CLOT Magazine: Recent Episodes
CLOT Magazine
"A magazine dedicated to art and design explorations into science and technology"
CLOT Magazine is an online publishing and curational platform dedicated to art and science explorations. We aim to collect, display, broadcast and promote the crossover of Art, Science and Technology.
L. Petitgand - Bodische Little AloneBruce Gilbert - Angel FoodMonte Cazazza - ClimaxRamuntcho Matta - Oil And CanvasThe Stupid Set - BassetDie Dominas - Die WespendominaAnatolian Weapons - An AfterthoughtGünter Schickert - Untitled (Toncollage Zu Dem Film)Roy Montgomery - Hollyford Valley Day 1DAF - Ich Und Die Wirklichkeit
, the album channels deep emotional undercurrents through a relentless collision of distortion, industrial ferocity and hardcore energy. Along the way, echoes of emo, early dubstep and cloud rap emerge, while the softly auto-tuned vocal intimacy recalls bands such as Team Sleep, balancing sonic extremity with moments of introspective vulnerability.We caught up with Donna Haringwey to discuss the evolution of the project, artistic freedom in an age of algorithms, relocating to Portugal and the influences behind his exclusive CLOT mixtape.Tracklist:Tuffie - EraserElusin - .410Jesu - HomesickSsaliva - The longest sleepPET - When you let goEterna - So differentFine - A/BDeftones - KimdraculaSALEM - Never LetKillogne - Whitearmor is a blessingNokia Angel - Fade awayOperant - The Squirt of ChristHelen Island - Alice dj
Tomsku - Let’s Get Hot (GNG Edit) Extended V3Code Crime - Bass Demon (UNSYN Edit)Brutalcore - Call Of The ValkyrieCryogenic Ft Major Conspiracy - Ha Ha (GNG Edit) V3Flout Mania - Extermination MASTER
For the upcoming fourth edition of Sunday School, a ritual gathering of sonic blasphemy and rave-fuelled devotion, London-based musician Jim Janco steps into the pulpit with A Wilderness Mix—a cryptic sermon through weird, experimental and underground sounds.Janco, the mind behind People Drift—a roving techno night grounded in South East London’s freeform spirit—has carved out a reputation for pushing dance music into stranger dimensions. His background weaves through the raw edges of DIY punk, the pulse of ’90s techno, and the deep throb of sound system culture—a combination that informs every part of this mix.In this Wilderness Mix for SSIV, Janco charts a path through live instrumentation and synthetic tension. It’s both personal and expansive, bridging old favourites with new discoveries. Janco’s Wilderness Mix fully captures the Sunday School ethos: dark, devotional, and defiantly off-grid, an invitation to sink beneath the flicker of strobe and sacrilege.Sunday School IV: The Hand of Satan will take place from 19 to 20 April at New River Studios in London. It will feature Beau Wanzer, Container, Nic Krog, Brood x Cycles (Alex Tucker & Nik Void), Ireen Amnes, Severin Black, and many more.
We are presenting our latest auditory journey curated by Taroug for CLOT Magazine's mixtape series. Taroug is the solo project of drummer and electronic music producer Tarek Zarroug, whose unique perspective is shaped by his roots in the suburbs of the Tunisian desert and his upbringing in Germany. Following his 2020 EP "Perpetual" and a series of notable remixes for artists such as Archive, Taroug has continued to evolve and refine his musical aesthetic.Taroug’s debut album, Darts & Kites, was released on Denovali Records. Drawing inspiration from the infinite possibilities of Penrose tiling, the album explores themes of change and transformation. This fascination is reflected in the album's nine tracks and cover art design, creating a cohesive artistic vision.The album presents a captivating blend of genres and styles, resulting in a sonic landscape that is both haunting and beautiful while weaving together experimental and abstract soundscapes with oriental influences, collected field recordings, pulsating dark beats, and hypnotic vocals. Contributions from notable artists further enrich the album: Beate Wolff’s cello, Benedikt Koch’s saxophone, Timo Schieber’s piano, and Niklas Genschel’s vocals alongside Abdallah Abozekry’s saz. The album artwork, a collaboration with architect and designer Marie Brosius, captures the intricate patterns and ornaments that reflect the album’s themes. It emerges as a mosaic of sound, seamlessly blending the unfamiliar with the familiar. For this mixtape, the artist mentions he has combined tracks from his album Darts & Kites with unreleased material, sketches, hidden gems, and inspirations from the Tunisian experimental and electronic music scene.Tracklist1. Dove Molotov Qaas 2. Azu Tiwaline feat. Cinna Peyghamy Magnetic Service3. Taroug Morphagene Sketch 4. Mash Echoing5. Taroug Jewels II 6. Azu Tiwaline Luz Azul 7. R.I.G II 8. DVSN SINE LUV 9. Taroug Cicada (work in progress) 10. Taroug Miled (work in progress)
Introducing the latest auditory journey curated by Lola de la Mata for CLOT Magazine's mixtape series. Delving into the mysterious realms of sound, the experimental composer presents a meticulously crafted selection of tracks that traverse the boundless landscapes of sonic exploration.Lola de la Mata, a London-born French/Spanish conceptual sound artist, composer, curator, and musician (violin/voice/theremin), boasts a diverse practice spanning performance art, installation, community projects, and electroacoustic composition.Her first release, the feminist concept album REMISE EN BOUCHE (Pan y Rosas Discos 2018), was followed by The Embalmer (Nonclassical 2021) and KOH—Klee—uh (SA Recordings 2022), laying the groundwork for her latest album, Oceans on Azimuth, set for release on May 8th.Currently, Lola’s artistic focus centres around listening and hearing practices, tinnitus and aural diversity, and chronic illness experiences, something she focused on after experiencing a trauma episode herself. Rather than giving up music after developing severe tinnitus and vertigo, as she was told, she decided to listen with a new ear and dive deep into the world of tinnitus to cope with the isolating condition and facilitate the connection between sufferers.For Oceans on Azimuth, she reached out to A.J. Hudspeth in New York who runs the sensory cell lab where they study the cochlea. There, she found collaborators in biophysicists who offered her the unique experience of recording her tinnitus.Drawing inspiration from the intricate forms of the cochlea and the inner ear, Lola's compositions emerge as avant-garde sonic tapestries, woven from the rhythmic pulsations of heartbeats and the ethereal whispers of tinnitus, transmuted through an array of innovative instruments. Metal, glass, ceramic, and ice converge to birth otherworldly timbres, while field recordings and traditional string instruments intertwine with inventions like the Claravox theremin and an ear canal-shaped gong.On the other hand, the artist's influence also extends far beyond the realm of composition. As a multifaceted artist, curator, and musician, her tireless advocacy for inclusivity and representation reverberates through her work. From collaborations with fellow artists (musicians, dancers and queer performance artists, most recently with Eve Stainton to a PhD pursuit in tinnitus research. For this mix, she mentions: I treated the mix as a sonic collection of some of the artists I met and who inspired me along my project journey. With the exception of AYA and Tomoko Sauvage, whom I haven’t (yet?) had the chance to meet, some were chance meetings. Stephan Crasneanscki, founder of Soundwalk Collective and Maria Chávez at Rewire last year, for bagpipe player and composer Lise Barkas and I, it was mutual curiosity sitting by the Niki de Saint Phalle fountain outside IRCAM in Paris; while others such as Kepla are supporters of me and my work, and in Mira Calix’s case, whom this record is dedicated to, she adopted me as her mentee for two years before she passed. The other dedication on the record is to Anneka Swann - a friend who will retain part of my soul…with May 8th, the album release date marking one year since I last held her. Just as sombreness infused with respite flows through my body and left ear. The mix is imbued with grief, reflection and recalibration.Tracklist1. Left Ear - Lola de la Mata2. Stereocilia - Lola de la Mata3. Lo Becat - Lise Barkas & Lisa Käuffert 4. Mummer Love - Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith 5. ASLEEP-AWAKE-EKAWA-PEELSA, Spring 2021 - Maria Chávez6. Sinew (Mira Calix Remix) - House of Bedlam7. Silence - Keeley Forsyth8. A Clearing, Spectre in Autumn - Kepla9. Whorling - Lola de la Mata10. Icky Dream - Valentina Magaletti & Marlene Ribero 11. Pearl Reservoir - Lola de la Mata12. Clepsydra -Tomoko Sauvage 13. what if i should fall asleep and slipp - AYA14. Right Ear - Lola de la Mata
The latest mixtape instalment hails from Seoul-based Korean experimental musician Suk Hong, offering a curated selection of tracks that traverse the artist's creative journey for their upcoming project.Suk Hong's musical style gracefully navigates between neo-classical and electronic influences. Fresh from their recent release on Unseelie, an NYC-based label, Suk Hong returns with a more introspective and expansive piece, My Day is Sold by the Hour, which debuted at the start of March on endonesia, an alternative art platform based between New York and Seoul.Recorded amidst the misty atmosphere of the Guro district, Korea's bustling digital industrial complex, My Day is Sold by the Hour encapsulates the essence of its surroundings through sonic storytelling. While the area is blanketed in fog, its stories are evident sonically. String instrumentations echo like distant growls, while a tapestry of field recordings collected over three years weaves a textured narrative within a granular, deconstructed framework. With electroacoustic techniques and contemporary sonic landscapes intertwined, Hong seeks to unveil the inherent extraordinariness of captured moments, carving timbres that contour the running narrative - an unforeseeable series of vignettes.In discussing what the artist has created for this mixtape, Hong reveals ongoing work on an album delving into the modernity of Korean families, including their own: It follows the approach of My Day is Sold by the Hour, but this time, I need more than one track to present the complete picture. It's a longer project, so I need to cleanse my palette occasionally for a fresh perspective. These are the songs I turn to.This collection of tracks offers a tantalising glimpse into Suk Hong's creative universe, teasing the imagination with its suggestive and mysterious allure.Tracklist:0:00 Sean McCann - Sylvan Smoke 2:25 Nuno Canavarro - Ultramarina3:53 Autumn Fair - The Town Clock7:32 Vanessa Rossetto - early girl11:45 Asha Sheshadri - Whiplash15:21 JJ+JS - Lilypad (with Izella)18:54 Derek Baron - he Matrix22:47 Natasha Barrett - Impossible Moments from Venice 225:33 William Eggleston - Improvisation28:16 Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - Trebizond30:12 TLF Trio - Suite X31:52 crys cole - A Piece Of Work35:30 SUSS & Andrew Tuttle - Rising40:04 Loris S. Sarid - Yellow Lines23:20 Tujiko Noriko - Rooftop46:22 Suk Hong - My Day is Sold by the Hour
Next in our mixtape series, we welcome London-based musician and DJ Aventex (aka Alec Tullio) with a mixtape he has prepared ahead of his performance at our next event, Portals 02..The Australian artist is a staple fixture of the London experimental and noise-punk scenes. He is involved in several bands (Keno, Skitter, Zek) where he drives the fast-paced rhythmic lines with his relentless and precise drumming.One of his main current projects, Casing, was born as a solo project during the pandemic, out of existential dread and societal dismay. The project, which has received lots of positive reception and press attention, has since evolved into a full band (with Dom Stevenson, also from Keno, and Liam Cadogan of Eros Catheter) for live performances and recordings.Patterns of Deterioration, Casing's first EP, was described as a six-song dive into depravity, nihilism, and desperation. It was praised as one of the most exciting newcomer voices in noise-punk. Over a year of live shows, Casing developed into another beast entirely and the finishing touches are being made to a new album showcasing this new fusion of sludge, grind and power electronics they now exist in as a unit. With his DJ moniker, Aventex began his quest for musical exploration and investigation around the same time as becoming a resident at Threads Radio at the station’s inception. The shows can often focus in-depth on a particular genre or be a trademark, unrestrained concoction of whatever would be interesting pieced together unconventionally. He tells us his DJ sets will follow in the same vein but will have a meticulous selection to suit the specificity of the event. Ranging from all-out driving techno to challenging noise and experimental, EBM, Acid, or ambient, there is not much that isn’t on the cards. In a nutshell, music for the fresh and/or fried brain.For the mix he has prepared for us, he mentions that he has relished the opportunity to gather some more of the oddball and experimental stuff that’s at some further reaches of digging: playing some genres I wouldn’t normally include in a mix and trying to work them where the outcome is very all over the place, which is my favourite approach. An hour techno mix can be fun and has its place, but absurd gems and challenging genre pairings are where it’s at, in my opinion. Enjoy!"Tracklist:Omen - Not Suitable For WorkVanessa Bedoret - Transition Trystero - La Lingua Rosso (Original)Organizatsiya - Die Idee Der ToleranzJimmy Smack - Death Is CertainDark Star - TripMaoupa Mazzocchetti - Why’re You Talking About Henry Hektik - Hong Kong Wedding NightDe-Bons-en-Pierre - Le Râle du Mâle AlphaGeier Aus Stahl - UnterlandFurther Reductions - Aural Equivalent Roly - My Century Further Reductions - Central SystemJob Sifre - Zeno DichoKΣITO - MagnetEric Toornend - Scum GriefEgg Meat - GeorgelBancal - EntresolBataille - Echo Drift Part 1Lord Crucifix - Sacrificial AltarPÖ - Fuck JungleOrphx - Eating The YoungTot Onyx - Propaganda MachinePontiac Streator - Angelus Spit (feat. Mister Water Wet)
The next mixtape is by Greek/UK-based artist Viki Steiri, who has recently released her debut album on our beloved Alien Jams. The mix is a recollection of sounds that inspired her for her album production.'Balm' is a powerful album anchored by ritualistic, monolithic cello layers. Steiri combines eerie soundscapes with electronic dance rhythms, synth-tinged folk songs from Istanbul, and reworked cello and santur improvisations.The album encapsulates a hauntingly poignant journey through melancholic soundscapes punctuated by electronic rhythms. Recorded intermittently between Athens and London over six years from 2017 to 2023, the collection of tracks serves as a deeply personal documentation of the artist's experiences and emotions. Steiri's compositions for this album navigate themes of rootlessness, loss, and identity changes, reflecting the tumultuous nature of existence. However, amidst all, there is a profound exploration of humanness, delving into the realms of imagination and introspection.Steiri mentions she had a lot of fun making this mixtape and while preparing it, it made her realize what her inspirations for the album had been: "I hadn’t given it too much thought before. This is music that has informed the album, either directly or indirectly, plus a couple of my own tracks. There’s no particular cohesion, but to me, these are all musicians who have transcended conditioning, and I feel their music is very free and individual."With this mixtape selection as well as through her music, Steiri uncovers moments of beauty and intensity while offering listeners a transformative and immersive sonic experience.Tracklist:0:00-1:34 - Rap Street Palestine – Otsha 1:35-4:22 - Tigran Mansuryan – Extracts from ‘The colour of the pomegranates’ soundtrack 4:13-8:25 - Viki Steiri - Procession8:22-11:55 - Kesarbai Kerkar - Lalat -Ghatan Lagi Rain11:55-14:31 – Safiye Ayla – Aksaray’dan geçer iken14:31-17:43 - Masahiro Ikumi - ‘Virtual Mima’ [Voice version]- (‘Perfect Blue’ soundtrack) 17:41-21:05 - Chrisman - Lupupu21:06-22:51 - Mica Levi - Death22:50-29:41 - Viki Steiri - Brink29:31-32:54 - Ryuichi Sakamoto - Composition 091932:55-37:18 - Tzusing - Gait37:18-43:33 - Ectopia - Sauna43:27-46:46 - Avel Mismo - Habibi46:46-49:36 – Senyawa - Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo The World) 49:09-53:12 - Iannis Xenakis – Charisma (for clarinet and cello)53:13-60:34 - Viki Steiri- Balm
Next on our mixtape series is Bersarin Quartett, the solo project of German electronic musician Thomas Bücker, with a delicate selection ranging from film scores, to gaming, and ambient tracks.Working within the realms of modern classical and ambient music, Bücker has garnered acclaim for his contributions as Bersarin Quartett (which he has been running for over 15 years), notably through his publications with Denovali Records. Bersarin Quartett's sonic landscapes are distinguished by a fusion of atmospheric textures, electronic nuances, and classical instrumentation, crafting a singular and emotive auditory journey. Bücker's oeuvre has earned widespread praise for its unique stylistic approach, captivating both ambient and experimental music audiences alike.A heavy sense of melancholy runs through the Bersarin Quartett sonic core, which Bücker confirms is indeed a big part of the project. The Quartett's most recent release, Systeme, also released on Denovali, marks its fifth release. It is described as probably the artist’s most intimate and focused sonic narrative. In this album, melancholy mixed with a sense of distorted alienation or strangeness is described as something that, while it still sounds popularly symphonic here and there, many soundscapes have an observing, almost unmasking effect. Microtonal shifts, polyrhythmic structures, tempo fluctuations, and sound aesthetics torn out of context create a fragile, unpredictable foundation.The mix he has prepared for us, he mentions, combines many film scores, gaming, and ambient tracks that really impressed and inspired him: First, I sorted the individual tracks by key so they could be mixed together appropriately. Here and there, this even creates completely new soundscapes beyond the original. To present my current album a little more closely, I have interwoven four new Bersarin Quartett tracks!Tracklist:00:00 Ambience (Taken from "Elden Ring")00:21 Michael Giacchino · Mayoral Ducting (Taken from "The Batman")01:08 Spoken Words (Taken from "Women Talking")02:09 Volker Bertelmann · No End (Taken from "All Quiet On The Western Front")04:54 Imprints · Blood Moon08:38 Bersarin Quartett · Firmamente11:58 Rob Simonson · Rigging (Taken from "The Whale")13:30 Lusine · Faceless15:50 Bersarin Quartett · Gespenster18:27 Loscil & Lawrence English · Grey22:04 Rob Simonsen · Life Boat (Taken from "The Whale")23:47 Bersarin Quartett · Für und Wider26:17 Alix Perez & Headland · Mirage, Pt. II29:03 Leif · Pteridium (Alternate Version)30:53 Alva Noto · Sehnsucht36:37 Hildur Guðnadóttir · Speak Up + Leaving (Taken from "Women Talking")38:30 Tim Hecker · The Arrest (Taken from "Infinity Pool")39:59 Aleph · Gradient43:12 Bersarin Quartett · Illusionen46:15 Hania Rani · In Between48:02 Jeremy Soule · Kyne's Peace (Taken from "Skyrim")50:40 KMRU · Guise54:00 SSIEGE · Veyl56:24 Louis Cole · Let It Happen59:23 Michael Giacchina · Mayoral Ducting (Taken from "The Batman")
We kick off the year with a mixtape from Six Missing, the ambient music project from Austin-based TJ Dumser, with which he wants to take us on a journey with pieces that transcend the illusion of time - transporting you into a timeless, formless, galactic-jell-o. The artist, who is also a sound designer and composer, began releasing music under the name Six Missing in 2017, a moniker that he took after experiencing a supernatural experience while recording in a studio near the site of the Revolutionary War’s Battle of Brandywine, in Pennsylvania, in which six participants remain unaccounted for. For Dumser, Six Missing is a way of experiencing music that is meant for inner journeying, calming sensations, and finding peace. The project started by experimenting with ambient and modular systems, and several albums down the line, Six Missing released his latest album in December last year. Titled Here For Now, the album deals with themes around being in the present moment - especially during uncertain times. For TJ, this was during a time of displacement for him and his wife as a way to cope with the uncertainty. Here For Now is comprised of what Dumser refers to as “musical compost” — a concept that isn’t nearly as derogatorily gesturing towards the material as it sounds. “It’s a bunch of work that I’d previously done that I’d set out to release in its form,but something didn’t feel totally right. For the mixtape he has prepared for us, Dumser says that he wanted to find tracks that were on the longer side, with a quiet confidence in their sparseness or even the guts to make production decisions that he admires. For him, Music algorithms these days are giving preference to shorter, more consumable, bite-sized pieces of music, and it makes complete sense to me. However, as a listener, he wants to really spend some time with an artist and allow myself to sink into their work.
