★Touch
Headphone musics 1 to 6. As I As
In 1967 Z'EV took a tape music class at the UCLA night school. The leader of the course was Joseph Byrd who was the founder and theoretician of the first electronic rock band: the united states of america. So while it's almost 40 years now that he has been involved in the production of electro-acoustic music, Headphone Musics marks the first release of a product exclusively featuring this form of music. All of the source material is drawn from the collection of cassette tapes Z'EV has amassed ov…
STAR SWITCH ON
Aer, Biosphere, Fennesz, Hazard, Philip Jeck and Mika Vainio working with recordings from Chris Watson.
SPIRE : LIVE IN GENEVA CATHEDRAL
St. Pierre Cathedral, Geneva, was the crucible of the Reformation in 1534… The second release in the Spire series [cf Spire, organ works past, present & future, Touch # Tone 20, 2004] is more than a document of ‘Spire Live’, which took place as part of La Batie 2004, at St. Pierre Cathedral, Geneva, on 5th September 2004. Curated by Eric Linder, from La Batie, and Mike Harding, the dynamism of the event, where the audience rotated between 3 separate venues within the Cathedral precinct, is refle…
SPIRE
The thought of producing a compilation where the tracks were all either inspired by or more directly influenced by the organ had been frequently aired over the years. The conversations were always animated and expansive. The organ works of Arvo Prt, those performed by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, a pupil of Richard Rodney Bennett at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and others, have reached a wider non-classical audience. Eventually Benny Nilsen arranged to visit St. Mary's Church, Warwick …
RINGSTONES
99 tracks and lots of participants (John Hudak, Oren Ambarchi, Chris Watson, Brandon LaBelle, Evan Parker, Thomas Lehn, Ryoji Ikeda…) that makes music for your mobile phone.
LIGHT
4 new tracks from the 3 audio artists (Hazard, Fennesz, Biosphere) who make up the forthcoming Touch Tour [UK, May 2001]. All are exclusive tracks recorded specifically for this CD, released for the tour. Taking the everyday world as source material and inspiration, the three international collaborations between electronic sound artists and visual artists present a vivid introduction to the work of Touch, the ground-breaking audio-visual label, in its twentieth year. Hazard's compositions evoke …
0°C
As the title may suggest, 0°C is a sonic exploration at a very bottom of human perception - the fragile line between life and death, dark and light, noise and silence. The authentic being is never to be achieved with complete and definitive perception of the universe - the limited human is just negligible drop somewhere between infinity and nonentity. There is no fulcrum for pretentious awareness and peace for one's arrogant mind - obscurity, uncertainty and hesitation are the only true man's sa…
+/-
This is the third edition of this timeless classic, originally released in 1996. Ryoji Ikeda is Japan's top avant-garde minimalist electronic composer, in the tradition of Alvin Lucier/The Hafler Trio/Bruce Gilbert/CM von Hausswolff/Panasonic, etc. +/- has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one's listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals c…
Jessamine
This is New Zealand-based (and former Thela member) Rosy Parlane's second full-length release on touch. With Jessamine, Rosy develops these themes, and continues to incorporate new musical elements from unconventional as well as orchestral instrumentation. To him, everything is an instrument: from household objects to nature sounds. But it is the human element which gives his work such a distinctive sound. Ranging from ambient to noise, he gives full rein to textures of living; to start, languid…
Iris
Rosy Parlane lives in New Zealand; he began playing music with the avant-garde rock trio Thela. Thela released two cds, 'Eponymous' and 'Argentina' on the label Ecstatic Peace! He subsequently began working with abstract electronic based music, both as a solo artist and as Parmentier with fellow Thela collaborator, Dion Workman. His full and intricate soundscapes are comprised of of sample-loops, pianos, guitars, and field recordings manipulated via digital means. Parlane has released two solo a…
passt
Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) and Ramon Bauer completed their trilogy for the label Touch with the 2001 CD Passt. This album, short at 33 minutes, maintains an uncomfortable relationship with glitch electronica. Rehberg & Bauer's first CDs pioneered the genre, which quickly went through an ossification process. Closing their series, the artists try to distance themselves from the glitch culture, bringing a humorous and critical touch to the music. But meta-music this is not; we remain in glitch terri…
Violence of discovery and calm of acceptance
This is his first album for touch. The highly evocative intricate and subtle guitar drones are captured in the beautiful photography of Heitor Alvelos, a Portuguese artist, and in the artwork of Jon Wozencroft. The background noise on track 10 is a recording of silence during a Space Shuttle mission real time webcast. All other sounds were released by electric guitars. The album was recorded between 1993 and 2000 and mastered at Noise Precision, Lisbon.
