, and it would be hard to disagree with any of it. 'Cross Pollination' is his latest full-length, again for the Touch label that has been his home for many years, and sees him teaming up with Marcus Davidson for a surprising collaborative piece. Using Watson's recordings of bees in an English country garden as the backbone of the composition, Marcus Davidson had a choir re-interpret…
Viroulegu forsetar
LP version. “This is his second album for Touch, after the highly acclaimed “Englabörn” [Touch # TO:52], about which The Wire said: “...expressive leitmotifs that unveil a profound sadness without ever wallowing in pathos” and Boomkat called it “a work of rare beauty and ... a rare jewel.” “Virthulegu forsetar” contains one hour-long piece for 11 brass players, percussion, electronics, organs and piano. The piece had its live debut in Hallgrimskirkja, a large church in Reykjavik and the city’s t…
A hidden place
Sohrab was born in Tehran in 1984. He was seven when the Iran-Iraq war ended. His name, from an old poem called “Shahname”, means “rouge water”, which can also mean 'blood'. He started a punk band with his brother and a friend, which lasted about two years before splitting. Sohrab is totally isolated in Iran, with little or no connection to what is happening there. Sohrab is, like so many, displaced within his own country and occupies a similar internal cultural isolation. This is suggeste…
An ark for the listener
Just Arrived: Philip Jeck makes geniunely moving and transfixing music, where we hear the art not the gimmick. Philip Jeck writes: A version of An ark for the listener was first performed at Kings Place London on 24/02/2010. It is a meditation on verse 33 of The Wreck of the Deutchsland, Gerard Manley Hopkins poem about the drowning on December 7th 1875 of five Franciscan nuns exiled from Germany. This CD version was recorded at home in Liverpool and used extracts from live performances ov…
Spliced
Live at the The Museum of Garden History, London, 8 May 2009. Keyboards: Marcus Davidson. Record players, editing & overdubbed bass: Philip Jeck. Philip Jeck studied visual art at Dartington College of Arts. He started working with record players and electronics in the early '80's and has made soundtracks and toured with many dance and theatre companies as we as well as his solo concert work. His best kown work "Vinyl Requiem" (with Lol Sargent): a performance for 180 '50's/'60's record p…
Incongruous Harmonies
These pieces were composed for Circa's Regarding the Joy of Others. Recorded and produced at 158, Brisbane, 09/09-01/10. Lawrence English is media artist, composer and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English's work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He utilises a variety of mediums including live performance, audio/visual environments, found sound/vision to create his work that typifies his interests in creating exp…
Energy Field
Armed with four 8011 DPA hydrophones, DPA 4060 omni mics, a Telinga parabolic reflector mic and and a Sound Devices 744T digital hard disk recorder, Jana Winderen studies and records wild places which have a particular importance in our understanding of the complexity and fragility of marine ecosystems. The recordings were made on field trips to the Barents Sea (north of Norway and Russia), Greenland and Norway, deep in crevasses of glaciers, in fjords and in the open ocean. These elements are t…
Location momentum
Eleh has been an enigma since the first record under that name was released in 2006. In numbered editions with letterpressed sleeves, usually on Important Records from the U.S.A., these vinyl-only releases were evidently a labour of love and attention. Further recordings have been released on the labels Taiga and Touch, making 11 vinyl editions in all. Eleh began as long ago as 1999 as an exploration of analog synthesis, emphasising low frequency oscillation and resonant acoustic phenomen…
The invisible city
Recorded and mixed during 2008-2009 in Berlin. All tracks composed by BJNilsen using tape recorders, computer, organ, acoustic guitar, electronics, viola, subharchord. Field recordings from Sweden, Iceland, Norway, UK, Japan, Portugal and Germany. The subharchord was recorded in the EAM Studio @ Adk, Berlin. Viola played by Hildur Gudnadottir. Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye.
