Two of the latest releases from Tochnit Aleph - Daniel Löwenbruck's project, for three decades one of the most radical and consistent spaces in the international experimental landscape, now operating from Denmark - that share a common obsession: sound as act, as summons, as a gesture that the recording does not archive but transforms. El Llamado (Der Aufruf) by Mario de Vega and A Profound Loss of Meaning by Alice Kemp are two works that inhabit the threshold between performance and record - and hold it open.

Mario de Vega - El Llamado (Der Aufruf) (LP)

A whistle is one of the oldest forms of long-distance communication. A summons. A signal thrown across space, hoping for a reply. Mario de Vega takes that elemental premise and stretches it to global proportions. El Llamado (Der Aufruf) began as a performative work for solo or multiple voices, commissioned by the Maison des Arts Georges & Claude Pompidou in 2020. The raw material: whistles sourced from seventeen countries - Austria, Germany, Italy, China, Spain, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal, France, India, Mexico, the United States, Poland, the Czech Republic, Russia, Japan, Nepal. Each instrument carries within it a different pitch, a different cultural memory of the human breath shaped into signal. On this fixed LP arrangement, de Vega layers these dispersed voices into a composition of austere and uncanny precision, accompanied by an outdoor activation performed by Yann Leguay at Saint-Cirq-Lapopie, France. The open air enters the record without warning - a sudden rupture of context that clarifies everything.

Born in Mexico City in 1979 and working between Berlin and Mexico, de Vega has long explored the limits of sound as political and physical event - using frequencies that induce visceral reactions, making the negotiating process with institutions an integral part of the work. Here the approach is stripped back to something almost naked: breath, wind, the ancient act of calling out across a distance. The result is concentrated and disquieting, a study in how a universal gesture fractures into dozens of cultural particulars. Limited edition of 250 copies.

Alice Kemp - A Profound Loss of Meaning (LP)

Twelve years of recording compressed into roughly forty minutes. Not a retrospective - something more like a stratigraphic core sample, pulled from the earth of a long practice. Alice Kemp is a British artist born in 1972, working across sound, performance, installation, poetry, drawing, and what she calls fetische-object making. Her practice inhabits the blurred territory where documentation becomes composition - where the act of recording is already a ritual gesture, already a form of divination. A Profound Loss of Meaning, assembled from material recorded and edited between 2013 and 2025, carries that ambiguity throughout. Sounds that may have originated as clear signals - a voice, a room tone, a breath, the scrape of fabric - have been subjected to slow, almost geological processes of repetition and re-inscription. The two-sided structure opens with the title piece's twenty-five minutes of unnerving drift and closes with Mass I-IV, fifteen minutes of ceremonial accumulation that acts less like a conclusion than like a slow subsidence. Nothing resolves. Things simply become quieter, then return.

What holds the record together is Kemp's sense of time as sculptural medium - fragments gathered, set aside, returned to, eroded. The domestic and the uncanny are never far apart. A rare work: intimate in scale, genuinely strange in effect. Limited edition of 225 copies.