The last instalment of the year arrives from the hands of Furtherset, the musical project of artist and musician Tommaso Pandolfi, with a mix especially suited for the melancholic nights of December.With Furtherset, the artist has defined his personal sound, mainly composed of layers of timbre-modulated sounds and dense rhythmic geometric passages converging towards a single harmonic plane. His music touches on ambient, modern classical and rave, building on his approach to composition with shifting modulations, synthetic clusters and sampling alongside rhythmic and embracing harmonies. Furthersetmentions that the project, which began in 2011, is envisaged as formal research that follows a path towards saturation and layering but is always capable of generating voids in which the listener can take their place and fill them according to their own focus.Furtherset has released several EPs and two albums with the record label OUS, with whom he’s signed with. His most recent one, The Infinite Hour, released in October, puts together all the artist's compositional interests over the years. Six compositions resemble the laboured breathing of one who mourns a disappearance and fears oblivion. The album was created between 2020 and 2022, in a slow process of writing and continuous refinement parallel to the previous EP, Auras. The compositions found their final form during the mixing process carried out together with Bienoise. They were later named based on references to authors who influenced and are dear to Furtherset: Amelia Rosselli, Vladimir Chlebnikov, Hubert Damisch, Dante Alighieri.Furtherset mentions that when preparing mixes, he tries to create listening environments with moments of extreme stillness or sudden changes, but always having the latter have their own general organicity: I also fixate on certain artists, such as Simon Fisher Turner, whom I now propose in every mix. In this case, I added Michèle Bokanowski to my fixations. I found pleasant similarities between Moritz Von Oswald's latest work and Ligeti's. Everything then begins and ends with two voices: with Patti Smith's words and Glenn Gould's whispers over Bach. I look for emotion in the music I listen to.Tracklist:Patti Smith & Kevin Shields - The Coral Sea, pt. 1Kevin Shields & Brian Eno - Only Once Away My SonMichèle Bokanowski - TabouMoritz Von Oswald - LuminosoGyörgy Ligeti - Clocks & CloudsMichèle Bokanowski - Vers SyracuseMichèle Bokanowski - L’indomptableMarta De Pascalis - Harmonices InfinityBrunhild Ferrari & Jim O’Rourke - Tranquille ImpatiencesMichèle Bokanowski - Pour Un PianisteFrancis Dhomont - Chambre d’enfantsGeinoh Yamashirogumi - Omae Wa Nan No HanaSimon Fisher Turner - The Invisible Frame, a film by Cynthia BeattLucy Railton - Rib CageJules Reidy - Trances IIIBen Vida, Nina Dante & Yarn Wire - Who’s Haunting Who HereLuc Ferrari - Cycle Des Souvenirs IIJohann Sebastian Bach - Concerto in D minor after Alessandro Marcello, BWV 974- II. Adagio (Glenn Gould)
The next mixtape instalment is by experimental musician Colin Andrew Sheffield. Born in El Paso and now based in Austin, Sheffield took his passion from being a self-taught drummer in Texas to a total transition to electronic music. For this mix, he’s compiled a captivating selection of experimental electronic music. Since the mid-90s, Sheffield’s work has consistently focused on the use of samples: deconstructed loops of hidden melodies and textures found in his collection of physical media. Through the re-contextualization of other commercially available recordings, like an alchemist of audio collage, he aims to distil the essential qualities of these works and convert them into new recordings.Sheffield’s music is full of atmospheric soundscapes, which shift and unfold, offering subtle waves and suspended stillness. From earlier work like First Thus (2005) to the most recent Images (2023), Sheffield's solo projects showcase his ability to explore diverse sonic ranges. One of our favourite records this year, Images, was entirely constructed from heavily edited and manipulated samples from jazz records and represents a true distillation of Sheffield's interests as both a composer and an obsessive listener.In 1998, Sheffield founded the Elevator Bath recording label, which has been releasing experimental works from a variety of artists from the US and abroad, featuring names such as Merzbow, Francisco López, Susane Drone, and himself.The mixtape he’s prepared for us, he says, was a lot of fun to compile. I limited myself to selections that are all quite recent or at least no more than a few years old. I tried to represent my tastes in various forms of experimental music and throw in a liberal dose of work from some good friends. There are a couple of brand new tracks in there from forthcoming releases too, so it's a bit of a taster of things to come. Hopefully, it flows well enough and has something for just about everyone. Thanks for giving me the impetus to create this mix!Tracklist:Andrew Anderson + Colin Andrew SheffieldClarioned - ElegiesValerio TricoliMimosa - HostilisConcepción Huerta - TrepidationAdam Pacione - Pos. Neg.Jana Winderen - The Art of Listening: Under WaterRoméo Poirier- Les grandes lignesMatt Shoemaker - Pasar GedeMarta Zapparoli - The resonant sky of KremsMerzbow - Hat 1046Susana López- Drones to ZazeelaRichard Ramirez - Protective Custody 2Telesurgient - LifelineSequences - Illuminated and TranslucentTIBSLC - Hypertranslucent (2)Werner Dafeldecker - NeuralPendant - Dream Song Of The WomanElectric Capablanca - Capablanca SpinFelicity Mangan - Digging The Pedospheric Vibes IIIJim Haynes - Variant, number fourColin Andrew Sheffield - EmbersKate Rissiek - Floating In DarknessJake Muir - CauldronKoray Kantarcıoğlu - Agat 01Rick Reed - Leave a Light on for Tony
Our new mixtape comes from Copenhagen-based experimental R’n’B artist Karen Juhl. Her influences span from the likes of Laurie Anderson and Holly Herndon to Solange. Juhl is interested in exploring different approaches to songwriting in the 21st century, her style ranging from experimental electronics and contemplative poetry to antithetical rap. Her debut album Mother Tongue, released on the 22nd of September, is a dynamic manifestation of her self-written poems and diary entries. The album explores ideas of fragility within a hyper-globalised world, shifting in dynamics from intensely noisy and emotive to calm and reflective. When explaining her process of making the album, Juhl stated that ‘I brought diary notes and prose poems with me into the studio and worked on vocals in a stream-of-consciousness kind of way.’The album was released on the London-based art platform Inklingroom and worked on with fellow collaborator Johan Feierskov. Using mainly YouTube samples, MIDI instruments and vocals, the album feels incredibly fresh and immersive. The dysphoric and euphoric elements that occur between the music and the voice reflect the contrast and overlap in topics; from personal in relation to politics and gender in relation to time, the songs travel between childhood scenes, psychiatric wards and internet rooms. Alongside the album, an artbook is also set to be released in collaboration with graphic designer Paw Poulsen, that displays digital collages based on Juhl’s lyrics for the album. The artbook aims to create an external layer to the album outside of the digital realm, seeking a space of intertwining narratives.The mixtape that Karen Juhl has created for us, entitled Threads, is described by herself as ‘a mix of moods, ideas, sounds, songs, and states. It’s full of life, cuz it unfolds in the same way life does, forward and through unforeseen terrains. I wanted to honour sounds on the verge of becoming. My compositions "Face Wash" and "Home" were composed and recorded in this somewhat improvised manner. I delved further into my personal playlists, but I also asked my two close colleagues and friends Laust and Johan to share some of their magical memos with me.’Juhl presents her mixtape as ‘a gentle framework that holds something beautifully frayed—loose threads that just barely come together to form a picture.’Tracklist:Dienne – Mio SignoreHoy La – EcotoneLaust Moltesen – Meditation #1 (memo) Maria BC – The Only ThingKaren Juhl – Face WashTLF Trio – Trio A Jonas Albrecht – LEIBLaust Moltesen – Meditation #2 (memo) Johan Feierskov – zoom (memo)Karen Juhl – HomeJeph Vanger – CA StudyMarina Herlop – miuJohan Feierskov – into (memo) Valeria Miracapillo – FictionCrush String Collective – Intermezzo II (Fetus)ill – íra iiLaust Moltesen – Meditation #3 (memo) Johan Feierskov – Chalk (unreleased)Pankisi ensemble - Asete ghameAbdullah Miniawy X HVAD – Notice a tiny scratch for the blue behind
We are presenting a new mix that will transport you into the enchanting realm of the early autumn months. This special mixtape is curated by VAST HABITAT, a recently established record label, and it showcases a curated selection of artists and music from their freshly minted catalogue, as well as tunes that have inspired and resonated with them.Vast habitat founders are Daniel Lea and Michael Deragon, aka Heliochrysum (Bedroom Community Records), which we have featured in the past. The project grew out of the artists’s desire to create an environment where music, design and art can coalesce. A good demonstration of this is their crafted selection of music and a superb visual approach. The label launched with the release of two new solo albums — Lea's 'ENTHEOGEN' and Deragon's 'DAWN', and a compilation, VHS 001, which is the first in a series of engaging sonic conversations with artists working across electronic music, modern composition, and ambient. The compilation includes a remix by Heliochrysum from Pinkcourtesyphone, another of this house's favourites. For this mixtape, they share they have included things they were listening to while making their records, film scores they love, deep sound design elements, some ambient/electronic music, a few of the works from the VAST HABITAT catalogueand other works that we love listening to or moved us along the way. "As well as being an electronic-focused label, a lot of VAST HABITAT uses real instrumentation, working with amazing players like Yair Elazar Glotman, Bethan Kellough and Jamie McCarthy. So it’s nice to hear the instrumentation of Six Organs of Admittance; and Michael and I are huge fans of the 'Crash' Soundtrack from David Cronenberg scored by Howard Shore, which is all guitars very Glen Branca inspired."Tracklist:1. Valerio Tricoli-Hic Labor Ille Domus Et Inextricabilis2. Low- Quorum3. Elliot Goldenhaul-Heat4. Daniel Lea-Tactile Memory Is Still In His Left Palm5. Abgail Mead-Leonard6. Michael Deragon-When Rooms Were Full of Smoke7. Colin Stetson- West of Arkham8. Yair Elazar Glotman and Heliochrysum-Abandoned Image9. Hildur Guonadottir and Sam Slater-Irreversible10. Howard Shore-Crash11. Six Orgrans of Admittance-Position of Cherry Blossom Spirits12. Eric Truffaz and Murcof-Origin of the World13. New Corroded-Chromosphere14. E-Saggilia-9 Digest15. Brian Eno-Signals16. William Basinski-Meloncholia I
This week’s mixtape comes from the multidisciplinary music/art project Ghost Tracks. They are a wife/husband team, and Sylvia Girstmair and David Lopez, originally from Austria and Spain but came together in East London. This happy home life hasn’t led them to a place of musical complacency for the duo, though, who also runs the experimental music label Cluster Node.Drawing upon their shared experiences in the art and music scenes, throughout the years, they have cultivated a passion for creating cinematic narratives through their music and visuals. With acoustic and electronic instrumentation, soiled traces of noise and mixed modes of experimentation, their songs present a peculiar intimacy and effortlessness. Ghost tracks sit between a dark lull and eerie, phantasmagoric soundscapes, aiming to create sci-fi soundtracks that evoke vivid and immersive imagery of futuristic dreams and imaginary worlds. They are fresh from a triumphant opening of CLOT and Cluster Node’s PORTALs showcase and presenting here a mix of their own tracks and works in progress alongside artists who inspire them: we are most excited about mixing tracks from artists that we really like and think convey a similar emotion. We tried to keep it cohesive and stick to the 'Fragments of Light' theme.Tracklist:Ghost Tracks - Through Time and Space (unreleased)Ghost Tracks - The Zone (unreleased)Ghost Tracks - StillnessAstrid Sonne - Ephemeral IV (Escho)Ana Roxanne - It's a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore (Leaving Records)Feeler - Highest Heaven (Cluster Node)Ghost Tracks - Vases and Gold Ornaments (Cluster Node)James K - Soft Key (Cluster Node)Ghost Tracks - 14 (unreleased)Spivak - i b lyin (Cluster Node)An Trinse - Duairc Aontais (Cluster Node)Ghost Tracks - The Morning Veil (unreleased)Ryuichi Sakamoto - Solari (Commmons)Ghost Tracks - Be with me (Cluster Node)Ghost Tracks - VoidCelestial - Endless (Ecstatic Recordings)LA Timpa - Brave (forsake) (O___o)Ghost Tracks - Ice One (Cluster Node)Dania - Lament (Somewhere Press)Ghost Tracks - Don't Move (Cluster Node)Edward Artemiev - Solaris Soundtrack Part IX (Song Cycle Records)
For our next mixtape instalment, we welcome Lý Trang, a musician-sound artist who will unveil a haunting musical storytelling piece arranged as an abstract dialogue around time travelling.Born and raised in the mountains of Northeast Vietnam, Trang's experiments with hollow rhythms follow folkloric instrumental phrases, and the music buzzes widescreen magic. Moving to Vietnam’s capital Hanoi for school, she connected with the local underground scene, joining Rắn Cạp Đuôi Collective for a short period before focusing more on her work as a multimedia artist. In 2018 she self-released ‘Snail Skeleton’, an album that hints at her sonic interests and various live-scoring commissions, soundtracks and installation works. Recently she released her second album, 'Syenite', grounded in a sense of alienation, first when she moved to Hanoi for school and later when she relocated to Moscow just a few months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the Russian capital, her separation from home cracked open a deep yearning that swallowed up the erupting geopolitical uncertainty and disillusion, crystallizing into the album's 10 electro-acoustic tracks. Last year she also released her debut film 'Sisyphus's Cat' a conceptually complimentary short that charted the search for a lost pet in a parallel universe, and her music follows a similar trajectory, interpreting interlocking themes sonically instead of visually.The mix she has prepared for us, she says, "Is a musical-storytelling piece arranged as an abstract dialogue between the captain of a time machine and a girl who wants to be transferred to the future. The conversation is sometimes highlighted and sometimes escaped into layers of music, untangled by the thrill of technology in its content and way of producing sounds. The "captain" voice was amped through a vocoder, which dragged my voice down to a voice of a non-human character. In this sense, I tried to constantly call to mind human scales of time, science, presence and sustaining—even if only in their defamiliarizing absence. And I lean into the aesthetics of alienation, trying to imagine the world of immortal and forever-sustaining entities in the future and questioning that idea".Tracklist: Tracklist here:Live Performance “Cosmic Bodies"and phosphenes (from “Syenite")Magnetic icebergsand congee (from “Syenite")Live Performance “Golden Bridge"sáo cọc ngang ao under the Arbat metro station (from “Syenite)(All tracks written and performed by Lý Trang)
Concluding our summer season, we invite you to descend into the audio abyss sculpted by the enigmatic Gosha Savage, the solo project of Małgorzata Sawicz, a visual and electronic artist hailing from Poland. Savage has prepared a very personal mix, which she also defines as one of her most experimental mixes, an audacious plunge into a sonic chasm.Gosha Savage's musical sojourn is an electrifying collision of the intensely personal and the unapologetically experimental. Imbued with the mystique of dreams and the ethereal allure of fairies, her sonic odyssey is a rollercoaster of emotions—plunging from the abyss of sadness to the heights of nostalgia. At the core of Gosha Savage's sonic landscape lies her fascination with real-time FM synthesis, an art of manipulating frequencies and exploring different timbral possibilities of sounds. This, coupled with her penchant for crafting irregular drum patterns, creates a sonic tapestry that defies conventional genre boundaries. Her musical explorations seamlessly meld elements of post-club aesthetics with the raw intensity of noise while drawing from a diverse array of genres, including trance, ambient, and dungeon synth.Gosha Savage is currently crafting a new EP and tirelessly honing her live act, promising exciting developments for her ever-growing fanbase.We are presenting this mixtape in light of Gosha Savage’s live show last June at the Polish Up to Date Festival. The mix is the most experimental and one of her most personal mixes so far. She describes it as a reflection of her Gothic sensibilities and her penchant for constructing and deconstructing emotions through her art. Furthermore, she says, I included incredible tracks from artists I adore. I'm glad I can share this with you and perhaps gain new listeners for them.Tracklist:Cimarrón - AmigxsMontenegro - Suceso de ColisiónSeraphim - Bubbles Move No OneThoom - Sound of a Heavy StoneAbssys - SPACE MANTRA (KÖPEK EDIT)Dj Würm - EnchantmentʒLVʒNLIʒD - serial loverSarahsson - Lime TimeAnge Halliwell — My Secret GriefChino Amobi - LAW II (DEMOLITION)DGNMP - SanctuaryAnthony1 - Arreglo FloralPENELOPES FIANCE - NOT DEAD YETSMILE ft Lag Switch, Tati au Miel, Blood of Aza - münkiHajj - Drag Me Into The Void (Euphoria's Death Edit)KMRU & Aho Ssan - ResurgencePj Harvey - On Battleship Hill
The next mixtape comes from Alifiyah Imani, an interdisciplinary arts & media practitioner and writer. Imani combines multimedia arts and design, focusing on sound, curatorial research and practice. She enquires into our relationship with space, the workings of our cultures and auditory subcultures.
Imani told us that an important aspect of Indian classical music training is practising with the tanpura, a full-bodied stringed instrument that creates a repetitive drone. While practising and tuning the tanpura, the daily ritual of attuning myself to the drone as a sonic companion and as a practice of embodied listening and improvising has been significant for me to understand the structure of sound itself. She said.
Last June Imani premiered at Distant Gallery her online solo show Your Listening is a Paracosm, a show that shifts perceptual perspectives through sound and ritual, drawings and prompts. Your Listening is a Paracosm unfolds as an experiment for the web and permeates through radio transmissions. We read in the statement.
Taking this show as an inspiration Alifiyah Imani has prepared a mixtape for us that intends to explore the sound pieces from the exhibition as an extended listening or long-form mix. Imani spent much of this time in her home studio layering field recordings, experimenting with the drone sound of the Tanpura, and improvising with other instruments like the Strumok and overtone flute: It's about different kinds of attention processes, tuning, and studying forms derived from sound. While drone-based and contemplative, it moves between textures, harmony, polyphony of colours, and moments that emerge in nature and improvised music.
The next mixtape comes from Heqc (an alias of Ben Lukas Boysen), an electronic music composer, producer and sound designer based in Berlin, with a selection of tracks that give a insight into some of his compositional interests.
Boysen has classic training, being the son of opera singer Deirdre Boysen with the works of Bruckner, Wagner and Bach laid an important foundation in shaping his practice. With his moniker Hecq, he’s released several albums since 2003, exploring a wide range of styles from ambient to breakcore and releasing mostly on Hymen records. Under his own name, the artist has also released a series of productions on labels such as erased tapes and ad noiseam.
His latest release as Hecq this year after a break since 2017, Form, co-released on Mesh, Max Cooper's record label and Erased Tapes, is defined as an echoic take on rave and electronica and a modern shapeshifting of styles, showing the artist's poly-faceted compositional ranges. Pulsating and syncopated synth lines built up with minimal ambient melodies, dub bases, and breaks fill the album with a breathable summery feel. His own productions aside, Boysen has led numerous workshops on composition and sound aesthetics, as well as creating custom sound designs for films, commercials, video games and installations.
The mix he has prepared for us is mainly based on pieces that play with overlaying frequencies and oscillations, focusing on the fabric of music without going overboard compositionally. Boysen shares that these pieces are always a good reminder and exercise in exploring and understanding the nature of sounds around us (primarily while working with electronic instruments)and appreciating the beauty of simplicity.
Tracklist: 01 Ben Lukas Boysen & Martyn Heyne - Orgeltod 02 Start Greiner - Final Sleep (Hecq Remix) 03 Set Fire To Flames - Kill Fatigue Frequencies 04 Alvin Lucier - I’m Sitting In A Room 05 Illusions Of Safety - P.O.E. 06 Jean-Claude Risset - Mutations 07 Jakob Ullmann - Solo III Für Orgel 1992 _ 1993; 2012 (Excerpt) 08 M U H D - Dalhem 09 Walter Fähndrich - Viola 1 (Excerpt) 10 Max Loderbauer - Au 11 NSI - 16 12 Hecq - Mare Nostrum, Part 2 13 Christine Ödlund - Lightning & Voices 14 Stephen Vitiello - Marfa Mix 15 Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Rensenada 16 Frank Bretschneider - Polaris (Hecq Remix)
The next mixtape instalment comes from American DJ and producer PTHGN, who has prepared a selection to give our audiences a glimpse into what he might want to hear on a night out. PTHGN roots in Chicago's music scene have shaped his unique sound that blends electro with influences from techno to grime and everything in between. The artist started out as a visual arts student in Chicago and was initially drawn to music production after exposure to the city's vibrant House, Techno and Footwork scenes. PTHGN's original work was more focused on the interplay between sight/visuals and sound, but his passion for a wide range of music genres, from electro to jazz and grime, led him to favour music creation and production. Emphasizing sound design innovation and musicality, PTHGN's current approach utilizes hardware and modular synths for production and performance, solidifying his status as an emerging artist to watch.
PTHGN's Binary Operation EP perfectly captures this with its pulsating drum breaks, dreamy pads, with urban vocal snippets. With a muscley but very suggestive sound, it's Detroit electro with a fresh, dynamic twist. The EP was very recently released in Fides, a Berlin-based record label founded by Tresor Resident Z.I.P.P.O. in 2015. The label releases music influenced by electro, techno, and IDM genres.
For the mixtape he has prepared for us, PTHGN adds that he tried to include as much as he could as far as influences go, within reason: I wanted to showcase something way outside the sounds of my EP to give a glimpse into what I might want to hear on a night out and also shine a light on some artists from past and present whose sounds keep me motivated.
Tracklist: Final Cut - Open Your Eyes Chatterbox - Hibernation Machino - Nada Es Real Shallowed - Electric Swell T_ERROR - Hard War Exterminador - Pericos Machino - El Diablo Sabe Norwell - Secret Transmission(Solid Blake Remix) DJ Nepali - Vanity of your ego Dez Williams - Carkrash Vikdim Datawave - Concretion Assembler Code - BIOS Anthony Rother - Destroy Him My Robots Unhuman - Unterstützung
Our new mixtape comes from London experimental musician and producer Kinn, with a mix of sound, youtube rips, film audio, raw sound design and unreleased music from the artist himself, an intimate recollection to take us into the artist’s expansive creative universe.
Kinn has emerged in recent years with a bleakly psychedelic take on post-rock shifting between traditional band setups and move avante-garde studio works. A rotating cast of collaborators, including Arthur Leadbetter, Maxwell Sterling and Alexander Tucker, bolsters this. Recently they have collaborated with artists Tai Shani and Mark Leckey.
Their current offering, ‘Dogtooth’, coming out on 7th July 2023, carries off down this path with spoken word, string shards and clouds of distortion, giving away to more traditional song form. The production was all rendered over a 2-year period in precise, spacious, sonic detail, bringing to mind a mood somewhere between Mogwai and The Haxan Cloak or The Body. The album puts a profound and disenchanted humanistic stance at the centre of the stage. As we read, Dogtooth reflects on an array of individual, global and digital, often seemingly esoteric, shared experiences. Anger, conflict, beauty and grandeur, all summarised as part and parcel of wheezing and spluttering modern metropolitan world, looking to peel away the negative smog of contemporary living, the interfering noise which bombards our ever more digital lives, searching for meaning, comfort and ways of goofing off amidst these oppressive forces, sirens and snake oil salesmen everywhere, an all-encompassing true and truly messy beauty.
The mix Kinn has prepared for us is built around some of his compositional approaches to long-form and non-linear narrative, spending a lot of time playing around with the arrangement and dynamics of the mix, how one thing can suggest, merge and form a narrative-only by preceding another track completely disassociated from each other in time, aesthetic, even meaning, or how a motif placed at the end can bend time and pull you back to something you heard at the beginning.
This never ceases to interest me, how loose "reality" can be, how easily we can be suggested. It can easily be smashed apart and put back together in a different way, a wrangling of ambiguity. As I started to work on this mix, to me, a clear narrative unfurled, I'm keeping this ambiguous from the listeners so that they can invest their imagination in it, that's one of the beautiful things about music. It is meaningless without you to listen to it."
