Appearing alongside their fantastic new batch of Henning Christiansen LPs, Holidays Records returns their focus to two new killer offerings from the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, Andrea Penso's Ad Invisibilia and MP Hopkins' Coupla Triples. Each delving into remarkably individual approaches to generative process and ideas at the outreaches of electroacoustic practice, offers truly engrossing listening.

Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward-thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music. Every step of the way, they’ve seemed to step up the game. The last year or so alone has witnessed stunning LPs by James Rushford, Jean-Yves Bosseur, Delivery Health, Pygmy Unit, and others. Resting alongside their two brand new releases from the archives of Henning Christiansen are two fantastic counterpoints from the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, the artist Andrea Penso’s “Ad Invisibilia” - a beautiful gesture of “mystical minimalism” - and the Sydney, Australia based MP Hopkins’ “Coupla Triples”, a virtuosic effort in the conceptual abstraction of sound. While radically different in their makeup and creative approaches, each is an engrossing listen that illuminates highly singular approaches to the making of sonorous meaning.

Andrea Penso has been active on the Italian experimental scene for the better part of two decades, working within collaborative projects like Surava and We Wait for the Snow, as well as issuing more than a dozen releases under the moniker Selaxon Lutberg. He is also part of the collective that runs Canti Magnetici, in addition to running his own imprint, the widely celebrated Invisibilia Editions, since 2020. Increasingly, over the last few years, Penso has stepped from behind the curtain of moniker and begun issuing work under his own name, “Ad Invisibilia” being the most recent of these and his first working with the venerable Holidays.

An effort in ambient minimalism with touchstones in contemporary electroacoustic practice as well as legendary 1970s and 80s Italian LPs like Giusto Pio’s “Motore Immobile”, Franco Battiato’s “M.lle le Gladiator”, and “Antico Adagio” by Lino Capra Vaccina, “Ad Invisibilia” was composed and recorded in numerous villages across the expanse of Italy - (Rocca Malatina in the Apennine Mountains; Ostuni in the deep south, close to the sea; Traversella, Chiara and Fondo in Val Chiusella, 1,000 meters above sea level in the north-western Alps) - between 2014 and 2020. When departing into the process of its creation, Andrea Penso posed himself a series of conceptual prompts and questions: “Making the invisible visible? Through the contemplation of sound, in sound. Are these sounds perhaps of spiritual exercises? Are they perhaps prayers? What is essential is invisible to the eye? Is it invisible to the eye?”

The outcome, slowly evolving over the course of six years, developed into a series of subtle works in shimmering tonality and texture, intertwining acoustic and electronic elements with processing and field recordings, ranging radically in their duration from under two minutes to nearly nineteen. Remarkably beautiful and introspective - appearing as fascinating mediations of place and states of mind - each of Penso’s compositions feels like an effort in understatement: how to gain the most meaning from the sparsest and most constrained means, accomplishing a striking sense of abstraction without fully existing a groundless in imagism drawn from a very real world.

Easily one of the most striking efforts we’ve heard from Andrea Penso to date, once again Holidays has taken a great stride in illuminating some of the more exciting corners of contemporary experimental sound practice.

Based in Sydney, MP Hopkins - the moniker of Matthew P. Hopkins - has been active on the Australian scene for more than 20 years, working within numerous collaborative projects - Absent Outfit, Four Door, Half High, Naked On The Vague, The Bowles, Touch of Poison, etc., and Warm Currency, who’ve recently issued a couple of killer releases on Horn of Plenty - as well as producing a significant number of albums under his own name. Hopkins’ work employs vocals, feedback, field recordings, and found sounds, along with ambient and drone-based elements, to produce a singular form of abstract musicality.

Hopkins’ latest solo effort, “Coupla Triples”, comprises two compositions recorded in 2014: “Spins, Groans, Tones” and “Waves, Feedback, Thoughts”. The artist explains: “Both pieces were made using simple word prompts. I wrote out a bunch of words, just whatever popped into my mind, things like ‘animals’, ‘spinning’, ‘waves’, and ‘thoughts’, then chose three prompts for each piece. I made recordings based on each prompt in a very immediate manner, not really thinking, not too much fuss, swiftly and simply with whatever was at hand.” In the case of “Spins, Groans, Tones”, the spinning is sounds of coins spinning on a table played back at half speed; the groaning is animal noises sourced from the internet also played back at half speed, and the tones are random sine tones fed through a ring modulator. In the case of “Waves, Feedback, Thoughts”, the wave is a processed tape loop of waves crashing at the beach; the feedback is microphone/speaker feedback; and the thinking is murmured observations about what Hopkins was thinking whilst composing the piece.

While heavily rooted in conceptualism - the idea and constraints therein guiding a work into being - with certain nods to early Fluxus sound pieces, the outcome of Hopkins’ methodology is surprisingly musical and composed within its dense sense of abstraction. Falling within some liminal space between the electroacoustic masterworks from the 60s and 70s that emerged from studios like GRM in Paris, and the early lo-fi, experimental industrial efforts of Nurse With Wound and Current 93, Hopkins pushes his vibrant tapestry of sonority and action to new depths through the infusion of a deep sense of humility and touch. While wholly abstract and endlessly mysterious, you never quite lose track of the movements and presence of the artist’s hand.

Subtle, elegant, and wholly matter of fact without artifice, we’ve got nothing but love for MP Hopkins’ “Coupla Triples”.