Soaked
This recording is taken from their live performance at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002. “There are grains of truth in the suggestion that, in moving, you may find yourself in or out of some one’s favour. But, listen to the slow, delicate, even introspective background: some breeze, some chimes, some distant thunder as each focal point remains a lament.”This blistering work was recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002 and follows hot on the heels of Philip Jeck…
Stoke
Stoke was made using Bush, Fidelity and Philips record players, a Casio keyboard and an Alba portable CD player. This record mainly consists of edits of live performances from England, Japan and Vienna. The notion of turntablism may be associated with flashy, deck-hopping scratch gymnastics, but the use of the record player as an instrument harks back to a less ostentatious tradition of music making. John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and James Tenney recognized records and turn…
Surf
Surf is the second CD from the British experimenter whose sound manipulations begin with record players and tape machines. His work "Vinyl Requiem" (with Lol Sargent) for 120 Dansette record players was awarded Time Out magazine's 1993 Performance Award. On these seven pieces (many commissioned for theatre companies) orchestras, rhythms, voices and rhythms ("Surf Finger") are borrowed, manipulated or run backwards (the ethereal tones of "Box Of Lamb" and "1986 (Frank Was 70 Years Old)"). Jeck's …
Grapes from the estate
Oren Ambarchi acts as a good antithesis to that other great Touch luminary - Fennesz.Both artists use the guitar as a starting point for minimalist discovery and post-abstract innovation, though where Fennesz relies heavily on distortion and catharsis, Ambarchi's focus is on a much more refined, clean building of layers and delicate augmentations. For his third outing on Touch, Ambarchi's immense achievement is through his sense of timing, pace and definition - slowly building pieces up to warm,…
Suspension
Oren Ambarchi acts as a good antithesis to that other great Touch luminary - Fennesz.Both artists use the guitar as a starting point for minimalist discovery and post-abstract innovation, though where Fennesz relies heavily on distortion and catharsis, Ambarchi's focus is on a much more refined, clean building of layers and delicate augmentations. For his third outing on Touch, Ambarchi's immense achievement is through his sense of timing, pace and definition - slowly building pieces up to warm,…
In the land of the blind, one-eyed is king
Generally speaking, contemporary musicians produce too much stuff. It is easy to do. But if you feel like sighing, "Oh, it's another Mika Vainio CD", then Mr Vainio himself has anticipated such sentiments with the opening track, a 2 minute blast which sounds like an angry animal breaking free of its cage. What follows is probably Vainio’s most accomplished work to date, a series of rich soundscapes whose beauty is always on the edge of darkness. "In the Land of the Blind One-Eyed is King" is Mik…
Onko
Mika, famous for his Panasonic excursions and solo work as Ø, has finally brought out some stuff under his own name. Listen along as he primes, then fine tunes his pneumatic devices, limbers up with a burst of groundhum before reclining against a sonic wall of hissing grit. Sounds of information reduced to their smallest common denominators. Frosty machine language. The reveries of circuitry. Bit-reduction. Wings of bass. And then, after three tracks which intensely and deftly tweak the spaces b…
Grand Mutation
Lasse Marhaug (electronics) and Nils Henrik Asheim (organ). Lasse Marhaug and Nils Henrik Asheim started their collaboration in 2004 at the All Ears festival in Oslo, Norway. This turned out as a fruitful meeting between two musicians of very different backgrounds. Marhaug's feedback to Asheim's organ sounds in the Oslo concert started to reflect how the work was to develop. Asheim is working with half-stops and subtle playing techniques that create multiple layers of sound with a vibrating or f…