Tracklist: Barry Adamson + Pan Sonic + The Hafler Trio - The Hymn Of The 7th Illusion (edit) K.C. Milian - Iconic Building Of The Past Simon Fisher Turner - Excerpts from Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990) Stef Kett - Killing Flaw Laboratorio Palestro - 2 Gil Scott Heron - NY is Killing Me (Chris Cunningham Remix) Kinn - Untitled (excerpt from Pace Gallery performance, 2022) Kinn - ??? Kinn - Dogtooth The Microphones - day one Sonic Youth - JC Godspeed You Black Emperor! - $13.13 EdGein2 - ??? Simon Fisher Turner - Excerpts from Derek Jarman’s The Garden (1990) Portishead - Machine Gun L4b - Me4nwhile in the L4b Set Fire To Flames - Barn Levitate K. Leimer - Malaise Kinn - ??? Amateur Childbirth - All Doomed
Next mixtape comes from ZONDERWERK, who are a duo consisting of Linde Carrijn and Dijf Sanders. The artists started this project during the pandemic to explore their relationship as creative partners. Carrijn has a background in acting but recently has been more focused on composing and performing original scores for theatre, while Sanders is also a composer (and music gear enthusiast), with his work drawn from a wide array of non-Western music. The duo explain that their artistic name means ‘’without work’, but it also comes from ‘bijzonder werk’, where bijzonder is particular and unique. Both artists like to work with images/paintings that are bijzondere werken’, odd works, special and weird. The fact of working with images adds a particular approach to their creative process. As they mention, adding music and sound design to the work of art creates a new dimension and amplifies the beholder's experience. It’s an extra layer, an alternative storyline outside the frameZONDERWERK have recently released their debut album babel on the Ghent-based tape record label Dauw (which similarly has a central visual/graphic aspect to their outputs and ethos). The album materialises the duo’s conceptualisation for this project; babel is an exercise in translating images into sound. It was initially created for the eponymous theatre piece by architect and artist Steve Salembier. One of the biggest inspirations for the album was Michael Woolf’s photographs, which in turn also served as the basis for the original theatre piece. The use of grey and repetition is translated into looped harmonies and fine-grained drones that progressively open up like blooming ice flowers.Using city-reminiscent musical elements, such as bells and metals, to create synthy lines, tape loops, and droney. There are details of fourth-world sounds that delicately populate the different tracks; small oases where to breathe away the man-made concrete jungle that is both inhospitable and endlessly awe-inducing.The mixtape they have prepared for us is full of compositions they are inspired by: Some we love because of the choice of the gear, some of them we love because of the emotionality, some of them we love because of the memory of a moment we listened to it together.Tracklist:Vuurfeest - ZONDERWERKPsalm - Yves TumorJynweythek - Aphex Twinknown(1) - AutechreAddio - DienneMore Islands - Clark, Budapest Art Orchestra, Peter PejtsikLindbergh - schntzlFalaise - Floating PointsPowerspot - Jon HasselGoodbye Pluto- Kohn (clouds) Kristalstoelen - ZONDERWERKOh Baby - Micachu & The ShapesWintersong - Elisabeth KlinckHana - Asa-Chang & Junray
Mixtape 58The new mixtape instalment comes from Ale Hop(aka Alejandra Cardenas) and Laura Robles. Cárdenas is a Berlin-based artist, researcher, and experimental instrumentalist from Lima, Peru. Earlier this year, together with Laura Robles (a percussionist and bassist formed from a very young age in the rich Afro-Peruvian and Cuban musical traditions and who also grew up in Lima), they released one of the most exciting albums of the year so far, Agua dulce (Buh Records, 2023). This mix takes on and reflects on the artists' inspiration for and during the Agua Dulce album production.The album is titled after the most popular beach in Lima, agua dulce, near where both artists lived during their childhood, houses apart, without ever meeting one another. Years later, the pair met and joined forces, with Robles on a self-built electric cajón and Cárdenas on electric guitar and electronics. With this album, both artists explore rhythmical structures that form the backbone of the complex Afro-Peruvian music and dance traditions – a broad term used for the various musical developments that occurred in the last two centuries at the shores of the Peruvian Pacific. The cajón originated in coastal Peru as a percussion instrument that the black slaves created from wooden fruit boxes when foot drums were banned at the end of the Spanish colonial era in the 19th century. And it was form Perú that the cajón was posterioly introduced into flamenco. From its birth, the cajón was a symbol of resistance, experimentation and transformation. Robles and Cárdenas strived to maintain the instrument’s spirit and qualities by pushing the boundaries of its sound into the future. The duo’s mission isn’t merely capturing something sonically futuristic but is primarily concerned with shaking off the dust: These rhythms have become ossified nowadays, heard in Peruvian folklore shows and on the ‘global music’ circuit, but our desire is to experiment and do something more radical with them, connecting to the instruments more radical past, comments Cárdenas.At the same time, this type of percussive instruments infuse the music with a very special physicality and spirituality; the percussion sounds entuned with our heartbeats. Both Robles and Cárdenas chatted to us about the meaning and influence of the cajón on their work. Finally, the mix they have put together for us is a rare combination of very personal influences from each of them, with influences that informed the project and songs they find interesting from Peru.Tracklist:Ale Hop & Laura Robles - Agua Dulce Nicomedes Santa Cruz - Aquí Está la Marinera/Mamita/Mi Señorita Pochi Marambio y Tierra Sur - Canto a los Santos Huayno Tradicional Prenda Querida con Andrés "Chimango" Lares Andrés Soto - Quisiera Ser Caramelo César Calvo La Despedida Victoria Santa Cruz- Me Gritaron Negra! (Daniel Haaksman Edit) Cañaris Incahuasi - Triste con Fuga de Huayno Yma Sumac - Hampi (Medicine) Banda San Miguel De Piura - La Perla del Chira Los Jaivas - Cerro de la Virgen Alice Coltrane - Jagadishwar Aphex Twin - Ageispolis Ale Hop & Laura Robles - Defensoras del morro Miles Davis Bitches Brew (Live In Copenhagen, 1969) Ayacucho traditional music - Harawi (women performing harawi before the plowing of the communal field) Sun Ra - Solar Ship Voyage Los Ases de Huarochirí - El pescadito Oscar D'Leon - Llorarás (live)
Our next mixtape comes from duo Brueder Selke, East Berlin-born, Potsdam-based, polyinstrumental composers Sebastian and Daniel Selke and also curators of the Q3AMBIENTFEST in Potsdam (Germany). The festival, taking place at the beginning of June, is a musical happening that brings together established and emerging artists from various genres and diverse origins.Sebastian and Daniel Selke became well-known as an award-winning cello-piano duo under their pseudonym CEEYS. Throughout the work that has come from this long-term collaboration between the two brothers who grew up on the other side of the Berlin Wall, the essential elements are encounter and exchange.The independent Q3A, invite open-minded music lovers to discover a wide, contemporary sound spectrum. Each year, Brueder Selke invite artists to meet on a common, physical stage, and, with performances that range between academic avant-garde and accessible pop, develop a kind of cinematic music that holds a mirror up to and makes audible the eclectic architecture of the world-famous Filmstadt Potsdam, with its neoclassical palaces and socialist brutalism. The buildings where the brothers grew up gave Q3A its name, which is the abbreviation for Querwandbau, a type of Plattenbau that was very common in the GDR. Coincidentally, the first edition of Q3A took place in the year that marked the centennial of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Q3A focuses less on headliners and sees itself as a complement to the local cultural scene. Thus the constellation of the artists is itself the highlight, bringing with it spontaneous, improvised collaborations with Brueder Selke. The 2023 edition will feature analogue and virtual performances by Jakob Lindhagen & Vargkvint, Dirk Markham, Julia Reidy, Alex Stolze & Ben Osborn, Austarda, Sofia Paez, Laura Cannell, Grand River, Mabe Fratti, Yair Elazar Glotman & Johannes Malfatti, Brueder Selke, Sergio Díaz de Rojas & Cedric Vermue, Villemin, Will Samson, Ben Osborn, Hélène Vogelsinger, Tim Linghaus and Simon Ansing. Aiming to expand on traditional playing techniques, artists will combine classical instrumentation with electronic. A visualization of the curators staging moving still lifes in Potsdam will also be screened, which will be scored live by some of the sets.In this mix, Brueder Selke have mixed smooth and silent with bright and intense pieces, inviting open-minded music lovers to discover today’s contemporary composers and performers featured on Q3A.Tracklist:1 Jakob Lindhagen - They Were Never Really There2 Vargkvint - Fyr3 Dirk Markham – New Joy4 Julia Reidy - Imminently5 Alex Stolze - The Rucksack Song6 Austarda – suis moi7 Sofi Paez - Preludio8 Laura Cannell - Dried Hands Pluck the Stems9 Grand River – Gold10 Mabe Fratti - El Trabajo Será Nuestro Final11 Yair Elazar Glotman - A Mirror12 Johannes Malfatti - ornament i13 Brueder Selke – QP (hidden)14 Sergio Díaz De Rojas - Flores de Papel15 Cedric Vermue – We Came And Left16 Villemin - Sirens17 Will Samson - Arpy18 Ben Osborn – The Fire19 Hélène Vogelsinger - Game B20 Tim Linghaus – Mother, Hurricane21 Simon Ansing - If Only I Had An Elevator22 CEEYS – Opal Glass
Our latest mixtape comes from Hora Lunga, a composer, sound designer, and songwriter based in Zurich. With a passion for pushing the boundaries of electronic music, Hora Lunga creates a unique blend of traditional and experimental sounds that take listeners on a soulful journey.Having studied electroacoustic composition, the artist's practice focuses on extended instrumental techniques and improvisation. However, his versatile profile has taken him from pop music productions to experimental works and sound art in recent years. David, as Hora Lunga is also known, co-runs the Swiss experimental music label BlauBlau Records, which is also an artist collective.Hora Lunga's latest release, Wirren (BlauBlau, 2022), is the product of a collaborative artist residency at Dampfzentrale Berne & Südpol Lucerne, and was premiered at Gessnerallee Zurich. Otherworldly drones and chamber music, feverish free jazz, and serene soundscapes provided by a vast ensemble make it an ode to shared improvisational sessions.'WIRREN' is passionately described as chamber music for anarchists and social media addicts, sleepwalkers and day thieves, social romantics, and post-structuralists; for those who are drowning in everyday life, for the superstitious and control-obsessed, for everyone who can read a map and for everyone who can't read a map. The music reflects this, with each track taking the listener on a journey through a range of moods, from introspective and contemplative to more joyous territories. Hora Lunga weaves together a tapestry of sound that speaks deeply.In this mix, Hora Lunga draws inspiration from their latest album, infusing it with their signature style of weaving together a diverse palette of sounds. With acute attention to detail, Hora Lunga creates a sonic landscape that explores the depths of emotion and expression.Tracklist:Hora Lunga - RéduitVanessa Amara - PescadoNicolas Jaar - VanishDrew McDowall - Agalma VICoby Sey - Night RidePan Daijing - DicteeNoémi Büchi - Nothing Is Artificial Lolina - Fast Fashion More Eaze, Claire Rousay - sameSpace Afrika, Florence Sinclair - Meet Me At SachasKMRU - moodKelman Duran - Freddie KingJunge Eko - Funghi MagiciHora Lunga, WIRREN - WIRREN 7
Our Next mixtape lands from the Spanish composer, cellist, singer and producer Yamila, with a unique mix inspired by her last album and a soulful vision inside her art.Dancing between electronic and analogue music, tradition and experimentation. Yamila's artistic practice "looks over the precipice of pure emotion", which couldn't be more accurate. That passion and soulfulness manifest in many (if not all) forms of expression.In her most recent album, Visions (UMOR REX, 2022), Yamila revealed her most intimate catharsis. The album evokes the hallucinatory powers of music. Like an ancient herald, she announces the profound feminine mystique while crossing epic melodies full of pleasure and pain. The album is a journey that prodigiously unites baroque accents, Spanish folklore, such as flamenco, and contemporary electronic music. Pain and glory, lacerating religiosity, feminism cauterized by power, and hallucinations as a source (or pretext/tool) to be heard. All these elements were very present in the Spanish Baroque, one of the most inspired creative epochs in the Mediterranean country, especially in literature, painting and architecture, but in a society lacerated by profound religiousness, poverty and injustice. Yamila's piercing gaze has the fierceness of those who dared to challenge the established powers of the time.Her voice and music –sometimes torn and others buoyant– can resemble the score for a biblical passage (i.e. visions of the Apocalypse), for they are overflowing with physical ecstasy and sounds one can touch. 'Visions' is composed of different forms and rhythms. Blending aural chiaroscuros with contemporary electronics, Yamila exhibits a profuse aesthetic with her music that calls for a look at the far past with romanticism and nostalgia.The mix she has prepared for us she tell, es un viaje compuesto integramente por mí, es una mezcla de temas del disco visions, con paisajes entrelazados, de lugares que visité mientras compuse el album (The mix I have prepared for you is a trip composed entirely by me, it is a mix of tracks from the album visions, with intertwined landscapes of places I visited while composing the album).Tracklist:1-Landscape 12-Visions VII3-Landscape 24-Visions I5-Landscape 36-Visions IV7-Landscape 48-Visions II
One hundred years after his birth, Berlin Atonal's special festival edition X100 was dedicated to the Romanian-born Greek, French avant-garde composer, architect, and mathematician Iannis Xenakis, who pioneered applying mathematical models to music, known as the designer of the UPIC, a computerised system with a graphical approach to musical composition. Studio LABOUR, who co-curated the happening with the OUTER team, share insights into their collaborative sonic practice, the origins of their collaboration sourced in the Xenakis's practice itself and also inspiration and motivation between their new work 'sungazing'
We open the festivities season with a very special mix from DJ, producer and musician Curses, with a dreamy compilation of cinematic elements, radio and tv samples from the 80s and 90s, and an extension of his passion for mixing Wave and the dark and weirder side of Italo Disco.Originally hailing from New York and currently based in Berlin, Curses is well known for blending his Rock & Roll roots with the darker side of Disco and Electro. In both his DJ and live sets. Curses also incorporate his ghostly vocals and guitar with flashes of EBM, New Wave, Post-Punk, and Psychedelic synth vibes.After his debut full-length Romantic Fiction in 2018 on Jennifer Cadini’s Dischi Autunno, this year Curses released his second album, Incarnadine, also on Dischi Autunno. His compositions blend Morricone-inspired guitars with elements from early 80s music genres like New Wave, Post Punk and New Beat, pushing the boundaries of these references with an emphasis on his own mysterious vocals and guitars. The album is a dialogue between the inner self and outer, and the romance of eternal and immortal existence. With a big inspiration from the cult classic film The Hunger which explores themes of immortality, love and timelessness, the post-modern vampire filmcontains a dark glamorous atmosphere. Slick production and dark, grooving melodies push the listener down a sinuous path with nostalgic moody guitars, and haunting vocals. Music is caught in a push and pull between the melancholic beats of the past, contrasted with a contemporary and sophisticated production; the album pays homage to Curses’ musical roots and the sounds that have shaped him. The mix he has prepared for us is a sort of version of all the artist's inspirations taken to the weirdest and most experimental, and as he says, is another good disconnect from the screen overload. Escape with it. I really enjoyed doing something different than a club mix. It is always in the back of my desires but rarely comes to fruition.Tracklist:0. Curses - Miriam (Doom Scroller's Edit)1.In-D - Virgin In-D Sky's (Curses Carpenter Edit)2. Emeralds - Double Helix3. Tangerine Dream - Police Car / Julie's Bedroom w/ Aline Baxley Sermon Excerpt4. Sofie Winterson - Turning (Waterlelyck remix)5. Ultimate Spinach - Ballad of the Hip Death Goddess6. Luca Venezia, The Last Defender - Hollow Shells7. John Carpenter - The Thing8. Marcell - Rust Patch9. Gary Numan - Trois Gymnopedies (First Movement)10. Floating Spectrum & Lemna - Mr. Dentin's Bubble11. Autechre - Rale12. Roni Griffith - Spys13. Curses - Shade of New_ Death14. John B - Up All Night15. S-F-X - HINOKI SKIN16. Delicate Features - This World17. Michael Bishop - Steal The Night18. Curses - Shadows Rising19. Local Suicide Ombra INTL x Vertere Vocal Utility Tool20. Paul Hertzog - Morning After21. Curses - Levitate22. Laurie Anderson - Gravity's Angel
The next mixtape sees new output 33, aka Billy Bultheel and Alexander Iezzi, putting together a mix of music and musicians that surround them and create their daily musical landscape.Through their collaborative project 33, Billy Bultheel and Alexander Iezzi further consolidate a partnership which has taken many forms within a visual, artistic spectrum. Their practice envelops performance art, music and installation whilst pinpointing, developing and elaborating the most meaningful and poignant marriages of the disciplines. Their differing backgrounds have informed how their long collaboration works – Bultheel with his conservatory training and Iezzi coming from DIY punk and experimental music scenes.Their debut album 33-69 (C.A.N.V.A.S., 2022), aments and commemorates the interruption of the simplicities, beauties and charm of mortal life in full Baroque splendour, whilst also partaking in the final opportunities for carnal pleasure and orgiastic excesses in the earthly realm. 33-69 was conceived during the first Covid-19 lockdowns and documents the duo’s experiences of pandemic life in Berlin. Recreating that dopamine shot and collaborating towards a sense of community that the pandemic had suddenly folded away. The record is a short but powerful rush of emotional states and bodily desires, translated into cerebral and carnal electronic compositions of EDM, noise and techno Bultheel and Iezzi carry with them a wealth of composition and performance experience and skill, boasting impressive trajectories which cross each other frequently. This complex and intricate working relationship culminates in the creation of 33-69 as a defiant debut — a dense and finely crafted work that finds unlikely pathways to navigate Baroque, Lieder and exuberant club through humour, dread and exaltation.As we’ve advanced, the mix they have prepared for us is a compilation of music and musicians that surround them and create their daily musical landscape. Part peers, friends and acquaintances, part inspiration, history and admiration. The mix includes music by Judy Garland, Liza Minelli, Bohren club of Gore, Heith, Lugh, Johannes Ciconia, PC Worship, Rihanna, CEM, Bach and more.
Our next mixtape comes from Luka Aron, a German musician and composer of electroacoustic and minimalist music, with a selection of tunes with unusual harmonics. Based between Berlin and Stockholm, Aron’s practice is largely focused in thespectral fusion of synthesised sound and acoustic instruments, combining the raw energyof power electronics with the fragility of the human touch. The framework of Aron’s compositions is often based on the observation of psychoacoustic phenomena and how they relate to just intonation. A careful selection of partials is presented, stimulating additional tones in the perception of the listener. Through this, a secondary structure is gradually unveiled: like light rays meeting the surface of water, partially reflecting back to air, and refracting at once as they pass from one medium to the other. As such, Aron employs methods of reverse-engineering auditory processes with the aim of invoking alternative listening modes. By putting the act of tuning at thecentre, many beating patterns are exposed, and the spectrum is flooded with overtones andfeedback.Aron is a Musikakademie Basel (CH) graduate and is currently pursuing a master’sdegree in Electroacoustic Composition at The Royal College of Music in Stockholm (SE). He’s recently published a new release, Tinctures (Ediciones Capablanca, 2022). The 10” consists of pure and magnified recordings of a chord-zither, laying bare the instrument’s inherent resonances and quivering sustain – with an immediate physical and emotional affect. By way of close miking, the instrument appears bigger-than-life; at once cavernous and bone-dry. Through this, the listener becomes witness to microscopically observed sound phenomena as the decay of the string in stasis, unveiling many pulsating patterns, capable of inducing austere and solemn alternate states of mind.As the pieces unfurl, the zither is joined by a neglected and untuned pipe organ found in a 13th-century chapel in the rural North of Germany. Its tones were later electronically matched to fit the harmonic space, adding another layer of the subtle interaction between pitch and timbre. The mixtape Aron has prepared for us aims to explore these unusual tonalities and harmonics in delightful eeriness for the listener's ears. Tracklist:Aleksandra Słyż – Everything tends towards chaos and orderCatherine Christer Hennix – Blues Alif Lam Mim In The Modes of Rag Infinity &Rag CosmosisTerry Riley – Anthem of the TrinityEyvind Kang – Tanpura StudyMorton Feldman – For Samuel BeckettNeil Young – FloridaÉliane Radigue & Frédéric Blondy – Occam XXVMorton Feldman – For Philip GustonSonja Tofik – Sky TrumpetsMazen Kerbaj – The 49 Trumpets of JerichoThe Plastic Ono Band, Yoko Ono – John John (Let’s Hope For Peace) (Live)Unknown – Ой забіліли сніжки
A Line, a succession of points, a fine line, a route; or many, like when talking about LINE as a label, house, family and source of inspiration founded by sound artist Richard Chartier 22 years ago. Sometimes conceptual, sometimes abstract, sometimes somewhere between the two, or just out of any category, the works published by this label condense a vast and exotic catalogue of sound art, initially created as a division of the mythical 12k, to later become independent in its own search, permeated by a marked but broad vision of sonic minimalism. Among LINE’s catalogue, there are true jewels of experimental contemporary music and sound art, such as the legendary Series by Richard Chartier, the compilation Between Two Points, the tribute/non-tribute to John Cage by Lawrence English, and the special Forms of Paper by Steve Roden, considered one of the essential works of the so-called lowercase movement, characterized by music played at low sound levels and lacking in prominence pretensions, a sonic philosophy close to that many of the label’s releases.
Each release is characterized by always bringing true sonic rarities to the label’s universe, one of the most select and diverse catalogues of contemporary sound art, where the meeting of sonority and concept not only satisfies the listener’s ears: it extends them, shows something that is very difficult to find elsewhere.
This 64-minute mix is a selection of the history of LINE since 2000, focusing on an overlaying of shorter pieces and excerpts to give an idea of the variety of sounds, aesthetics, and compositions of the label. So many of the works on LINE are longer, extended experiences. This is merely a taster.
Tracklist: miki yui - schlaf asmus tietchens - parallele ebene 1 oliver thurley - subcutaneous 1b haruo okada + fabio perletta - genkai 12-17+19 (excerpt) norman w. long - return and recovery (excerpt) monty adkins - empire (excerpt) france jobin - scène 3 (excerpt) miguel angel tolosa - salon 20-04 alva noto - interim (for dieter rams) steve roden - airforms (excerpt) robert curgenven + richard chartier - acquisition eviction evelina domnitch + dmitry gelfand - mucilaginous omniverse II (excerpt) masaya kato - m3 lrp-III (excerpt) agf - breathing in lines (excerpt) mark fell - storage 3 porya hatami - 8(kurdhish folk song) emile bojesen - scrape 8 geneva skeen - ii (excerpt) triac - here intro hosoo - p.29 tomoko hojo + rahel kraft - probabilities and possibilities frank bretschneider - circle_cycle ensemble d’oscillateurs - faust: movement 6 (else marie pade) william basinski + richard chartier - untitled 3 [reprise]
Aeondelit, a Colombian music producer, takes us on our next mixtape trip into the sonic landscapes of anime and video games.