Intermission 2000-2008
Intermission brings together a range of material Australian sound artist Oren Ambarchi has contributed to compilations and limited-edition vinyl releases between the years 2000 and 2008. Highlights include two live recordings -- an early, fragile solo guitar recording taken from a radio broadcast in 2000 and "A Final Kiss On Poisoned Cheeks," his powerful 12" recorded live in Vancouver in 2007 and originally released on Table Of The Elements. Additional tracks include "Iron Waves,"an exclusive t…
Observations & Momentum
The Touch label presents the Observations & Momentum split LP as a great opportunity to hear noise minimalist Eleh and Swedish visual/sound artist Christofer Lämgren aka Nana April Jun at their finest. Nana April Jun's track "Sun Wind Darkness Eye" is taken from the album The Ontology Of Noise, particularly because it stands out as being perfect for a vinyl edition. In the same time-frame, the series of releases by Eleh on Important Records attracted the Touch label's attention. These homages to…
Touch Strings
This is Phill Niblock's fourth release on the Touch label. Phill
Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician
and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the
flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on
the fringes of the avant garde ever since. In the history books Niblock
is the forgotten Minimalist. His influence has had more impact on
younger composers such as Susan Stenger, Lois V Vierk, David First, and Glenn Bra…
Aíneen Musta Puhelin / Black Telephone Of Matter
Best known as one-half of acclaimed techno minimalists Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio also has an impressive résumé as a solo artist that stretches back to the early '90s and his association with influential Finnish imprint Sähkö. Recording primarily under the aliases Ø and Philus, and sometimes his birth name (depending on the project), Vainio's aesthetic mission has been consistently and rigorously defined by an investigation into the materiality of sound. Indeed, just about everything in his catalog …
Stepping Into The Dark
1996 release, repressed! Watson's lead instrument is the tape recorder. After working with Cabaret Voltaire and The Hafler Trio, he became sound recordist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He has since joined a film and video production company, working for BBC wildlife documentaries and occasional feature films. The 12 recordings on Stepping into the Dark contrast a windswept forest in Glen Cannich with the gathering conversations of rooks roosting in a churchyard in Northumber…
Englabörn
Upon setting out to score the music for the play Englaborn by Havar Sigurjonsson, Johann Johannsson, co-founder of the Icelandic arts organisation Kitchen Motors, came upon a text by the Latin poet Catullus which roughly translates as, I hate and I love. Why do I do it, you might ask? I dont know, but I feel it happening to me, and it's tearing me apart. This poem concisely bridges the emotional opposites which clashed within the play itself. As the play's content was extremely violent and distu…
Vectors
Touch releases an album by UK experimental musician Robert Hampson. Before his involvement with acousmatic sound, Hampson was the originator behind such guitar-based acts such as Loop and Main. He was also a member of Godflesh, and collaborated with Jim O'Rourke and Organum. Vectors features three pieces, two of which were commissioned by the Group du Recherches Musicales (GRM) which had their debut performances on the Acousmonium in Paris. "Umbra" (2006) is a 16-channel piece that had its d…
Wireless
1st live album by Norway's Geir Jenssen - recorded in 2007 by Chris Watson & mastered by Touch stalwart BJNilsen. In the early 1990s, he was a pioneer of so-called "ambient techno," but since then, he has refined his sound into something more magnetic & enduring. Here, he incorporates samples of field recordings by Jony Easterby & trumpet by Anders Karlskas, invoking a sparser, more arresting sound.
Ignotum Per Ignotius
Original copy on Touch, packaged in large card wallet with 36 page booklet. This was the first CD by The Hafler Trio. Ignotium Per Ignotius stands for unknown to the very unknown, which is as much a mystery as the other Hafler Trio CD with a Latin title from that period "E Causa Ignota" — by unknown cause). Releases by The Hafler Trio are never "easy listening" and Ignotum Per Ignotia no exception. This is a brief CD (clocking in at 36 minutes), which for once is a good thing, as there is much t…
The Ontology Of Noise
Mastered by Denis Blackham. The Ontology of Noise researches the dark associations of post-black metal. No traditional instruments are used on the album and all techniques are digital in their application. There are almost no arrangements or layers, but the pieces consist of single streams which change intuitively. This makes The Ontology of Noise a concrete journey through an abstract language evolving around light and darkness, nature and artificiality, and sometimes even takes the form of a s…