Aeondelit has just released his second full-length album, Vestigios (Unguarded, 2022), which tells a lucid, captivating story of heritage, transformation, vulnerability and healing. The release will include the artwork created by Petra Hermanova and will be accompanied by limited textile pieces by Diane Esnault. Aeondelit practice explores themes related to technology and the human condition in sound while focusing on the creative use of sample manipulation techniques and digital sound synthesis to deepen the idea of a dialogue between computer and human and how both influence each other. Listening to Vestigio enthrals you in a net woven with the fourth-world meanders of Jon Haswell and the dramatic serenity of Vangelis.
Aeondelit’s music is strongly influenced by the rocky surrounding of his hometown Manizales in Colombia and fuses electronic sensibilities, ambient streams and avant-percussive rhythms that build his sound identity. On Vestigios, he comments that the memories of past generations, the lives that burn within him, are the pillars of who he is. These constitute longings and traps, sin and strength, the temple that breaks down and rebuilds. The different dimensions of consciousness converge in the mind, which constantly tells us who we are, synthesising and projecting our contradictions. The pain that comes with getting in touch with our vulnerabilities opens the doors to healing through confrontation. Vestigios is the bridge between the temporal and the eternal, the crystallised remnant of pain caused by transformation and recognition of the convulsive underworld of our psyche.
For this mixtape, he’s prepared a selection of anime and video games, which have always been a key influence in his creative process; this mix is a compilation of his favourite anime and video games soundtracks of all time.
Tracklist: Berserk – Guts Donkey Kong Country – Aquatic Ambience Gantz – Titicaca Aeon Flux – Ultimate AF Dragon Ball Z – Battle Point Unlimited Resident Evil 3 – Well Dressed Up Ghost in the Shell – Floating Museum Dino Crisis – Set You at Ease (Save Room Theme) Shadow of the Colossus – Lakeside Neon Genesis Evangelion – Rei I Angel's Egg – Prelude Ikue Asazaki – ObokuriEeumi (Samurai Champloo) Wolf's Rain – Paradiso Animatrix – Beyond Cowboy Bebop – Road to the West Resident Evil Code: Veronica – A moment of Relief (Save Room Theme) Silent Hill 2 -–A World of Madness Bôa – Duvet (Serial Experiments Lain Opening)
South-east Turkey-born DJ sound artist and producer, Banu is bringing the sounds for our next mixtape. The artist uses music as a political tool. For Banu, the strong message carried through sound is a vehicle to express emotions as well as a means of fighting against oppression.
Coming from a conservative family, making music has been her lifelong dream. It was the moment she had the opportunity to work with the iconic Arp 2600 synthesiser (a younger sibling to Eliane Radigue's infamous 2500 machine) that all her interests came into place to create an empowering soundscape with the aid of analogue drum machines. In her artistic practice, Banu uses participation, social design, ecology, and feminist and queer theory to create multimedia installations with sound as the main element, making her practice closer to contemporary art and activist spaces than the club realm.
Banu has also been exploring her approach to sound and composition through her PhD research, focused on how to include sound in the Urban Design process. As Urban Design and Architecture concentrate mainly on the visual aspect of the urban space, other senses have never thought of or given very little consideration. For Banu, listening and hearing are essential in our daily life to understand the urban space and our surroundings. She also told us how she took the challenge and included human perception with Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening theories and what attentive listening can bring about. She proposes sound as a participatory tool which means not only measurements and acoustics play a role but how we as users hear or listen to the urban space.
Banu has also very recently released her debut album 'TransSoundScapes' (Intergalactic Research Institute For Sound, 2022). The production is an exercise in female solidarity between her as a migrant woman (she's currently based in Berlin) and her sisters from the trans community, where an artist from one marginalised group showing support towards her trans sisters, using her platform to help them amplify their voices and building a bridge towards a mutual understanding of femininity. There is also a part where she proposes urban space as a music composition - she doesn't believe in improvisation. She thinks there are rhythms in life that everyone follows, but we still create a holistic composition; this is why life goes. There are ruptures, like accidents or pandemics... But we still find harmony.
This mixtape, she says, it's a bunch of secret conversations with her Arp 2600 and everything influencing what she hears and listens to. It is about synths and drums.
Tracklist: Banu - When the rain drops the lake - unreleased Banu - Transitioning (Part I) / TransSoundScapes - Intergalactic Research Institute for Sound Banu - Drama - unreleased Banu - Transit - unreleased Banu - Bianka / TransSoundScapes - Intergalactic Research Institute for Sound Banu - Say her name - unreleased Banu - Arp Cry - unreleased Banu - First Time (instrumental) - unreleased Mike Dean - Whales / 4: 22 - MWA Music Pearson Sound X Clara! - Mi Cuerpo Rastronaut - Pontinha Entrañas - OetapaZ Fearz - Tundra / Street Drumz (Vol.2) Fearz - Rosalía - Motomami (Fearz Bootleg) Rosalía - A Palé (Overmono Edit) Dinemarca - Holy - Staycore Fatima Al Qadiri - Shaneera
Our next Mixtape comes from Nanook of the North, the duo of composer and violinist Stefan Wesołowski and electronic producer Piotr Kalińsk, with a small introduction to their music and the music of their friends.
Taking the name of a 1922 American silent film that follows the struggles of the Inuk man named Nanook and his family in the Canadian Arctic, the two Polish musicians merge compositional roles blending as seamlessly as their use of acoustic and electronic sounds, with Stefan playing the violin and piano parts with additional synth touches and Piotr taking care of electronics, more synths and the final mix.
Their first album, with an eponymous name (published by Denovali), arrived after the pair were invited by the Sopot Film Festival in Gdansk to perform an improvised score to a film screening; they the classic silent movie ‘Nanook of the North and travelled to Iceland to record the album. Despite the icy expansive isolation captured from the movie, the album is also transferrable in scenario and evocation, equally omitting the dangerous allure of dystopian cityscapes or even the 80s sci-fi horror menace of Maurice Jarre, Howare Shore and Jay Chattaway.
Nanook of the North are now back with their second album Heide (Denovali, 2022). Their new material is a raw and minimalist sonic landscape, practically devoid of percussive elements but featuring vocals by an acclaimed mezzo-soprano Margarita Slepakova. As with the debut, the music on "Heide" is rooted in nature and its primordiality. The title of the album alludes to wildness and untamedness. The material was recorded last winter in a village in the middle of forests in northern Poland, which is clearly felt in the atmosphere of the 9 new tracks on "Heide".
The mix they have prepared is aimed to be an introduction to their craft and the music of our friends and collaborators from other projects - such as Jacaszek or Olga Markowska (also the author of the cover of Heide). 100% Polish music. Including "Hinode Tapes #05" (the second song), which was recorded by Piort’s new improvising trio Hinode Tapes (released on August 26 by Instant Classic), a great and very inspiring Krakow label.
Our next Mixtape comes from the Polish producer Cafe de la Jungle, where he has recollected some of his latest inspirations in terms of pace and rhythms.
Cafe de la Jungle is Tomasz Zając, a Kraków-based producer who is using modular synthesis, field recording and sampling techniques to build mystical worlds on twelve-inch discs. He’s recently released Tuvan Spirits EP (Dans de la Desert, 2022), where he explores his fascination and interest in shamanic practices in highly dynamic sound environments.
His excellent debut Dancing with Cicadas was rife with dangerous and mysterious rhythms, but Cafe de la jUngle takes a more laid-back approach in the new EP. Built around cavernous ambience and bass notes, sounds that paint a picture of a dance ritual so subtle, it’s visceral and highly narrative at the same time.
We were enthralled with his rhythms and track unfoldings. For the mix he has prepared, He shares that It’s an extension of his latest inspirations and direction of music in terms of pace and rhythms. I’ve been listening lately to a lot of halftime, trip-hop stuff. Naturally, with listening, there is a lot of digging and collecting music. I had this feeling that this style would be perfect for your mixtape series.
Next on our Mixtape series is by the one and only Richie Culver. We published an interview with him a few weeks back, and he so generously offered us a mixtape. A selection of drifty suggestive tracks of artists he's been recently interested in, and the perfect companion for the entertaining read that his interview is.
Culver has been this semi-outsider, self-taught artist figure in the UK and a few capitals scattered around the world, gaining recognition with his pungent view of "existence" and observation of human behaviour (a lot of it autobiographical). Conceptual, but at the same time direct and full of a minimalistic force, a big part of Culver's work lies in his relationship with technology, the advent of social media, and how antagonistic forces around these affect human interaction, new forms of linguistics and communication, and new levels of cultural symbols, signs and signifiers.
A frustrated musician, as he frequently recalls himself (and who isn't, I may dare to say…), music and sound is where he is keeping a lot of his artistic focus at the moment. And he seems to be as prolific as with other different types of media and artistic forms. He'll be releasing his first solo album in the following months; he's also very recently released an EP in collaboration with electronic musician Pavel Milyukov (aka Buttechno), that is receiving a lot of attention from the press as his preceding Blackhaine collab 'DID U COME YET / I'M NOT GONNA CUM. Texts and spoken words have long been central to Culver's practice, and in his audio pieces, these sometimes become the starting point for his compositions. Other is recorded noises or recited words.
Culver is also putting his energy into his record label (and creative studio) Participant, which he runs along with filmmaker William Markarian-Martin. The label is where he's been releasing his own material (including a compilation on tape format of his "Full musical archive 1999-2019", and more recently releasing other artists' music, like the phenomenal DRONE OPERATØR latest release.
About the mixtape, and especially when asked about the title, Culver shares that he travels to the English countryside often with his family: When I go there, I give my phone to someone, and they give it back to me when we arrive home. The mix is a reference to my brain finding it's self again. When I'm in London, I'm not sure my brain is operating in a healthy way. We all know it's the new normal now with phones etc… But having a week or a few days with no screens or laptops is the most freeing thing ever. I feel I owe it to myself to let my brain meat thaw in the countryside every now and then (and once again, don't we all do, don't we all? :) )
For tracklist please check https://www.clotmag.com/audio-visual/clotmix/clotmix-participant-records-presents-richie-culver
Barkum Deer are Louis Giannamore and Jenny Ames, two talented musicians who met in a London house share and bonded over their love of early Renaissance music, black metal, and Björk. Amid the bleak reality of a winter lockdown, the pair found a space for creative collaboration unencumbered by deadlines or expectations, fuelled by the catharsis of experimentation. Jenny graduated from the RCA, and as a classically trained viola player, has performed with Björk, Floating Points and Mica Levi, while Louis is a drummer, producer, and graduate of Berklee College of Music who’s collaborated with the likes of Gang of Youths, Master Peace, and First Light Records labelmate Kinn.
Earlier this year, they released their debut self-titled album Barkum Deer (First Light Records, 2022), a dense half-hour trip into bass-rich drones, anxious strings and skittering electronic flourishes. Viola, drums, Jenny’s voice, and found samples (creaking doors and dusty footsteps) all come together to form a beautifully cinematic and abstract exploration. The track’s sound is designed with a special awareness that makes it something really special, endowing the compositions with a haunting enduring physicality. In some tracks, travelling pulsating drums make you feel like galloping on a horse’s back at 100 miles per hour; in others, it’s the viola pulsating or stretching, with its string's sound plunging into one body, pungently expanding and contracting within.
About the mix they have prepared for us, the whole of it is enveloped in found sounds and field recordings recorded by Louis: I've been on tour for most of 2022 with a band called Gang Of Youths, so I have had the opportunity to capture sounds from all over the world. There is a thunderstorm that you'll hear in there I luckily timed and captured perfectly, Louis shares. The mix opens with a live version of their song 'Folding Fog' and an alternative version of -also theirs- 'Labyrinth', which is found exclusively on the CD format of the album. Following, there are two solo pieces by Jenny and Louis, both of which can be found online. To round it off, they say, we have a roughly mixed, unreleased song for Barkum Deer. It's not even finished, but I love the way it sounds. Referring to my comment earlier, I've been trying to teach my ears to listen to the world around us as if it were music. I feel this mix mirrors that. I'm chuffed about it.
Tracklist: 00:00 - ‘Folding Fog’ - Piano/acoustic rendition (intro) 03:40 - ‘Folding Fog’ - Live 12:38 -‘ Labyrinth’ - CD exclusive/alternative version 19:09 - ‘Chrome’ - solo piece by Louis Giannamore 23:12 - ‘Organ’ - solo piece by Jenny Ames 27:25 - ‘Ground’ - unreleased song by Barkum Deer
The next mixtape comes from Akusmi, the new project moniker of French-born, London-based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Pascal Bideau. It's a dive into Indonesian sounds territories, following his recently published album Fleeting Future (Tonal Union, 2022), which was partly inspired by the artist's journey to the east-Asian country.
In Indonesia, Bideau immersed himself in traditional Gamelan and gong music, and many of the themes, motifs and melodies on Fleeting Future stem from the 'Slendro' scale, one of the essential tuning systems used in Gamelan. However, it is not musical scales but scales as in the size or extent of things that most fascinates Bideau. Specifically, he explains the compelling way things dramatically change when you shift from any given scale to another." From the atomic to the celestial, the micro and macro universes of dizzying complexity co-exist within each other. Bideau, who also teaches music production and sound/visual installation at the Roundhouse and the University of East London, feels there is a direct connection between the music he makes to this: You take a simple repetitive pattern, seemingly consistent in its shape, but the more you listen to it, the more it changes and becomes something else. Of course, this is the premise of minimal music, and if you listen to Steve Reich's "six pianos" or Terry Riley's "In C", it does precisely that. But I try to condense it to a much more compact/short time frame to convey the dizziness and epics of the shifting. On the visual arts side, Bideau makes connections between the work of David Goodsell, a structural biologist who paints watercolours of cell interiors obtained by electron microscopy, and many of the traditional aboriginal art that convey the same sense of systems and organisms, though the batik techniques of the Javanese/Balinese art (an older expression form of pointillism one may say) to even the abstractions of Jackon pollock.
In that sense, Fleeting Future connects directly to nature and the wider world in its evocation of perceptive shifts and transitions from microscopic to macro scale. Its hallucinatory, genre-defying blend of minimalism, cosmic jazz and Fourth World influences, and its quest for optimism in the face of unknown and limitless possibility.
The mix he has prepared for CLOT is a mix of various pieces of Indonesian music that he finds particularly striking in the way they sound: some good examples of different gamelan ensembles from Java and Bali, both bamboo and gong based; some chants from the Kecak music and dance with its highly percussive quality; some pieces of Genggong which is the Balinese mouth harp: I also threw in a few samples of Indonesian radio stations and field recordings done while in Bali for good measure, and some gongs experimentations recorded at my studio in 2018-2019. We are sure it will make the perfect summer treat for our audiences' ears.
Tracklist: All hits music: Radio Sumatra / The Indonesian FM experience Gamelan descending a staircase / Arturas Bumsteinas Radio Java / Radio Republik Indonesia The music of Lombok / Ratu Radio Java / Radio Republik Indonesia Bali Music From the North-West / Seka Balaganjur - Balaganjuran Radio Java / Radio Solo, Bandung Best World Sounds / Music of Bali - Kecak 2 Bonang Studio / Gong experiments IV Bali field recordings / Sarinbuana - Gong & Rindik Gamelan from Central Java / Genhing Munggang Bonang Studio / Gong experiments VIII Radio Java / Radio Bandung Radio Java / Radio Solo, Bandung Living Art, Sounding Spirit: The Bali Sessions / Gelaga Punhun Living Art, Sounding Spirit: The Bali Sessions / Semara Guna Bonang Studio / Gong experiments IX Radio Java / Radio Solo, Bandung Living Art, Sounding Spirit: The Bali Sessions / Kepandung Sita
The next mixtape comes from Italian artist Anor Londo (aka Marco Fasoli). Dedicated to drumming for a long time, the artist has more recently moved into more introspective electronic territories.
With an artistic name that recalls a fictional city in a series of action role-playing games, Anor Londo is deeply fascinated by alchemical esotericism, philosophical hermeticism, cosmic horror and cyber-decadence. His speculation in the audio-visual field is bound up with the search for timeless perfection, an opportunity to understand the true nature of the cosmos a contemplation of the transcendent, which constitutes a form of esoteric ritual.
Transmutations are one of the founding elements of his creative method. He reinterprets in a technological key the broader meaning of alchemical philosophy, which - as the eldest form of chemistry - is committed to the fascinating task of shaping and moulding matter. Anor Londo wants to understand the very nature of the fabric of the universe.
Last April Anor London published Chaos & Materia EP, an extremely elegant and soulful ambient expression of abstract and melodic musical forms. The productions, teh artist says, stems from an analogy between hermetic philosophy and Anor Londo's mindset. Chaos' is perceived as the aggregator of all opposites, whilst 'matter' means understanding the foundations of reality.
The mix he’s prepared for us, Solar Plexus, refers to a complex structure of nerves of the sympathetic nervous system. It’s an energy centre necessary for balance and well-being in the body. These networks are like an electrical junction box, distributing wires to different areas of the house, Anor Londo shares. The mix developed is a direct emanation of this concept of interconnection. Different feelings and sensibilities communicate in a dance of gazes, seemingly distant but intersecting at an epicentre that is my own vision. Sometimes they smash into each other, creating a sense of loss, but in the end, it all returns to a global balance like in an infinite loop. Seeing is believing.
Tracklist: 01. UVB76 - Onna 02. Calogero Aquilina - Low Tide 03. Khymeia - Runda Munda 04. Gila - Shoulder 05. Mai Mai Mai - Musica Nova 06. Stokowski - Arkansas Black 07. Wiegedood - Prowl 08. Varg & AnnaMelina - To the Sea / Hug Me Like you Love Me 09. Anor Londo - 1+2+3+4=10 10. Bath - Ocean Death 11. Khymeia - Runda Munda 12. Old Apparatus - Dourado 13. Pulshar - Nospheratu 14. Clarice Jensen - For This From That Will Be Filled (b) 15. Daniel Spaleniak - Back Home 16. Deru - The Future Never Comes 17. Genghis Tron - I Won't Come Back Alive 18. Proem - I Don't Know How To Tell 19. Ninos Du Brasil - O Vento Chama Seu Nome 20. Stokowski - Saint 21. Scott Walker - Epizootics! 22. Plaid - Do Matter
The next mixtape comes from musician and composer Remo Seeland, who is behind the Swiss experimental label Hallow Ground. He’s presenting a selection of the label’s music, partly in response to the label's recent publication, their first ever "concept-compilation" Epiphanies (Hallow Ground, 2022) released earlier in March this year.
Founded by Remo Seeland, Hallow Ground was created in 2013 and has been instrumental in launching the careers of artists such as Kali Malone and FUJI||||||||||TA as well as recently releasing albums by Lawrence English, Norman Westberg, Maria W Horn and Siavash Amini, as many of Seeland’s composition as well. More than a record label, Hallow ground is a platform for Music and Art that leads to ‘Visions’, also acting as We act as publishers, hosts and performers.
For the label's first ever compilation, the artists were commissioned to pursue a non-rational creative process in approaching the phenomenon of epiphany through sound. The results, whether long-form, short vignettes, profane and concrete sounds or spiritual and abstract pieces, perfectly encapsulate what Hallow Ground as a label has stood for since its inception in the year 2013: challenging not only conventional notions of what music is supposed to sound like but also the listeners' perception through the power of sound.
The mix Seeland has prepared for us reflects on the sound of some of the main artists behind the label, and a joyous and sinuous journey into experimental introspection.
Tracklist: 1) Lawrence English - Outside The City of God (Augustine wept) 04:02 2) Miki Yui - Listening (oneness) 10:03 3) Maria W Horn - Oinones Death pt. I 05:36 4) Siavash Amini - Spuming Silver 05:53 5) Kali Malone - Empty The Belief 10:01 6) Marja Ahti - Symbiogenesis 07:22 7) Remo Seeland - Pulse Points Green 05:33 8) Steve Fors - Unsound Structures 06:26 9) FUJI||||||||||TA - sukima 07:03
The next mixtape arrives from V-stock, aka Valentin Doychinov, an electronic musician, guitarist, producer and film score composer. With an interest in nature, mathematics and of course music, he finds inspiration in a diverse set of influences that range from the fringes of experimental club music, noise, and ambient to instrumental genres such as jazz fusion and post-rock. V-stock has released several EPs and albums for several experimental labels, and he has just published a new LP, Liminal (Position Disposition, 2022) where he combines his recent jazz fusion influences with the noise, ambient and broken electronics sound he developed during the last LPs. Incepted during pandemics, the album title Liminal refers to a state of ‘occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold’ and very trivially, the spark of inspiration came from a Facebook group called ‘Liminal Spaces’ which I came across at some point over the lockdown period. In this group people generally post pictures of cities and buildings when they are devoid of people – these both convey a certain emotion that combines a sense of loneliness, isolation and also otherworldliness which I was also feeling during this year, but I didn’t know how to express. The artist also shares that the way the tracks were made is also a result of a very improvisational approach both with the synth and other production gear he was using; the tracks were recorded live and improvisations were layered on top of each other. I also experimented with techniques for creating very broken and unpredictable beats. Valentin’s daytime profession as a wind energy project engineer allows him to contribute to another cause that is massively important to him - the decarbonisation and transition to clean energy sources for society. For our mix, he’s prepared a selection of tracks from albums he has been enjoying lately; mostly made of atmospheric tracks that have a certain ambience that communicates well with his approaches to production.
Tracklist: Benoit Pioulard - Whose Palms Create Vanessa mara - Piano & Accordion, Pt. 1 Richard Skelton - Pariah Fennesz - Endless Summer V-Stók - A pocket within a pocket Eli Keszler - The Accident Jon Hassell - Picnic Death in Vegas, The Two Lone Swordmen - Neptune City - Concrete Funk 2 Pan-American - Het Volk North Americans - Furniture In The Valley Okkyung Lee - Another Old Story Jean-Claude Vannier, Mike Patton - Insolubles
The next instalment of our Mixtape series comes by Johanna Sulkunen, a Finnish experimental vocalist, composer & improviser based in Copenhagen. A mix of minimalistic sounds combined with vocal compositions to welcome the spring season.
For Johanna, the symbiosis of vocals and electronics have been at the centre of her career. A frequent collaborator with iconic jazz & improv musicians such as Tomasz Stanko, Axel Dörner, Koichi Makigami and originally labelled as an exciting voice on the alternative jazz scene, Sulkunen has expanded her range from jazz and alternative pop to free improvisation, electronic music and avant-garde. Only a few months ago, Johanna release Terra, a collection of tracks where the artist invokes imaginary landscapes with her voice, electronics and a stellar ensemble. Terra also represents the second part of her trilogy with the solo project Sonority, in Terra Finnish experimental vocalist creates a global vision while being trapped in Copenhagen, and invites the listener to question our modern life and its often destructive relation to nature. On Terra, she continues the work with Zen Buddhism and the koan as in her first release with her solo project, as well as her own lyrics, but she expands her musical space considerably and explores the transformation of the vocal language into instruments such as strings, horns and drums, letting the qualities of texts lead to the result.
For this mixtape, she's selected a mixture of very minimalistic sound compositions, some vocal works, and some more ‘embracing’ with strings and electronics: I think it intrigues you to listen to the details and allows you to let go of thinking and drift along with sound. I’ve been preparing the mix while sitting on a tour bus (or more of a tiny, totally packed car) and taking my own time between the concerts sitting alone with my headphones.
Tracklist: 1. HYbr:ID Oval Hadron / Alva Noto 2. A HOUSE A DANCE A POEM / Félicia Atkinson 3. III The Body Entire / Johanna Elina Sulkunen 4. VII Abide / Johanna Elina Sulkunen 5. 1 / Mads Emil Nielsen & Andrea Neumann 6. IV Shosen / johanna Elina Sulkunen 7. X Hiemal / Johanna Elina Sulkunen 8. End Of Summer Part 2 / Johann Johansson with Hildur Gudnadottir, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Il Santo Bevitore is the artistic alter ego of the Italian born London-based musician, producer and sound engineer Nicola Serra, who is also known for being the founding curator of London's experimental music festival Dronica. The following mixtape is shared on the occasion of his recent debut release for Opal Tapes ‘Water and Tears’.
“The mixtape includes tracks from my album as well as music from artists who inspired, either directly or indirectly, the album process”, shares Il Santo Bevitore.
To have worked on the album with 11 other musicians and artists, who contributed their vocals and a variety of instruments, shows extraordinary determination to experiment with new ways of working on the recording process, while still on unstable grounds during the past two years of the pandemic. The sound on the album is heavily processed thanks to that and as a result creates an extensive depth of soundscapes, which immerse the listener into the voyage under the artist’s spell.
‘Water and Tears’ has been inspired by the painful story of the Panas, women lost during childbirth, as well as the Sardinian ancestral pagan past, its people and their echoes. Each of the tracks is characterised by thick sonic textures and comprises multiple layers of sound sources. “Some of the voices I used, belong to an ancestral Sardinian and Italian folkloric past, which is emphasised and brought back to life and projected into the future thanks to technology”.
Keen on continuing his explorations of compositions of inseparably intertwined analogue instruments and digital technology, while embracing his curatorial practice, Il Santo Bevitore is now looking forward to more collaborations and working with other artists in the near future.
Tracklist: Il Santo Bevitore - A Spell On You Iosonouncane - Hiver Il Santo Bevitore - Malia The For Carnation - A tribute to Pan Sonic - Arktinen Death In June - Rocking Horse Night Goblin - Sighs Swans - In My Garden Maria Carta - Dies Irae Tribes Of Neurot - Achtwan Il Santo Bevitore - Roaming In A Sea Of Blades
For our next mixtape set, duo Auf Togo will be taking us into a session of Pop, Funk & 70's Cosmic Disco, filled with hypnotic grooves and absorbing melodies.
Auf Togo is the long-time collaboration between Sasa Crnobrnja and Clement Cachot-Coulom which is inspired by the Cosmic disco sounds of the late 70s/early '80s. Sasa Crnobrnja originates from the deep, disco-laced house duo of his duo alias In Flagranti (Kitsune, Phantasy, Gomma & more) and Clement Cachot-Coulom from bands The Fabulous Penetrators and Big Girls. With the Auf Togo formation, they present a sound that echoes the richness and flavour of vintage recording equipment and instruments whilst holding the edge and sharpness of modern studio techniques.
The duo presents a loose, almost improvised sound that works very well within the rigid confines of house music. Psychedelic echoey guitars clash with probing synth lines and live-sounding rhythm sections and their heavy kicks and singing cowbells, their deep basslines and spare guitar licks blur the line between rigid, quantised sounds and the duo’s refreshing human touch.
Auf Togo recently their new album, Movements (SaS Recording). The record, unconventional in its production, stems from samples extracted from Clement’s riffs and jams on guitar, bass and keys, all of which are then ultimately sown together by Sasa’s expert production
For this mix we can expect…well all that has been said before, abstract sensuous grooves, well-crafted melodies, avant-garde Kosmiche and space disco sounds which hopefully take us away from all that January wintery blues. Tracklist: Lion - Youve Got A Woman (Abel Edit) Os Mutantes - Ando Meio Desligado Nu Genea & Celia Kameni Marechià - Marechià Serge Gainsbourg - Sea, Sex & Sun (Barry & Gibbs Edit) Minami Deutsch - Futsu Ni Ikirenai Lizzy Mercier Descloux - Fire Giorgio Moroder - Chase The Fatback Band - Are You Ready (Bus Stop) - Mitiko Puma & The Dolphin - Toys Noise Django Reinhardt - Rhythm Future
Electronic musician and sound artist Josep Kamaru, aka KMRU, takes us on our first December sonic journey. Born in Nairobi and currently based in Berlin, KMRU is a sound artist and producer whose methods include field recording, improvisation, noise, machine learning, radio art and drones. With a paramount sound and visual sensibility, his work is reminiscent of ambient masters such as Lawrence English. KMRU’s sound though is uniquely positioned between the rarely-married cultures of ambient and African music, entwining his compositions with field recordings from his native Kenya and the surrounding countries of East Africa.
Self-releasing his productions, these have been received very enthusiastically by both critics and the audience. In 2020, he released three albums that showed the depth and range of his sound: Peel, an LP of hypnotic drones on the avant-garde institution Editions Mego; Opaquer, a collection of vivid and dreamlike sound sculptures; and Jar, a dreamlike cassette of found sounds and analogue ambience. KMRU hasn’t stopped in 2021 with a few more releases including Logue, an album Formed of tracks written from 2017 to 2019, which represents an artist not only in command of his form but also willing to develop and evolve, ready to deconstruct and radically refocus his music to explore new contours of experimental and ambient sound design.
This mix he shares is a liminal narrative of falling asleep, each track feels like an episode of a hypnagogic state. I’ve been thinking deeply about dreams and nostalgia this past week and these tracks evoke this feeling.
Tracklist: Patricia Wolf - Morning Light KMRU & Nyokabi Kariuki – unreleased Fields We Found – Drops Alexandra Spence - Suddenly Silent Perila & Ulla - every something is an echo of nothing Kevin Richard Martin - In Slow Motion Klara Lewis & Peder Mannerfelt - Styrofoam Tone Pita - Two Top Five Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin - Uptown Psychedelia Aho Ssan - Outro (KMRU Remix) Tashi Wada - March 2007 MIGUEL ANGEL TOLOSA - salon 09-02 loscil – Vespera The Transcendence Orchestra - Weather Series John Hassel -Hex Sarah Davachi - Border of Mind
Our 35th Mixtape installment arrives from Dahjyn, a musician, producer and vocalist originally from the Pacific Northwest of the U.S and currently based in Brooklyn.
Dahjyn, or Dan Jyn Suk Ahrendt is currently a resident with a monthly show at Hong Kong Community Radio and has just recently published his debut EP, The gall (Most Dismal Swamp, 2021) featuring additional remixes by Endgame, Thegn, and trngs.
A new member of the swamp family, his sounds is completely akin to the label’s unique sonic aesthetics. With relentless industrial gut-punch percussion, textural power electronics, and reflective baritone verse, the album includes 5 tracks that embody a convulsive tension between an abrasive physicality and a brooding emotionality: a visceral incantation working through aggregate layers of trauma.
Alongside his particular self-exploration in identity and ability to express it, he’s continually inspired by amazing electronic musicians and producers around the world pushing his boundaries and expectations. Also a
In this mix, Dahjyn tells us, he covers a very solid gamut of his driving nostalgia combined with the newer driving interests in his ears. The personal arc has moved from a past more anchored in post-punk romanticism, moving into the atmospheric self-obliteration of the heavier experimental pulling from the traditional music he’s found himself lost in.
Tracklist: Akai Tori - Takeda No Komoriuta Book of Knots - Drosophila Melanogaster (ft. Blixa Bargeld) Nilotika Cultural Ensemble - Ejokawulida The Anchiskati Choir - Alilio ver.2 Rowland S. Howard - Silver Chain The Blood of Heros - Hecatomb Setabuhan - Tabuh Langit Tanduk Jawara The Bug - Warning (ft. Flowdan) Geinoh Yamashirogumi - Shohmyoh (AKIRA OST) Bark Psychosis - Absent Friend Kim Yung Mi - Haenim
Our end of October Mixtape comes from Bedroom community’s Heliocrysum.
With a name that evokes the Latin for sunflower but also a healing tincture, the LA-based composer/sound designer duo have just recently presented their visceral, deep and exploratory debut album "We Become Mist". Reminiscence of their name too, their sound blends overlaid orchestration and distorted lightness, simplicity washed with emotional intensity, the remembered dreams of far-off, science-fictive discoveries.
Heliochrysum is Michael Deragon and Daniel Lea in which collaboration becomes a sculpted journey into new aural and imaginative cosmology. "We Become Mist" uses analogue and digital processes to mine the depths of industrial and science fictional, psychedelic soundscapes, often cinematic in tone and texture. The album has been mixed by minimal ambient beast Ben Frost and mastered by Valgeir Sigurdsson. Within the melding of the analogue and digital, there was another element mixed: the album is tinged with psilocybin technology. As a listener, you can hear as you move through a psychedelic passage, like out of a state of lockdown into one of alien otherworldliness. Something that also seems to be tingeing the electronic music scenes throughout. Especially on the American west coast.
For this mix the duo have selected a series of tracks filled with the atmospheres and textures they love and are inspired by and truly find moving: "there is something like an angelic quality or a spiritual depth to each of the tracks that we are always in search of. Heliochrysum for us is about layers, simple melodies and atmospheres moving towards an immersive experience that take the listener and us somewhere new, unknown and challenging. We also included some things we have made as Heliochrysum as well as other projects that we have been a part of because for us they are all one world and part of this journey".
A blissful trip of warm sounds to fill our readers with autumnal feelings .
Tracklist: 01. ALVA NOTO - XERROX SORA 1 02. SILVER MOUNT ZION - 13 ANGELS STANDING GUARD ROUND THE SIDE OF YOUR BED 03. MY BLOODY VALENTINE - TO HERE KNOWS WHEN 04. STEVE MOORE - THERE’S NO NEGOTIATING 05. HELIOCHRYSUM - HIVEMIND REMIX 06. L A N D - TRANSITION 07. M. DERAGON - A RADIANT SLEEP SHINE 08. CLINT MANSELL - WAVES CRASHING ON DISTORT SHORES OF TIME 09. HELIOCHRYSUM - LENS NOIR PART 2 10. HOWARD SHORE - MANSFIELD CRASH 11. BURIAL - NIGHTBUS 12. ALESSANDRO CORTINI - SCAPPA 13. HELIOCHRYSUM - ALIENA
With a selection of dark and deep cuts, the rising electronic music producer MINOS is presenting our next mixtape.
The London-based, Italian/Colombian electro producer fuses complex synth-work with powerful harmonies. MINOS is a classically trained pianist, however her love for the dancefloor has naturally guided her into electronic production. Her musical training feeds directly into her synth work, which is also underpinned by intricate grooves and an overall love of sound design; and her upbringing in Dubai and Tokyo has instilled a deep interest in the futuristic, which shows up in her music, along with an appreciation for diverse and multicultural sounds.
Her music is also Inspired by a sense of apocalyptic chaos and confusion, Minos’ knack for rich harmonies and killer grooves becomes her main emotional weapon. She makes no exceptions deploying complex and evocative synth-work for optimum dancefloor effect. Where her music combines a passion for dancefloor dwelling with meticulous sound design and storytelling,
Her first release, ‘Compose Urself’ is the first representation of how the world of Minos is beginning to take true form. As she facilitates an immersive journey through this rapturous world, With this project, MINOS seeks to captivate the listener both in mind and in body, carrying them away into her rapturous world. This is achieved through her careful attention to sonic detail, wherein every layer and every sound tells its own story, culminating in a unique symphony of acousmatic elements and facilitating an immersive journey through this fantastical world.
For this mixtape Minos says it includes a lot of the music and artists that inspired her for the Compose Urself EP and that continue to inspire her in the studio these days: I called it "Hidden Depth" because the music is deep and dark and you really feel it in your gut...I love music that entrances you and makes you explore your depths. I don't think people spend enough time do.
Tracklist: 'Hord (Convextion Remix)' - Tolga Fidan 'Ask Me' - Mikron 'Orange Blank' - Chaos In The CBD 'Without You' - Gosub 'Re-Entry' - Mikron 'WAX60006A' - WAX 'Black Sands' - Mikron 'Pattern Rotate' - 214 'Fluid Dynamics' - Morphology 'Downlink' - Patricia 'RDS - 224' - De Lichting 'Interrogator' - MINOS 'let them have the internet' - Ela Minus
Huma is the alias of Barcelona based experimental musician Andrés Satué. who is bringing our next mixtape instalment, following the release of his new EP Se van sus naves. We recently featured Huma ahead is release titled Emergence (Hedonic Reversal, 2021), a release that was an experiment in the irregular rhythmic, textural or physical qualities of sounds engaging with one another. In it, the chaotic nature of these sounds colliding allows for the emergence of atypical rhythms, ones in which preconceived notions of a linear structure are supplanted in favour of melodies and patterns borne from the dissonant sound. The new release Se van sus naves is a production of experiments with different creative processes and tools such as granular synthesis or extreme sampling created halfway between Eva and Emergence. Continuing with the exploration of the idea of singularity and exponential growth in which Eva was inspired, Se van sus naves proposes an abstract and delicate universe, closer to ambient but without leaving aside the characteristic abrasion of other albums. In this mixtape, Huma shares, you will find music that inspired Se van sus naves but also recent discoveries and music that he really loves and respect: from ambient to club, film soundtrack or computer music. There is a wide variety of genres inside.
Tracklist: Alessandro Cortini - SEMPRE Huma - Transcension Variation Bobby Krlic - The Crash Gong Kebyar - Sekar Jepun Tim Hecker - Not alone Tohji, Loota & Brodinski - Yodaka (dir. Taichi Kimura) crnds - 013 Vladislav Delay - Rakkn Aelk Minsur - Drugged Out Ginnix Zuli - Where Do You Go Synalegg - Juggernaut Tim Hecker - Pond Life Huma - 1 Year, 2 Times Terminal 11 - Unpleasant Experience Rrucculla - Ciclo del agua
Dalhous, the music project of Marc Dall and Alex Ander formed in Edinburgh, are bringing our next mixtape instalment, with a mix that will particularly please those with cinematographic inclinations. Dalhous have just returned after a 5-year hiatus with a long-awaited follow up to 2016's House Number 44, presenting the second volume of The Composite Moods Collection: Point Blank Range released on Denovali Records earlier this year. This mixtape is a collection of some of the records Dalhous have been re-listening to recently. They like to make mixes in the same way they make records where entire tracks are used as raw material. The cinematographic influence comes across immediately: There are a lot of cues from film and game soundtracks, from classic FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Half-Life through to a library cue from David Cronenberg's Shivers, to direct audio rip from the opening of Abell Ferrera's The King of New York by Joe Delia.
Tracklist: Concierto for Violin OP. 8# Autumn by Antonio Vivaldi arranged by Joe Delia - King of New York OST (1990) Takefumi Haketa - Intercourse of Ghosts - Kairo OST (2001) / Audio extract from Pulse (2001) / Takefumi Haketa - There is nobody in the laboratory - Kairo OST (2001) Klaus Shulze - Dream Team - Next of Kin OST (1982) Carlo Maria Cordio - Incontro - Absurd OST (1983) Bruce Ditmas - Visioni Sconvolgenti (2017) Edward Artemiev - Part V - Solaris OST (1972) / Tangerine Dream - Terrible - The Keep OST (1983) Popol Vuh - The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner OST (1974) Richard Einhorn - Audio Extract - Blood Rage OST (1987) / Charles Bernstein - Lurking - Nightmare on Elm Steet OST (1984) Miwako Chinone - Saferoom Theme - Resident Evil 7 OST (2017) Christoph De Babalon - Opium - If Your'e Into It, I'm Out Of It (1997) / Alan Splet - Audio Extract - Blue Velvet (1986) Chu Ishikawa - Swamp - A Snake Of June OST (2002) Joji Yuasa - Audio Extract - Funeral Parade of Roses OST (1969) Angelo Badalamenti - Main Theme - Mulholland Drive OST (2001) Clint Mansell - Ambient Music Loop - Pi OST (1998) Akira Yamaoka - The Forest Trail - Silent Hill OST (2001) Mark Isham - Dust and Gasoline - The Hicher OST (1986) Bobby Prince - Wondering About Loved Ones - Wolfenstein 3D OST (1992) Audio Extract - Black Christmas (1974) / Simon Park - Vocal Point - Dawn of The Dead OST (1978) Simonetti-Pignatelli-Morante - Flashing - Tenebrae OST (1982) Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music (1974) / Chris Conner - Key Personnel - Manhunt OST (2003) Laurie Anderson - Gravity's Angel (instrumental) - Naked Lunch trailer music (1991) Muslimgauze - Under The Hand Of Jaruzelsk (1987) / Jack Nitzsche & Barre Phillips - Cat & Mouse - Cruising OST (1980) Graeme Revell - Nobody on the Safety Boat - Dead Calm OST (1989) / Graeme Revell - Fireboat Light - Dead Calm OST (1989) Barry De Vorzon - Men's Room - The Warriors OST (1979) Kelly Bailey - Vague Voices - Half Life OST (1998) / Wang Chung - City Of The Angels - To Live and Die In L.A OST (1985) Nurse With Wound - Spiral Theme - Scrag! (1987) Popol Vuh - Brothers of the Shadows - Nosferatu The Vampyre OST (1979) Coil - Meaning What Exactly-666 - Unnatural History III - (1997) / Coil – Here To Here (Double Headed Secret) - Unnatural History (1990) Akira Yamaoka - Eternal Rest - Silent Hill 1 PSX OST (2001) Akira Yamaoka - Is This The End? - Silent Hill 4 OST (2004) Eugene Cines - Rooms in a Museum - Shivers OST (1975)
Our new mixtape comes from the Norwegian transcendent artist Kjetil Jerve and producer Stian Balducci with a recording specially crafter for CLOT Mag and getting inspiration from their more recent album.
Tokyo Tapes: Piano Recycle, released on Dugnad Records in April 2021, is an epic archival collection fusing ambient, drone and experimentalist textures. Performed with a live emotion in mind, this aspect of the collection adds to the innovative spontaneity and the duo’s dynamic musicianship.
Jerve is an artist known for his genre-defying curiosity, adventures transcending dogma and style and has been running the Oslo-based label Dugnad rec since 2016. He has been an important figure in the next wave of Norwegian jazz musicians, and likewise, Balducci, although coming from strictly electronic musicianship, has moved towards extended jazz and improvised genres. The clear jazz influences are felt moving throughout the 18 track album, in which classicism and electricity combine, crafted through fuzzy textures, cinematic soundscapes and hauntingly beautiful melody paintings.
The album centres around Kjetil’s unique piano musings, it is then moulded by Balducci through creative warping in order to design and sketch new instruments through the initial medium of the piano. The result is a record that feels both archaic and contemporary, clearly drawing inspiration from and acknowledging Alva Noto/Sakamoto and Bugge/Schwarz as predecessors, but at the same time, residing on its own plane of artistry. The artists suggest a promise to provide a euphoric connection: the record asks to be listened to in a place of nature, free of distractions when its power can be felt most vividly.
For this mixtape, they share, they wanted to display a balance between the eclectic and narrow, selecting from a broad spectrum of inspirations and melding it together with a long take of piano improvisation recorded exclusively for CLOT: It sort of sounds like what could be a live DJ set from Stian’s studio with Kjetil’s piano built-in. There are also some gold nuggets from new and upcoming releases happening here in Norway, and it’s always really nice to present our peers’ work in a worldwide context.
The artists also request their audiences to engage with the listening: Please let us know in the comments how you experienced it, and be sure to check out our socials to take part in our common future.
Tracklist: Stian Balducci, Kjetil Jerve - 4.5 Goen Slo (edit) Burial - Subtemple Ben Frost - Forgetting You is Like Breathing Water Robert Turman - Flux 3 Ø - Scene 1 Tortusa - I Know This Place Porter Ricks - Biokinetics 2 Damata - I Say Damata, You Say Matoma Kim Dürbeck - Tma4ever Laraaji - Trance Celestial Movement 4 Stian Balducci, Kjetil Jerve - 3.2 MIN Lövgren - Car Crash Bendik Baksaas, Maria Brinch - Inya Lake II Alva Noto, Ryuichi Sakamoto - Uoon II Basic Channel - Mutism Loscil - Discrete Entropy Biosphere & Maâlem Mohamed Kouyou - Boiler Room Marrakech Tortusa, Jo David Meyer Lysne - Jazz Spot Candy Stian Balducci, Kjetil Jerve - 4.5 Goen Slo
The next mixtape instalment comes from the hand of one of the sound artists we have long followed and admired. Jana Winderen is contributing to the series with a mix inspired by one of her recent compositions, the track "Listener" which appears in the VA compilation Colliding Wind by Concentric Records.
Jana Winderen is an artist and field recordist that has dedicated a big part of her life recording and revealing sounds from the most remote sources – oceans, glaciers, ice cavities. A multifaceted artist, her impressive amount of work expands from installations, performances, exhibitions, recording releases, field trips. Her practice pays particular attention to audio environments and to creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear.
With a background in Marine Biology and also in Fine Arts, she gives life to her compositions listening over and over and, slowly collaging things together, more like sculpting than writing - something she shared with us in an early interview.
The Listener’ is a sound composition created from hydrophones and sound field recordings in and by the River Orne in Normandy. As an indicator of the river´s waters health, freshwater biologists count underwater insects and use this data. If one identifies the sound of the specific underwater insects with their varying ability to survive forms of pollution, one can possibly, through focused listening, reach an understanding of the health of the river. ‘The Listener’, was a 6 channel audio installation part of the exhibition Second Nature and the project Nature and Renaturation: A Sensory Overview of a History of Changing Watercourses. A three-year-long project which started in 2014 by Thierry Weyd, Esam Caen-Cherbourg (Art Academy) and Camille Prunet, Research Coordinator chez École Supérieure d’Arts et Médias Caen/Cherbourg.
And early this year the track has been included in the Concentric Record VA debut trilogy (courtesy of Touch). CONCENTRIC RECORDS is a multi-disciplinary record label exploring new music that transcends identity and definitions, and is inspired by a sense of collective movement. Spawned by the work of artists who operate in between set approaches and styles, the label releases high quality, carefully-designed physical editions of recordings that defy genres and promote inter-cultural links. In colliding winds, they approach the concept that ‘a COLLIDING WIND binary' is a binary star system in which the two members are massive stars that emit powerful, radiatively-driven stellar winds. The location where these two winds collide produces a strong shock.’ As we reference the state of world chaos today, a colliding-wind is a reassuring reminder of the inspiring thought that the act of coming together as one produces exponentially powerful results.
Tracklist: Anodyne - We Are All We Have (Autechre Remix) Melissa Pons - Freita KMRU - Why Are You Here John Grzinich - kinetic sense KMRU - me tal Philip Jeck - Fleeting BJNilsen - Impossibilidad Ipek Gorgun - Tserin Dropchut Ian Wellman - Mercury Seefeel - Lux1
Our next mixtape instalment comes from Sara Berts, an Italian composer and sound artist. Sara’s work is saturated with elements from the natural world blending with electronics. She defines her music as a meeting ground, a place of active exchange between two bandwidths of reality, the visible world and its allusive aliveness of another order of being. And following this premises she has prepared this mixtape, a flow and exchange without an intention. I just start playing and listening, inside and outside; and, as for this mix, things start shaping up bit by bit.
Sara is publishing soon her debut EP in Gang of Ducks Ayni self-described the record as a gift from the plants and for the plants. Field recordings flowing through the whole record come from the Peruvian Amazon forest, where she spent 3 months in 2019 while seeking personal healing. All the other sounds come from the Buchla Easel and were recorded in Italy during the suspended time of the 2020 strict lockdown. As she puts it, two different times and spaces linked together through isolation and uncertain feelings for the future. However, Ayni doesn’t contain any element of darkness but is inspired by a sense of redemption and healing arising from these events.
A thoroughly immersive record that deserves a deep listening to explore and appreciate all the different shades of sound and emotion it contains, which sounds and feels specially crafted to ease the listener into a new season of hopeful renewal.
This new mixtape comes from Kosei Fukuda, the Japanese producer and sound artist, who shares his time between Tokyo and Berlin and who has prepared a deep listening hybrid DJ mix.
Fukuda camo to the scene in the late 2010s, attracting the attention of Berghain resident Tobias Freund. Fukuda's sound delves into minimalistic narratives and dark atmospheres, with a penchant for longer, conceptually inclined works which culminated in early 2020 in the two-vinyl collection of electro-acoustic improvisations compilation under the philosophical aegis of Enso featuring such acts as Recent Arts, Renick Bell or Rabih Beaini.
Fukuda return returns with a full solo project, Reuten, his debut LP and his thirteenth release on the Reiten label – a platform he created to showcase his techno music and the more general, experimental aesthetic agenda of which the club music is but one face. Ruten is a Japanese concept whose closest Western counterpart is the ancient Greek notion of ‘panta rhei’. Referencing Heraclitus’ famous adage that ‘everything flows’ is not just the philosophical inspiration behind the album but also the succinct aesthetic manifesto of sorts.
The two albums called Ruten – and Ruten + are meant to represent the principle of Ying & Yang, the two elemental forces and the eternal cycle of energy. As a whole, they signify a journey from the nascent being to the eventual dissolution of everything into nothing. Yet there’s still a deeper message at play: the omnipresence of patterns. Even the incessant flow of changes is patterned. The philosophers ask what it tells us about reality. The artists offer answers, each coded in the respective artistic language. In this work, Fukuda hints at the idea that a pattern is both an abstract structural quality and a concrete aesthetic value. The music is a complex sonic story about the interlocking meanings of pattern and flow, and it is a meditative exploration of the human experience of this entwinement.
Our new mixtape steems from recently launched journal-zine FOCUS On Sound, an anthology of scholarly articles and artist responses to the subject of sound. A one-shot issue featuring work by independent artists and articles by researchers and emerging scholars associated with different universities around the world, where each contributor has a double-page, across which they present their focused take on the central topic, sound.
The magazine was founded and edited by Nicholas Burman, - a writer, researcher and editor with a background in Comparative Cultural Analysis-, and features articles on topics as diverse as the relationship between sound and modernisation in China, decolonial listening practices, aurality and orality in Latin America and the use of voice recognition technology on the German borders to name a few. Among the multimedia, spreads are a stained glass collage, a memory-based comic, psychogeographic maps of sonic experiences, and a meditative photo/text combination. There are also a few creative writing pieces.
The mixtape presented here was a response to the obvious question of whether there would be a sound element for the project and the availability of a bunch unreleased tunes from one of the zine contributors.
Tracklist: Opening voice: Isabel Palomar Track 1: gauthiier - Namnètes Voice 1: Daniel Leix Palumbo reading from "Voices And Policies Of Exclusion Within German Asylum Procedures" Voice 2: Luca Penning reading from "Untitled" Voice 3: Daniel Leix Palumbo reading from "Voices And Policies Of Exclusion Within German Asylum Procedures" Track 2: Unknown Artist - turist Voice 4: Robert Baciu reading from "What Social Housing Has To Do With The Production Of Music" Track 3: Phlp. - Черната Скала Voice 5: Seb Harris reading from "The Bleaching of Techno: What White People Must Learn" Track 4: Unknown Artist - turist Voice 6: Luca Penning reading from "Untitled" Track 5: Dou Wei & Yi Yue Dui - 渗透 Voice 7: Cherphile Ciao (Xuefei Cao) reading from "Sound as Community: How Far Are We From Terrene" Track 7: Evitceles - Spring Touch Voice 8: Rick van der Waarden reading "Memo Memento" Closing Voice: Isabel Palomar
The first mixtape of the year arrives with a label focus by Pointless Geometry, an independent label founded in 2015 by Justyna Banaszczyk (FOQL) and Darek Pietraszewski (aka VJ Copy Corp) in Warsaw, Poland.
The label specialises in tape releases of experimental electronic, electroacoustic and dance-esque music as well as audiovisual projects on VHS tapes and is one of the most interesting labels in Poland. During these last five years, the Pointless Geometry catalogue has grown to include 36 releases by WIDT, Mchy i Porosty, Jakub Lemiszewski, FOQL, Fischerle, Jakub Gliński and Muka, to name just some of the artists. All the label entries are accompanied by a carefully designed graphic design, available in limited collector’s series, prepared by some the most interesting Polish artists such as Stachu Szumski, Sandra Sygur and Tomek Popakul.
And once or twice a year, Pointless Geometry releases an audiovisual project on VHS. These releases are limited to 20-30 copies. The team shares they don’t really make any profit on them, but they’ve turned into a small tradition of sorts. The whole topic of VHS recordings and analogue video is still interesting to explore and they get flooded with proposals. For this mix, Pointless Geometry have included some tracks from their recent and upcoming premieres and from Pointless Geometry back catalogue.
Tracklist: Qba Janicki & Obsequies - Afterglow Qba Janicki & Obsequies - Gleam Aleksandra Słyż - MG III Aleksandra Słyż - BG II Bartek Kujawski - Self-made implosion Aleksandra Słyż - MG I Tutti Harp - Patch#3 (feat. mef) Julek Ploski - My True Life Drvg Cvltvre - Destablization Julek Ploski - Kocham Cię Koniu Qba Janicki & Obsequies - Metamorfoza Izanasz - Eripuraisuus Tutti Harp - Patch#6
Mixtape 23 sees Mexican artist Lorena Quintanilla crafting a selection of tunes to warm the late November afternoons. Originally for Guadalajara, the artist made a name for herself as one-half Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, a duo responsible for some of the most sonically adventurous psych experimentalism of recent times with a reputation for exceptional live shows and a catalogue of equally impressive albums to match. Now relocated in the less hectic city of Ensenada in Baja California, Quintanilla has reinvented herself into J. Zunz, a new solo project where she explores similar atmospherics but marking a distance with what she had been doing with the obsolete. J.Zunz is also the result of a metamorphic process whereby the minimal is rendered maximal and the personal fused with the political. The initial vision for the J. Zunz project was for Lorena to strip her approach down to the basics. She remembers reading a biography of John Cage, where the author was referring to the influence of Buddhism and meditation, and modern artists like Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Duchamp, futurism... that detonated something inside her and sparked a myriad of ideas.
Earlier in August J. Zunz published her second album, Hibiscus, one of the most popular flowers in her native Mexico. The album marks a move on sonically from earlier comfort zones in her work, into minimal electronics, hypnotic repetition and compelling trance states, arriving at a soundworld in which cyclical synth patterns, eerie ambient textures and cathartic vocal exhortations. “It is hard to describe any record as they keep unfolding to me in time,” says Lorena. “Now it is almost a year since I recorded it. What I know is that I wrote the album during a personal crisis inside and a political crisis outside. After being profoundly hurt by a person, I trusted but also by the structures outside of me. I wrote it during sleepless nights filled with overwhelming thoughts and feelings.” The collection of tracks in Hibiscus are sinuous, enticing and mysterious; one may feel a bit spooked while wishing this mischievous journey never finishes.
For this mixtape, Lorena was inspired by the content of CLOT Mag: I selected some tracks by INTERSPECIFICS, which is an amazing collective that mixes science with music. I chose some tracks that use the translation of different microorganisms and their bioelectrical activity into sound. I also added a track by Alexandra Cárdenas (a master at LiveCoding) and some political electronics from the past. The artists behind the track Ola! have been experimenting with mind and body healing through sound frequencies. I know they have a mattress filled with subwoofers where you can rest while you are feeling the vibrations.
Tracklist: 1. INTERSPECIFICS - Infinites 2. Iván Pequeño - ¡Ahora! (Fragmento) 3. Niños De La Tierra - Ola! (Late Edit) 4. Jocy de Oliveira - Wave Song Para Piano e Fita 5. Alexandra Cárdenas - HELLO WORLD 6. INTERSPECIFICS - Slime Mould Music
Next in our mixtape series comes with Prairie, the project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Marc Jacobs who has prepared a mix to submerge our minds into a semi-awake state, where senses are heightened and we experience sound and reality in a different way.
Jacobs, with his Prairie output, has recently published a new album in Denovali Records "And the Bird Said: Cut Me Open and Sing Me", his second release on the experimental German label. With a sound that some have acquainted to a space between Bohren & der Club of Gore and Sunn O))), his releases are infused of a vivid cinematographic narrative. Sonic landscapes provided by layers of synths and instruments that remind us of the passing of time and the persistence of memory. "And the bird said", Jacobs says, "was inspired by the silence of the birds, the tone between a mother and her daughter, the Sandsnipe twins, constant wailing sirens... the memory of a Vangelis track". Composed in several locations from urban in the city, or in his studio Les Lacs and in the mountains of the French Cévennes, the producer integrates his various recording locations into his sound design, creating this ample and revealing sound, resembling the sights of vast fields in the early morning hours, when life is awaking surrounded by a layer of unknown mystery yet to be unveiled.
Jacobs also works as a music consultant and as a curator of experimental and electronic music for various venues, events and festivals, among which the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels (Bozar) and he is also the founder of Le Bureau Electronique, a platform dedicated to the promotion of leftfield music and arts in Belgium.
This mixtape consists of various approaches to sound and music, where the artist has combined the different forms of production of the tracks in order to create a feeling of a narcotic or hypnagogic state: "It is a state I particularly enjoy, it enables surprising auditory connections and stimulates the imagination. I have chosen the tracks according to the connections they created with one another, like a cadavre-exquis – or how you can fall into a cascade of images or ideas just before you start dreaming".
Tracklist (in order of appearance) Plastikman, Robert Ashley, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mt Gemini, Aymeric de Tapol, Francisco Lopez, Simon Fisher Turner, Lionel Marchetti, Kate Carr, Lawrence English, Niedowierzanie, Ernest Hoood
The new mixtape comes from the hand of SPIME.Im, a Turin-based media art collective formed by Marco Casolati, Davide Tomat and Gabriele Ottino. Their practice that aims to investigate, through transmedia projects, the aesthetics and the languages derived from the affirmation of digital reality. The collective includes musicians, video makers, creative coders and engineers, with all these different backgrounds having a large impact on their creative process when developing new works. Spime is a concept that defines the internet of things. Spimes are objects that know how to talk to each other. A concept that was coined and refined by Bruce Sterling; he first imagined spimes as an extension of RFID tags, where a physical organization of things could be representative of an also intangible web of things.
By juxtaposing Bruce Sterling’s «spime» concept with «I am», SPIME.IM is the being that is intertwined between the artificial and the natural, with they work representing human-machine interactions in sound, moving image and generative graphics. In their audio-visual 360° live show «EXALAND», te collective interweave sound and image, letting sound parameters influence what manifests on-screen, and treating the camera perspective as an instrument.
We use technology, 3D art and electronic music to create immersive audiovisual experiences, in which we explore the boundaries of identity, and question what is real and what is not, what is happening around us and what our collective experience as a society could be instead.
SPIMES.IM have recently published a new album ZERO, and an extrapolation of their debut EXALAND. Glitches, hypercharged synthesisers, and some machine funk as they define their sound, providing a soundtrack for the Zero times.
Tracklist: M.E.S.H. - Loop Trip Georgy Ligeti - Lontano Mohammad Reza Mortazavi - Dancing Eleven Ritme Jaavdanegi Vladimimir Ussachevsky - Metamorphosis Emptyset - Filament Mica Levi - Castigo Second Woman - 200601je6 John Cage - Imaginary Landscape N°2 Jurg Frey - Memoire, horizon Autechre - Flep Otto Luenin - Fantasy In Space Vladislav Delay - Raajat John Zorn - Poverty (Once Upon A Time In America) Ennio Morricone
Ville Aalto is the Finnish sound artist and electronic musician presenting our 20th mixtape. Originally from Helsinki, Aalto has been working on a project called Avian Electronics for a few years now. The main focus of the project is creating and imitating birdsong with synths and it includes surround sound installations, sound art works and electronic music featuring synthesized birds and other natural sounds.
Aalto has recently published the first album related to this project, also titled Avian ElectronicsThe music on the album is primarily divided into electronic, rhythmic works and 'ambientish', droning works that are a sort of loose electronic interpretation of natural soundscapes. The project is a slightly twisted love letter to the sounds of birds and nature. It aims to raise questions about the relationship between us, nature and technology as well as the changing (aural) environment that we live in and affect all the time.
The artist states that nature as a stable, separate entity does not exist. We tend to view things that previous generations have created as natural; fields, moors, paths. And so too, our current unnatural ways are slowly transforming into nature, traditional landscapes, conservation areas. This is quite natural, something we may somehow forget. But as the world is so rapidly changing and technological development is affecting everything – how ultimately are we changing our living environment, what will the nature around us sound like in the future?
The mix here is loosely based on this idea of passing through different landscapes, fields with different aural environments - maybe travelling on a train or in a dream. The scenery changes slowly and it affects the things you hear around you or in your mind. The main body of the mix are these lovely tracks that evoke images of landscapes and then there’s quite a bit of synthetic rain, crickets and other “natural” sounds which I’ve been working on lately layered in. One of the main inspirations here was Ryoji Ikeda's masterful 1000 Fragments, which is consequently all over the mix.
Tracklist: 00:00 Throughout the mix: Ville Aalto - Synthetic signals, crickets, wind and rain sounds 01:00 Leila Abdul-Rauf - June 14 03:25 Ryoji Ikeda - Zone 2 08:06 Ville Aalto - Transmission 12:24 Ø - Syvyydessä Kimallus 16:33 Dasha Rush - 100 Hearts 22:20 Ryoji Ikeda - Zone 1 25:15 György Ligeti - Atmospheres 25:35 Pauline Oliveiros - Mnemonics I 27:00 Richard Chartier - Location 29:56 Pierre Boulez - Répons / Section 1 30:28 Atte Elias Kantonen - Form 1 33:42 Ruth Anderson - Points 35:05 Caterina Barbieri - TCCTF 39:07 György Ligeti - Lux Aeterna 42:42 Ryoji Ikeda - Zone 3 45:22 Ryoji Ikeda - Abstructures
Pablo Casares is the artist taking up our next mixtape instalment. Born and bred in San Sebastian and holding a degree in philosophy and masters in science, technology and communication, Casares had a long trajectory in poetry and illustration before turning to synths and sound. Since then, he has tried to learn about the complex world of sound using a media that suits him better to express himself, bringing him closer to creative worlds that he couldn’t reach otherwise".
The artist shares his most immediate challenge is to achieve sounds and sound environments so that people can listen to them and use them as a medium for their mind to expand. Nature and its poetic veils seem to be a regular inspiration in Casare’s productions, probably an influence of the Vasque Country’s dramatically beautiful scenery. The sound and music orbit in the ambient realms, creating dark musical landscapes and abstract industrial atmospheres, which some have defined in a magic suspension dream, where Casares finds his way. His most recent album, Naturaleza Fósil (Superspace Records 2020) is an exercise of psychedelic ambient. Sounds as telluric forces that seem to raise from the melted metallic earth core.
For this mixtape he says, I have placed songs that I listen to many times, you will not find big artists of ambient as Radigue, Basinski, etc. (that I love so much), I used tracks from people that you can find on youtube and other platforms. From Elliot Severence to Hakabune, Marcell.... and also one of my lastest track. My intention was not giving you something conceptually closed; I wanted it to flow like a river.
Tracklist: Sea in exile / Máté Szabó Digitone ambient emotive drone / Dustmotes Snow / Hiroshi Ebina El roble / Pablo Casares The beginning / Pleg and Hakabune Harmonic-clouds / Severence Winter lullabies / Valotihkuu Structure / Marcell Per Aspera Ad Astra / Ygor Yalivec Mahamrityunjaya Mantra / Sacred Sound Choir
Just when London is basking in scorching temperatures, we turn away from our more abrasive electronics sounds to we bring you a new mixtape soothing as a fresh summer breeze by Dukes of Chutney. The transcontinental trio of Dustin Lynn, John Paul Jones, and Petra have been exploring the different spaces and places with their productions, between nothingness and nature, that nurture inner and outer peace. Cosmic yet intimate, long-gestating and free-flowing, diffuse and centred.
Jones' has established a beguiling production touch to various edits and remixes Under the moniker Tom Croose. Lynn is an accomplished filmmaker who has collaborated with artist Gabriel Orozco and directed campaigns for designers Alexander McQueen and Corto Moltedo.
The trio’s recently published their debut album, hazel (rvng Intl), the Dukes turned towards their immediate sanctum and a network of friends and colleagues. As they say, Hazel explores life’s wandering ways while widening its path. Recorded from remote yet commonly tranquil corners of the world over six years, Hazel is illustrated from a colourful palette of dub, folk, Balearic, and otherwise blissful sounds, somehow escaping categorisation in its pursuit of uninhibited joy. It was a long, not necessarily strange trip as much as a revelatory journey, with recording sessions taking place from Venice Beach to Sausalito, Mexico City to Minneapolis, Sicily to Berlin (where vocalist Petra calls home), national parks to beachside drifts, with an East Village studio apartment thrown in for good, gritty measure. Each landscape seeps into Hazel and causes the colours to run even more.
Very much following hazel’s steps, this mixtape is Inspired by an island fantasy trip to Indonesia with elements of Rastafarian mountain ceremonials, and Balearic hedonism, featuring an unreleased original by Dustin Lynn and a Dukes of Chutney remix by Peter Kruder.
Tracklist: 1. "Tangaroa" Tropical Hi Fi 2. "Temple on a Road" Young Marco 3. "Roll Together" Weval 4. "Communiqué: Approach Spiral" Michael Shrieve 5. "Ama-Zona" Janax Pacha 6. "Blahblahboomboom" Dustin Lynn 7. "Traydz" Luca Vera 8. "Rainbow Perch" Dawn Again & Rothmans 9. "Poor People Must Work (Carl Craig Remix)" Rhythm & Sound 10. "Flying Horse (PK Deep Rub)" Dukes Of Chutney
Our next mixtape instalment comes by Temp-Illusion the Iranian experimental/electronic duo consisting of Shahin Entezami and Behrang Najafi.
Formed in 2011 and mainly operating as a live act, temp-illusion use a wide range of music programs and hardware synthesizers in their music production to combine noisy and atmospheric layers with melodies and complex beat programming to achieve a unique style of dance music.
In recent years, an exciting Iranian electronic music-scene has quickly emerged and reached western ears, partly thanks to the work of Sote and Zabte Sote, a sister-label to Opal Tapes that focuses on putting out experimental electronic music by Iranian composers that he runs, as well as SET festival. Temp-Illusion release their first album Autoelected in 2019 in Zabte Sote as well as the more recent Pend, released earlier this year.
While Autoelected was a perfect example of what recently has become known as ‘deconstructed dance music, Pend takes it from there to evolve into an assembly of carefully designed sonic microstructures that ultimately result in an artificial macro environment of hard electronic funk. Taking the listener from a meditative to a hyper demented state, inspired by the fear and stress instigated by media manipulation during and after the war.
Shahin Entezami and Behrang Najafi, also have their solo projects as Tegh and Bescolour. The artists share that this mix is mostly made from the music they have recently listened to during these 2-3 months of quarantine: Since our rehearsals are also cancelled due to this pandemic, we have started to work separately on music projects, which is a new experience for us and it would probably change the way we sound! So this mix is the first output of working on a mutual project separately.
Tracklist: 00:00 Selm - Sand 01:55 Clipping - All in Your Head 04:30 Zonal - System Error (Feat Moor Mother) 07:40 Aho Ssan - Simulacrum III 11:12 Arash Moori - Forward Backward 13:06 M.E.S.H - Search. Reveal. 18:38 Of Habit & Dane Law - Laid out 20:20 Xin - Crrrash! 22:25 Emptyset - Axil 24:50 Temp-Illusion - 22nd Alley 29:25 Grischa Lichtenberger - 1 req 32:00 Diamond Version - Access to Excellence 34:40 Sote - MOSCELS O + Emptyset - Bloom 38:22 Kindohm - Meme Booth 41:46 Daniel M Karlsson - 16 Rare beauty 44:38 SDEM - 6448 48:53 Lorem - The Sky Would Clear What The Man Had Wrapped To The Link
In this 16th mixtape volume, the Italian-born and Berlin-based experimental producer Andrea Taeggi has prepared a selection of sounds that inspired his last album Mycorrhiza (OOH-sounds, 2020), also including some recordings from the late Sanne van Hek, a dear friend of Taeggi and a great artist.
Taeggi’s work is often categorised under the labels of experimental ambient, techno or minimalist through which he explores the sculptural potential of sound. His research expands the physicality of sound, its tactile quality and implied 3-dimensionality, the grey area between acoustic & electronic sources, the disassociative & hypnotic power of repetition and the fictionality of recorded audio. For his research endeavours, he has been a regular guest-composer at renowned research institutes such as STEIM Amsterdam, EMS Stockholm and Willem-Twee, where he further developed his investigation in analogue synthesis, extended techniques, reel-to-reel tape treatments, recording techniques and composition
Earlier this year, Taeggi has published a new experimental album, this time inspired by Funghi and it’s biological structures. Taeggi shares the album is not written or inspired by the intoxicating use of fungi, rather he observes the cognitive and intelligent behaviour of mycorrhizal fungal roots—one of the great mysteries inhabiting the forest soil, and from which a network of beneficial underground relationships with plants sprouts. A mutualistic symbiosis that Taeggi similarly establishes with the rather rare arsenal of sound machinery he had access to at Willem-Twee synthesis.
He shares that while originally this mix was meant to show the inspirational music that influenced “Mycorrhiza” he also thought of including some material from Sanne van Hek, a dear friend and great artist who passed away much too soon: Sanne and I shared a common fascination for Indonesian gamelan music (she was of Indonesian descent) and both explored ways to re-work those beautiful bell-like sounds and drums...I think you can hear that quite clearly in the mix. It is said that no label ever wanted to release her music, although it was carefully crafted and rhythmically exciting—hopefully, more people will be able to check her work now and realize what they missed. For the rest, I included other artists that were (un)conscious inspiration in the making of Mycorrhiza and others I admire or feel closely related to. Fun fact: the oscillators used in Stockhausen’s seminal “Studie I” are the same I had the privilege to use at Willem-Twee...you can hear them in “Oculus Cordis” on the record—a stately drone track centred around the pristine sine-waves generated by those oscillators.
Tracklist: Sekaten Gendhing Rangkung Pelog Lima - gamelan of central java, vol. 4- spiritual music Patamamba, Sur le 3∞ Mode - place : ecuador Sanne van Hek, Medley 14aug (excerpt) - unreleased Andrea Taeggi, Kodama - Mycorrhiza Sanne van Hek, Medley 14aug (excerpt) - unreleased Burnt Friedman, Sky Speech - Musical traditions in central europe, explorer series vol.4 Andrea Taeggi, Cuttleburrs - Mycorrhiza Piezo, Blue Light Mama Magic - Perdu HHY & The Macumbas, Wilderness Of Glass Version - Camouflage Vector: Edits From Live Actions 2017-2019 Biosphere, Altostratus - Dropsonde Bernard Parmegiani, La Roue Ferris (excerpt) - Violostries Andrea Taeggi, Phantasmagoria - Mycorrhiza Alexi Perälä, GBBVT1337052 - The Colundi Sequence Karlheinz Stockhausen, Studie I (excerpt) - Elektronische Musik
For the 15th Mixtape volume Danish artist Minais B is takes us through a selection of inspirational music and a few demos from the making of Quiet Bloom, his second full-length album. Behind the moniker, we find Villads Klint, who is also well known for being part of the avant-pop trio KhalilH2OP and a collaborator of Copenhagen artists Astrid Sonne and Xenia Xamanek.
Minais B’s debut album was received as a strain of post-internet abstract and cybernetic music. But with this second album, released this year by Anyines, the artist shapes a considerable turn in his compositions: I needed less conceptual music, more direct and not afraid of emotion. The album was inspired in part by the loss of a loved one and the experience of grief; music grew from a place of great loss and emptiness but sparked a new whole creativity horizon.
Drawing from Minais B’s interest in spiritual music traditions, in particular Danish hymns, combined with electronic, synthesizers and organ compositions as the artist explains, weaving as a musical metaphor of composition, juxtaposing computer music and the more organic sounds of the church organ, in an analogy of conveying the different colours of sorrow.
Bringing an organ into the equation, Minais B continues, brought some lovely afternoons playing around with a church organ and spend more time with harmonies and chord progressions. It also brought a lot of reference to the compositions. The sound of an organ is loaded with associations, which I tried to make use of. Regarding this tough, the biggest challenge was to avoid making it too churchy – it is not religious music.
The album result is both trancey and modernly baroque and as gratifying as the selection the artist has prepared for us pointing towards some of the musical inspiration for the inception of the album.
Tracklist: Af dybens nød, o Gud, til dig · Thisted Kirkes Drenge-Mandskor · Johannes Walter Demo#14 (pop it) Hans Abrahamsen - Intermezzo 1 BACH - Canon a 4 BWV 1074 - Musica Antiqua Köln The Newcomer - FUGUE Ursula Le Guin & Todd Barton - A Homesick Song Demo#1994 (nocturne) Sonic ceremony#1 (Caparica Vocal Group SYNC exercise) FHM - For the Oranges and Melons Af højheden oprunden er · Odense Motetkor · Niels Wilhelm Gade Demo#22 (tintinnabulum) Astrid Sonne - Air Is Unfit Hans Abrahamsen - Intermezzo 3 Exorcist theme - Robert Miles version Sonic ceremony#2 (Alvin Lucier x Oure Efterskole) James Blake - Overgrown ML Buch - Sap Hans Abrahamsen - Intermezzo 2 Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen - Igen
For the new mixtape polish electronic jazz duo Skalpel brings a selection of the main inspirations behind their music.
Skalpel, originally from Wrocław are DJs, musicians and record producers, Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudło, who have been making music since the late nineties. Their musical style is a distinctive blend of local, traditional jazz inspirations and new electronica. Citing influences from the likes of Miles Davis, leftfield avant-garde, minimal, the duo alludes to roots in Polish jazz and trip-hop. This particular mixture caught the interest of Ninja Tune, the legendary record label founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More (aka Coldcut), where they released two albums: ‘ Skalpel ’ and ‘ Konfusion ’ gaining recognition worldwide. They became one of the first polish DJs to get recognition abroad. This year they released their third album in NoPaper Records/!K7, HIGHLIGHT, which has marked a significant shift in their creative technique, a shift away from samples to virtual instruments.
For this mixtape, they want to portray their main inspirations: 'This is our origin story. Artist inspired by hip-hop and jazz such as The Herbaliser, Amon Tobin, Madlib and Jimi Tenor. Pioneers like Pierre Henry, David Axelrod production and Vangelis. And a section of Polish fusion, soul, avant-garde and broken beat including our postmortem collaboration with outstanding drummer Jacek Olter. Stylistically and technically this mix is inspired by the Solid Steel Radio Show - so it's archaeological digging in the crate. Some tracks are heavily edited some are blended (Sandy Nelson with Johann Johannsson and Penderecki) and the whole mix is a journey into the sound.'
Tracklist: Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier - Masse Pour Le Temps Present - Prologue (Philips) Krzysztof Scieranski – ‘Wieloryb Basawy’ (Poljazz) The Cinematic Orchestra – ‘Diabolous’ (Ninja Tune) David McCallum – ‘House of Mirrors’ (Capitol) The Cinematic Orchestra – ‘Continuum’ (Ninja tune) Vangelis – ‘Hypothesis’ (part 1) (Affinity) The Herbaliser – ‘Mrs Chombee Takes The Plunge’ (DJ Food Re-Bake) (Ninja Tune) Wendy Carlos – ‘Fall’ (CBS) Vangelis – ‘Hypothesis’ (part 2) (Affinity) Niemen Enigmatic – ‘Kwiaty Ojczyste’ (Skalpel edit) (Polskie Nagrania) Skalpel & Jacek Olter – ‘Zero Gravity’ (Polskie Radio) Jimi Tenor & UMO –‘Sahkoinen Lali’ (Herakles Records) DJ Cam – ‘Voodoo Jazz’ (Inflamable Records) Zura – ‘Waz Fryzjerki’ (U Know Me Records) Amon Tobin – ‘Fast Eddie’ (Ninja Tune) Sandy Nelson – ‘Beat From Another World’ (Sunset) Johann Johansson – ‘Xenoanthropology’ (Deutsche Grammophon) Krzysztof Penderecki – ‘Dimensions Of Time And Silence’ (Polskie Nagrania) Medeski Martin & Wood – ‘Pappy Check’ (Blue Note) Madlib – ‘Slim’s Return’ (Blue Note) Jimi Tenor & UMO – ‘Ghost Warrior’ (Herakles Records) H.P. Lovecraft feat Ken Nordine – ‘Nothing’s Boy’ (Philips)
In our 13th instalment of the series, Japanese musician Yasuyuki Uesugi shares a 30 mins-long track specially produced for CLOT Magazine. Truths is a noise track that expresses the question of whether all the truth should be conveyed or how hidden it should be to live.
Uesugi produces wall of sound kind of noise music, using almost a fully analogue workflow, u including a custom-made synthesizer made by JMT SYNTH (Japanese handmade synthesizer maker) the NSDQ, a 2VCO synthesizer equipped with multiple sub oscillators, delay effector, phaser effector, and a 16-step sequencer. Once the parameters on the instruments are set, Yusuegui doesn’t physically play, the noise changes and evolves due to the effects of the analogue instruments and spring reverb, recording all in one take and letting each passing moment decide where my sounds go The producer started being interested in noise music when he met the mind behind JMT SYNTH: I became fascinated by operating the analogue synthesizer and freely searching for noise sounds, which became part of my music style today.
Uesugi gui productions as himself defines are “deeply experimental noise tracks that reflect ideas of the spiritual world, mental illness and the human brain”, and as he shares with us: "I use this NDSQ to create noise music that expresses my distorted spiritual world. I have a mental illness, so I express it in the form of noise". This is well reflected both in the music, harsh, abrasive - almost as if something was to be pulled from one’s brain-, but and also in the titles and track names in many of his prolific productions. He has self-released a bunch of EPs and albums and also published in labels such as Drvg Cvltvre’s New York Haunted.
In times where the disconnection with a gone reality is pushing, when our minds are stressed and damaged, listening to Yasuyuki Uesugui’s productions can be a cathartic noise exorcism.
The 12th Mixtape brings Hoshina anniversary with his mix Session 2.0, a rework of his most recent album, Odoriko, released on Alien Jams, the independent and superb record label run by Chloe Frieda.
Based in Tokyo, Hoshina anniversary has been producing house and techno for the last five years, releasing on labels such as Turbo Recordings, Octopus Recordings and Boys Noize Records. His style mixes experimental sounds using elements of rock and pop into his productions.
The japanese producer debuted on Alien Jams last month with a 7-track-long album Odoriko. Referencing the archipelago in Miyagi prefecture, the Tokyo-based producer presents a cluster of visually harmonious symbols: Japanese gravestones, foam and tethered objects pieced together with minimal electronics and traditional Japanese instruments. The grouping and intricate arrangement of these motifs results in a measured dynamic atmosphere throughout the album, balancing creative sound design with effortless flow, all the while conveying a range of emotions that tell a captivating story as the album unfolds across the 7 tracks
For this mixtape he didn't want to make a normal mix. Being a producer he felt he wanted to use his own tracks or remake them. So he ended up remaking all the tracks of the Odoriko album with the idea being that if you listen to the album first and then listen to this mixtape, it will be experienced and enjoyed in a new way.
Tracklist: 1. Odoriko (Session 2.0) 2. Sagarifuji (Session 2.0) 3. Abuku (Session 2.0) 4. Matsushima (Session 2.0) 5. Buraikan (Session 2.0) 6. Honkomatsuishi (Session 2.0) 7. Boro Boro (Session 2.0)
Michael Vincent Waller is an American composer based in New York. Some describe them as one of the most interesting composing of the big city, and we surely agree. His music has been described as lyrical and introspective, drawing inspiration from impressionism, post-minimalism and world music. There’s a melancholic longing quite unique in his sound.
A student of names such as minimalist legend La Monte Young, Bunita Marcus, and Elizabeth Hoffman influenced, Waller compositions are suffused with an avant-garde essence of enthralling beauty.
Waller's most recent publication, Moments (Unseen Worlds, 2019 is a collection of minimalist pieces performed solo by pianist R. Andrew Lee and vibraphonist William Winant. The piano pieces bring memories of Satie gravitating between softness and more dramatic tones. The album draws on Western classical music tradition in its most archetypal forms through its use of modal melodies, triadic harmonies and metered rhythms. Yet the emotional heart of the music is not in attack, but resonance. The afterlife of sounds. Those elements that can’t be grasped and placed into easy historical categories. Behind his surface attacks, Waller finds hazy, edgeless zones that draw us downwards, into introspection – an “inward gaze.
For this mix Waller has prepared as pretty fluid stream of consciousness, starting with the austere and contemplative, building to the dense and dark electronic, blurring into jazz, funk, hip/hop -- then shifting suddenly back to hardcore dark chamber music, which smoothes out to drones, and finally emotive piano music.... (then a reprieve, coda / tour-de-force outro).
Tracklist Bunita Marcus - Solo Luigi Nono - Omaggio a Gyorgy Kurtag Elaine Radigue - Naldjorlak Deep Listening Band - Cave Water (Troglodyte's Delight) Linda Caitlin Smith - Far From Shore Zbigniew Karkowski - Electrostatics Iannis Zenakis - S.709 Miles Davis - Savad (Live in Switzerland, 10/22/71) Fela Kuti - Expensive Shit Mississippi Fred McDowell - Shake 'Em On Down GZA - 4th Chamber Karlheinz Stockhausen - Trans (Abschnitt 1) Jlin - Unknown Tongues Morton Feldman - Turfan Fragments Phill Niblock - Hurdy Hurry Peter Garland - Nostalgia for a Southern Cross Michael Pisaro - Akasa Young Thug - Check Michael Vincent Waller - Love IV. Sizing Kanye West - Jesus is Lord
Our 9th Mixtape instalment brings Sorcery -the acclaimed electronic experimental drummer- with a very specially crafted mix: Manufactured Stimulus" - the unfolding of a surreal hyper narrative though music.
Merlin Ettore (the man behind Sorcery) is a multifaceted creative: a highly skilled drummer, producer and also visual artist. With a long-established artistic career, he developed a very personal bold esthétique noir. Whilst the intense, polyrhythmic power of his live performances his compositions reveal a mastery of both the acoustic instruments and analogue equipment that define his particular sound. Speak“There are no strict rules to how I compose beats, calculate clever subdivisions or bend time signatures, the rhythmic alchemy is dictated by feeling the impact that resonates in me. Ettore has lent his unique drumming imprint to the techno scene throughout various contributions and collaborations including Kangding Ray and Powell
Last September, under his alias Sorcery, Ettore has published his debut EP (which includes a Samuel Kerridge Remix) where he expands on his cinematic math-laden techno with a combination of bestial, off-pulse rhythms, clever metric modulation, inspired textures and punchy transients. Reinforcing the fact that Sorcery cuts a unique presence in electronic music’s experimental underground, with an unrelenting and visceral impulse to his work, defined by a life-long and far-reaching passion for the rhythmic qualities of music.
For this mix, he wanted to create a vibe of "short stories" that intertwine and morph into each other unfolding a surreal hyper narrative: In there, there is a collection of music and sounds from friends, family, influences and music that I like a lot. Mostly older stuff, some newer discoveries as well, but mostly dug into the “weird” folder. I guess it relates to my practice as I've treated the individual tracks like raw material and just jammed with them. The mixtape was so much fun to do! Hope you enjoy the listening trip!
Tracklist: Yim Hok-Man - Poem Of A Chinese Drum Empty set - Origin John Zorn - Grand Guignol Sorcery - Modular improv 16.09.2019 Krzysztof Penderecki - Polymorphia Empty set - Order Pierre Henry - Prologue Gilles Gobeil - Point De Passage Empty set - Instant Empty set - Departure Steve Reich - Drumming part 1 Sorcery - Modular improv 03.11.2018 Francois Bayle - Fabulae Maria w Horn - ÅngermanländskaBilder Merlin Ettore - Broken Doll SØS Gunver Ryberg - Quantum Skull Arvo Pärt - Litany SØS Gunver Ryberg - Silver Thread Reggi Ettore - Pipo Justice Olsson - Up Ivan Shopov - Kanatitsa (Merlin Ettore Remix) Kuedo - Take Off (Remix) Bernard Parmegiani - De Natura Sonorum Nebulo - Alpine Meiban Merlin Ettore - Improv 02.19.2010 Rian Treanor - Ataxia_D1 Noumeno - it was just one of many possibilities Renick Bell - Create A Channel Autechre - Fold4, Wrap5 Zôl - Oim Merlin Ettore - Void Calling ([trap] version) Maria w Horn - Fides Minus Skype glitch 10.07.2017 Sorcery - Hyperception 01
For our 8th Mixtape, CLOT Magazine's editor Jacobo García has prepared a selection of the most relevant Spanish ambient and experimental sound artists and musicians from the 80s and 90s.
Only a few years after the end of the fascist dictatorship, Spanish musical scene exploded, and every region started developing micro scenes mostly focused on rock, pop or punk. This was preceded by a few interesting blends of flamenco, rock and funk in the 70s. From the 80’s explosion, the most widely recognized movement is the Movida, an amalgam of punk, new wave and pop that it is a still a reference to many new bands in the country and music connoisseurs outside it.
At the same time, but in different circles, a group of producers, composers and sound artists were developing works in the experimental and avant-garde terrains. Supported from a few independent labels like El Cometa de Madrid, Hyades Arts (a partnership between mainstream singer Alejandro Sanz and renowned writer Elvira Lindo) or Auxilio de Cientos. The music ranged from New Age to Ambient, from Sound Art to Industrial and Noise and the artists came from different contexts, many times building connections, or coming from cinema or the visual, plastic and performative arts. The scene was considered too intellectual from many of the most accessible counterparts.
Looking back and considering the quality of works, the originality of narratives and concepts, the contemporaneity of the productions, it seems natural to ascertain that those times defined a golden era for the avant-garde. From global pioneers like Esplendor Geométrico to cult industrial acts such us Diseño Corbusier, from ambient stalwart Suso Saiz to Javier Segura’s haunting productions. Ildefonso Aguilar, Patricia Escudero, Orfeón Gagarín, El Sueño de Hyparco, etc., the list of remarkable of artists, ensembles and creations is daunting.
This mix, recorded by our contributing editor for Spain, Jacobo García using records from his collection does not present a complete, comprehensive selection, there is too much material for that. What this selection aims is to thread a set of tracks presenting the musical essence of those times. At CLOT Magazine, we hope it opens a window to a new audience to a not so distant past, one that has been relatively forgotten but which offers innumerable musical rewards.
Tracklist:
Suso Saiz - Nada de lo que Sucede, Mirrors Of Pollution, NO-CD Rekords, 1994. Iury Lech - De la Melancolía, Musica Para el Fin de los Cantos, Hyades Arts, 1990. Patricia Escudero - Prelude A La Porte Heroque Du Ciel Fragmento - 1894, Satie Sonneries, Grabaciones Accidentales / El Cometa de Madrid, 1987. Grupo Circulo (Adolfo Núñez) - Animacion Del Cuadrado, Talleres De Arte Actual 83-84, Circulo de Bellas Artes, 1985. Randomize - Contemporize, ¿Como se Divertirán los Insectos?, Grabaciones Accidentales, 1986. El Sueño de Hyparco - La Máquina Machacadora de Cerebros, Ambientes Hormonales, Hyades Arts, 1990. T - En El Camino De La Roca, Dark Fields, Klamm Records, 1983. Neo Zelanda - Pretoria, Mix Zelánea, Auxilio de Cientos, 1986. Diseño Corbusier - Meta Metalic, Pérfido Encanto, Auxilio de Cientos, 1985. Javier Segura - El Aborigen Parte I, El Sol Desde Oriente (Selected & Unreleased Recordings 1980-1990), Pasat Continu, 2017. Finis Africae - El Abrazo De La Selva (The Jungle Hug), Amazonia, Ediciones Cúbicas, 1990.
For our seventh instalment, Sote, or Ata Ebtekar, one of the most prominent current Iranian composers and sound artists has prepared a mix inspired by Unsound Krakow's mix, SOLIDARITY. This theme will explore how music unites, both on a sonic level via its presence in a physical space or online, as well as culturally and politically, through scenes, collectives and movements.
Sote has produced two of the most exciting albums from the last two years, Sacred Horror In Design (Opal Tapes, 2017) and the most recent Parallel Persia (Diagonal, 2019). Albums where he closely collaborates with traditional musicians such as Arash Bolouri and Behrouz Pashaei. Currently based in Tehran, he is one of the motors behind the vibrant and growing experimental art cultural scene in the country.
For this mix he explains that collaborating with talented musician friends such as Arash Bolouri who plays the santour on ‘Parallel Persia’, Pouya Damadi who plays the tar on ‘Parallel Persia’ and Behrouz Pashaei who played the setar on ‘Sacred Horror In Design’ has been critical to his electro-acoustic works in the past few years. Since these mentioned electro-acoustic projects/albums have been about comradeship, he thought it would be interesting to go back about 10 years when I collaborated with the pianist and composer Mazdak Khamda who is a dear friend from his San Francisco Bay Area days: "And I decided to mix our album ‘Sonic Within’ with additional spectral editing. I feel like this work was overlooked by the media upon its publication and felt right to reintroduce it one more time in this shape and form. I greatly enjoy the balance between the acoustic and the synthetic bits on this material."
In our 6th Mixtape, Floating Spectrum is presenting a selection of music specially put together to resonate with our audience; music that utilizes data from our universe, such as sounds of two merging black holes, earthquake or planetary data sonification, and many otherworldly songs that take you through a peculiar journey.
Floating Spectrum is the moniker for Taiwan-born, Berlin-based composer and audio technologist, Mei-Fang Liau. Her fantastic debut album, A Point Between, is coming out in Temporary residence this September. And it’s been crafted from a combination of synthesizers, everyday household objects, and unique software synthesizers made by Liau herself.
Originally inspired by a dance performance for which Mei-Fang that explored the recurring cycles of nature. Liau also relied heavily on a self-made, fractal-inspired software synthesizer called Polyphylla, which simulates the way in which nature creates very complex and organic forms. It allowed Liau to create slowly evolving textures and sounds with complex dynamics. Furthermore, for one of the tracks, Liau built a generative sound system that turns visual data into sound. In this hybrid system, sensitively fluctuating analogue signals, fine-tuned data analysis, and human intuition perform together as one coherent living being.
She shares that she wanted to make a mix that would be interesting to audiences of CLOTMagazine, somewhere between art, science and technology. Most tracks are tech-driven, otherworldly, and some of them utilize some sort of planetary data. You can hear the sounds of merging black holes, abstract representation of earthquake motion data, planetary motion in our solar system, etc. and she goes even a step further: In my album, there are high dynamics among songs and within each song - surprises, contrasts, changes of moods, as if it was a sonic narrative. I tried to achieve similar dynamics with the mixtape to keep the listeners engaged throughout the journey. Many tracks have a blurry boundary between organic and digital sounds, which is also what I attempted to do in my album.
Tracklist: Visible Cloaks - Terrazzo Floating Spectrum - The early green outburst Micah Frank - Tectonic (excerpt, earthquake data sonification) Tim Hecker - Live Room Tom Hall - Spectra JAB - Planner's Beauty Children of Alice - Liminal Mind over mirrors - Vermillion Pink William Basinski - On Time Out of Time (excerpt, uses sounds of two massive merging black holes, 1.3 billion years ago) Victor Bombi - Me estoy marchando Isao Tomita - Arabesque Nr. 1 (written by Debussy) Laurie Spiegel - Kepler's harmony of the worlds (excerpt, sonification of the motion frequency of planets in our solar system) Vangelis - Albedo 0.39
The fifth volume of our Mixtape series comes by Lost Few, the audio-visual project of Melbourne-based experimental artist David Thomson. For this Mix, he’s prepared a personal journey developing a sense of space and theme that reflect the contexts and emotions he tries and explores with his own work.
Lost Few has just published his debut LP Between The Silence (Southern Lights 2019). It showcases ambient techno, disturbed electronics, processed instrumentation & sub-bass experiments, leading the listener to a journey that traverses a world that possesses a sharp, dissonant edge. The album also portrays the artist's relationship with the physical form, which includes sound recordings from the Buchan Caves in Victoria & the Tasmanian wilderness.
For this mix, the selection of tracks comes from artists who have influenced Thomson or represent a sound and thematic that he relate to and engage with: "While writing a new body of work I try to limit the music I listen to and separate myself from any external musical influences. I also stopped dj’ing when I started writing this album for that reason. However you will still hear influences come through - for example I used to work at a job that was slowly destroying any creative output - I’d be on the train looking out the window as the sun rose above the roofs of the inner city suburbs with Roly Porter or Puce Mary slamming my ears - a cathartic and ritualistic experience."
Tracklist: Lost Few - TMMFHTWNBIV Max Cooper - Hope (Roly Porter Remix) Puce Mary - Red Desert Lost Few - Bound_Many_Eyes_ Ourea - From Chaos Came Erebus Lost Few - Blessed Are The Tears We Forget To Shed My Disco - Forever Sow Discord - VI Lana Del Rabies - Disgrace Noiztatic - Noiztatic - W.A.R I Oake - Lilin Roll The Dice, Alessandro Cortini - Hydra
For our fourth instalment, Richard Skelton and Phantom Limb Publishing are bringing us a psychogeographical mix.
British musician and sound artist Richard Skelton has been exploring the natural world, its cycles of life and decay and our relationship with landscape and human-constructed spaces with experimental atmospheres. Skelton has just published his latest album, Border Ballads (Corble Stone Press). After spending the last two years living in the rural northern edge of the Scotland-England border, a boundary demarcated by various watercourses, this hinterland topography has informed a series of musical recordings, twelve miniatures fragments of a larger whole, such is their unity in tone and timbre.
For this mix Skelton shares that this mix is loosely constructed around absences, vacancies, and dereliction. The image of a deserted church, now falling into disrepair, located deep in the north Cumbrian interior: I pass by the building on a regular basis as I traverse the labyrinthine back roads between Scotland and England. Fittingly, therefore, all the music in this mix is sourced from vinyl — the ever-present sound of cracks and pops attesting to a kind of degraded materiality.
Perhaps predictably, the first recording that came to mind was Nico’s ‘No One Is There’ — a favourite song with a haunting melody, and my selection moved out from there, looking for records that had similar resonances, regardless of their provenance or genre. I was therefore interested to discover overlaps between the Baroque inflections of Boismortier’s ‘Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders’ and the synthetic swells of Vainqueur’s ‘Elevation’, or the howling sonorities of Gareth Davis’ clarinet and Jandek’s cracked harmonica. The whole mix is held together by the rich field recordings of Joshua Bonnetta’s ‘What Lies in It’, which itself is a document of a Californian ghost resort, Salton Sea. In turn, various segues are made with Alan Lomax’s recordings of human voices, many of which crackle and blur with their own disintegrating physicality. These are various documents of (primarily North American) languages and dialects: Blood (00:50, Stoney (07:50, Beaver (17:48, English (25:45 & 36:00, Achumawi (48:45)and Nenet (54:05). Given this proliferation of languages, in the end, Nico herself has gone — vanishing through the cracks in her own song to leave only its refrain, looping eternally.
Tracklist: 00:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press) 01:05 Tirath Singh Nirmala & Richard Youngs — A2 (Untitled) (HP Cycle) 05:40 Stephen Vitiello — Shake (Farpoint Recordings) 19:05 Baby Ford — New York (Rhythm King) 19:37 Gareth Davis & Steven R Smith — Westering (Important) 23:46 Jandek — Harmonica (Corwood Industries) 29:06 Félicia Atkinson — The Owls (Umor Rex) 36:35 Nico — No One Is There (Refrain) (WEA) 39:00 Musica Dolce — Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders in D Minor (Adagio) (Grammofonfirma BIS) 40:30 Vainqueur — Elevation (Version 3) (Chain Reaction) 50:10 Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang — Orcus Pellicano (Editions Mego) 55:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press)
A new instalment of our Mixtape series with a psychedelic selection by the hand of Anatolian weapons.
Athenian musician Aggelos Baltas has been producing music for almost a decade, with his Fantastikoi Hxoi project and the more recent Anatolian Weapons, this last one conceived as a way to bring together his influences in krautrock and EBM - two seemingly mismatched concepts- with the polyrhythmic percussion and wailing tones of Greek folk music serving as their unlikely bonding agent.
His most recent publication under the Anatolian Weapons moniker, the excellent 'To The Mother Of Gods', is an album made in collaboration with Greek folk musician and composer Seirios Savvaidis. Savvidis contributed stems of ten songs, which Baltas deconstructs and rearranges with an appreciation of the ancestry of their lineage and of the deceptively ancient eerie, droning qualities inherent in the style. Baltas shares that this album was one of these projects that flows very naturally; he felt so inspired by Seirios' original material that this is one of his favourite projects to date.
This mix, Ghost Dancers, it's [as always] a leftfield, psychedelic mix striving to combine the organic and electronic.
Tracklist: Yu Su - Tipu's Tiger (ft. Pender Street Steppers) (Second Circle) Anatolian Weapons feat Seirios Savvaidis - Ofiodaimon (Tolouse Low Trax Vs Anatolian Weapons Remix) (Beats In Space) Rip 'n' Enji - Ghost Dancers (Creative Space Greece) River Yarra - Toad Charmer (Antinote) Théo Muller - Mayan Ride (KRAKZH) Klein Zage - Womanhood (DJ Python Remix) (Orphan Records) Pete Namlook - Oui (Anatolian Weapons Acid Edit) (Fax +49-69/450464) D.K. - Earth People (Antinote) Karamika - B2 (Offen) Mc Laren Deneuve (ALT Edit)
For our second Mixtape, experimental musician Zachary Paul has prepared a selection of novel approaches to string instruments. Zachary Paul is a violinist and composer interested in perception, the transportive nature of long durations, and trance states. His work explores the contrast between stasis and movement and questions the possibility of depicting both synchronously with a profound sensibility and emotion, drawing from a long lineage of artists exploring sustained tones within organic performance, including Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and La Monte Young. Zachary is currently a participant in Touch's curated mentorship program where he’s also released his first album A Meditation on Discord, last April 2019.
In this Mix he reflects about one of his main interests: Growing up as a classical musician, he was always attracted to composers who invited the performer to play their instrument in a unique way. The vocabulary of the violin is much larger than the twelve notes of the diatonic scale and there is something inherently rebellious about searching for the sounds one is instructed to avoid as a young musician.
Tracklist: 1. Charles de Beriot: Violin Concerto #7 in G - 2. Andante Tranquilo (performed by Maud Powell) 2. Béla Bartók: String Quartet #5, SZ 102 - 2. Adagio Molto (performed by Emerson Quartet) 3. György Ligeti: Ramifications, for 12 strings (performed by Schoenberg Ensemble) 4. Adrian Knight: The Ringing World (performed by Bearthoven) 5. Jóhann Jóhannsson with Hildur Guðnadóttir & Robert Aiki Audrey Lowe - Part 1 6. R Keenan Lawler - Bow Shock (excerpt) 7. John Luther Adams: Canticles of the Sky - 1. Sky with Four Suns 8. The Dream Syndicate (John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Maclise, La Monte Young, & Marian Zazeela) - Day of Niagra 10. Deep Listening Band & The Long String Instrument - Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS #3 11. Henry Flynt - You Are My Everlovin' (excerpt) 12. Leya - Swan Lake 13. Low & Dirty Three - I Hear...Goodnight
New series of mixtapes specially created for CLOT Magazine. The first instalment comes from Phantom Limb and Dylan Henner: Alternating Microsound with Film Score a mixtape.
Both of these categories of music acknowledge environment. In film score, a soundtrack is part of worldbuilding; it is a key part of the film universe, part of its reality. Microsound music does something similar. It follows different rules to pop music, operating only within its own tiny world. Like film score, it is not made to be a filler of empty space, but to be details within it, like the literal case of NASA's audio recording of the sounds made by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it flies through the outer universe.
A Secretive newcomer, Dylan Henner describes his work as “bliss-out ambient” and released his debut EP A Reason for Living through Phantom Limb in February 2019.
Tracklist: 1. Akira Rabelais - 1440 Promp. Parv. 518_2 Wawyn, Or Waueryn, Yn A Myry Totyr, Oscillo. 2. Nick Zammuto - Stealing [from We The Animals] 3. Jim Wilson - God's Chorus [edit] 4. Anugama & Sebastiano - African Journey [from Baraka] 5. Mike Shiflett - Sufferers 6. Benedetto Ghiglia - El Suplicio [from El Suplico] 7. 2015 NASA recording of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko 8. Apichatpong Weerasethakul - Dawn of Boonmee [from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives] 9. Aylu - IV 10. Michael Danna - Elena Shoplifts [from Ice Storm] 11. Sugai Ken - Wakihi 12. Edward Williams - Japanese Macaques [from Life on Earth] 13. Masaki Batoh - Kumano Codex 2 14. Genioh Yamashirogumi - Dolls Prophecy [from Akira] 15. Rully Shabara - Lahuwahlahu 16. Hayasaka Fumio - Seven Samurai Suite [from Seven Samurai] 17. Orton Socket - TLT 18. Joe Hisaishi - Hana Bi [from Hana-Bi] 19. Es - Sädekellot 20. Boris - Yesterday Morning [from Mabuta no Ura]
The Zero Gravity Band is an immersive installation of light and sound 360º that tries to induce sensations of zero gravity and an exhibition of prototypes and instruments designed to create arts and music in conditions of zero gravity and smart space suits. The project is produced by Fundació Quo Artis, a non-profit organisation that seeks connections between art, science and technology through the joint work of professionals in these fields. Quo Artis aims to add value to society and culture by incentivising the creation of innovative interdisciplinary projects. The Zero Gravity Band project aims to find answers to how would art, and it is perception change when we were not restricted to the physical and gravitational laws and create a dialogue on the subject between researchers in such varying disciplines as art, science, technology and philosophy. It was devised by the artist and researcher Dr Albert Barqué-Duran and musician, composer, sound engineer and music producer Marc Marzenit with the scientific participation of Albert Barqué-Duran himself and Dr Elisa R. Ferrè, director of the VeME Lab. Dr Albert Barqué-Duran is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cognitive Science at City, University of London, and a contemporary artist. His research focuses on new theoretical approaches to decision-making and cognitive systems. Musician, composer, music producer and sound engineer Marc Marzenit acquired his first synthesiser at age 14, and a year later he created his first label, Paradigma Musik. Marc Marzenit’s approach to music consists of combining acoustic, analogue and digital instruments in the same show. A great example is his project Suite on the Clouds, a visual 3D show with eight violinists, a harp, symphonic percussion, several synthesisers and a grand piano. Dr Elisa R. Ferrè is Director of the Vestibular Multisensory Embodiment Lab and lecturer in Biological Psychology in the Department of Psychology at the Royal Holloway University (London). Her research focuses on how the brain calculates gravity, but also how gravity shapes human behaviour and how gravity influences the aesthetic experience. We had the chance to experience The Zero Gravity Band and chat with Dr Albert Barqué-Durán and Marc Marzenit and this what they told us. Enjoy it as we did!
Technological research, design, art, industry and business with a strong focus on future trends were the central axis of Sónar+D 2017.
This year’s edition of Marketlab returned to the large public area in Sónar+D and put its center on music technology from both creation and experimentation point of view. There we were able to discover new tendencies in music production, interfaces and tool for sound production that may change our lives in a not-too-distant future.
Apart from industry projects, Marketlab paid attention on what creatives hubs, media labs, creative platforms, universities and incubators are developing and researching around the globe. We could get in touch with London incubator Somerset House Studios, and New York’s School for Poetic Computation, Creative platforms like Kickstarter and the littleBits makers tool, as well as the universities RMIT (Australia) and Kuntsuniversitat Linz (Austria).
And as well talk to the professionals behind some of the innovative projects that caught our attention such as INTORNO LABS, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, IED, Onmipresenz and Alan Warburton from Somerset House Studios.
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin
Machine learning - a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building or the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed- is having a growing impact on our everyday lives: from practical speech recognition, effective web search, vastly improved understanding of the human genome to first prototypes of self-driving cars. But what is the influence these new forms of computing intelligence will exert on artists and their creative processes? Can it help us understand human creativity? and how does it work? These are some of the articulating questions the work of Artificial Intelligence curator Kenric McDowell revolves around.
Kenrick, who has long had professional interests on the intersection of culture and technology, currently leads the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google Research, after moving from New York City and few years working in the advertising industry to L.A. AMI is a program at Google that brings artists and engineers to support and encourage collaboration between them and intelligent systems in artmaking. An emerging form of collaboration that opens new ways of thinking and working with intelligent systems. And Kenric helps driving forward cross collaborations between Google AI researchers, artists and cultural institutions.
Kenric was at Sonar+D 2017 giving a talk as part of the Google AI Showcase: How machine learning and artificial intelligence are changing the art of the future panel. In his talk Creativity Beyond Human Creativity, McDowell presented the AMI program and how AI entities are not merely tools, but collaborators in the creative process changing the art of the future. He explored how artificial Intelligence and “Machine Learning” are already having an impact on the economy, transforming industry and the way we work, as well as influencing the work of creators and artists.
After Sónar, Kenric stopped for a few days in London, and he kindly agreed to meet and chat with us. We were lucky to have a quick personal tour around the Google building in King’s Cross and deepen into questions such as how artists and creators change the way they work when their tools can come up with creative decisions or what is the value of this new art form. It was fascinating to speak with someone with so much vision and forward thinking.
As we build systems with cognition that can understand and recognise the world, new ways of reading the world will also be created, forms that may have never came out of a human brain.
Joe Davies is one of the seminal figures in Biomedia. His work has shocked and polarised the artistic community while at the same time laying the foundations for a new artistic discipline.
The artist is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT and his research and art include work in the fields of molecular biology, bioinformatics, and sculpture.
With his practice, he was one of the first to blur the lines between art and modern biology,
In the late 1980s, Davis collaborated with molecular biologist Dana Boyd to insert for the first time a non-biological DNA message into a coding sequence. The recipient was the bacterial strain E. coli, one of the basic tools in molecular biology labs. The work, named Microvenus, encoded a binary representation of the Germanic rune for the female goddess of earth and life. The piece was a response to the Pioneer plaques designed by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan that were sent aboard Pioneer spacecraft with the intention of being intercepted by extraterrestrial life. The plaques depict the location of the Earth in the solar system and galaxy, the trajectory of the Pioneer spacecraft, and anatomical depictions of the human form. Davis took issue with the relative lack of detail of the female figure compared to the male figure and used Microvenus as a counter-argument for how we, as a species, outwardly represent ourselves.
More recently, Davis has been working on encoding the top 50,000 pages of the English Wikipedia page into bacteria to be transferred into apple trees. The project is titled Malus ecclesia and is both a biblical reference to the apple tree in the garden of Eden as well as George Church, the principal investigator for the lab at Harvard Medical School where Davis holds an appointment. Davis' interest in plants also extends to one of his current projects, Astrobiological Horticulture, where he is investigating the potential for biological gardens in space.
Throughout his highly productive career, two projects stand out as being particularly ambitious; Call me Ishmel, a 110-foot lightning tower in memoriam for Hurricane Katrina, and Bacterial Radio, a crystal radio system that uses a protein derived from marine sponges to create an electrical circuit capable of receiving AM radio transmissions. Davis work on the bacterial radio, which was assisted by molecular biologists Tara Gianoulis and Ido Bachelet, garnered critical acclaim for its technical sophistication and sustainability and was awarded the 2012 Ars Electronica Golden Nica in Hybrid Art.
To become familiar with Joe Davis’ work is to come into an understanding of the creative potential for Biomedia and its relationship to culture and semiotics
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin
Harm van den Dorpel is a Berlin-based dutch conceptual artist regarded a key figure in post-internet art movement. Alongside with other contemporaries, they developed a new way of exploring technology, digital footprints and social networks.
He was at Unsound Krakow 2016 bringing the visual element to Lexachast, a project by Bill Kouligas and Amnesia Scanner which started as a website with generative visuals from Harm. These were programmed to live stream pictures uploaded in real time on Flickr and DeviantArt, algorithmically filtered to show Not Safe For Work images. The project expanded into a live premiere for Unsound, combining uneasy imagery with the dystopian music.
With a background in Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Harm´s work investigates how algorithms can analyse digital archives and guide the artist in aesthetic decision making, leading to a symbiosis of man-machine art creation. He uses algorithms and data to explore how things online relate and mutate in what is called “unstable media; away from the rather rigid classical notion of the work of art as immutable entity compared to the fluidity of contemporary software production, continuously updated and improving.
As a sort of a philosopher of the digital era, Harm’s systems (exhibited as computer animations on screens, and as printed framed wall pieces) try to expose more people to reflect on questions about meaning life online. How does the Internet influence culture and our daily lives offline? Language and cognition also play a central role in Harm’s art. The internet is primarily based on written language, and everything that you can find is done by using words. He also uses complex computing and biology concepts like DNA algorithms and inheritance and applies them in a virtual gallery setup where the artist and machine mould the aesthetic of the projects, like in his project Death Imitates Language, series of works exploring the development of meaning in generative aesthetics using micro feedback and a genetic algorithm, consisting of a website and a series of printed and boxed collage works.
We also chat about the debate on the commercial aspects of the post-internet art business. In 2015, Harm became the first artist to sell an artwork authenticated through blockchain to a museum. The MAK (Austrian Museum of Applied Arts) in Vienna purchased his Event Listeners, a screensaver created in a limited edition, using bitcoin. The museum saw the intervention as a new form of collecting in the digital age. For the artist blockchain presents a solution to the issues related to creating and dealing in digital and net art, which by its very nature can be easily copied and transferred. “Blockchain creates a fingerprint, something that identifies the owner. Through blockchain, you can see who owns it now, who owned it before and who created it.” Premonitory, he stated last year: “They say that 2016 is the year of blockchain and I do think we will see huge changes in the coming year”, and it certainly has been.
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow.
Marcel Weber better know as MFO is a renowned German lighting and visual artist. Marcel has been creating and directing audiovisual performances, installations, and video works since 2001.
His work has a very distinctive aesthetic concerned with memory and perception, it highlights the architectural elements of performance spaces with powerful experimental visual narratives juxtaposing the work of some of the world’s most renowned electronic musicians.
Marcel work lays between the analog and the digital. Employing old media like projectors, film, and lenses, against digital compositions and generative software.
Some of the artists he has collaborated with include Kara-Lis Coverdale, Tim Hecker (Ephemera), Ben Frost (Aurora Tour), and Kode9 (Her ghost, homage to Chris Maker's la Jeté). Last year saw light his collaboration with Rolly Porter for the latest new show Third Law, inspired by solitary iced landscapes and which culminated in a blinding strobe crescendo.
During Unsound he managed to find some free time in his busy schedule to chat with us just before the weekend got crazy - he is also the lighting designer for the whole festival, something he has been doing since almost the very beginnings of the festival.
Sitting outside bar Alchemia in Krakow’s lively Kazimierz Jewish quarter, we had time to go through his work and creative process and why his artistic practices take much on the crossover with technology and science.
After Unsound we caught up again with Marcel in Berlin, where he told us about his many coming new projects: a collaboration with Liz Harris, aka Grouper, which took them to remote Siberian lands and they will be presenting in this year’s edition of Unsound krakow, a new our and other surprising projects...and it looks like a busy year ahead for Marcel.
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow.
The American experimental electronic duo Matmos are M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel. Both artists are the main core of the outfit but they are frequently joined by other musicians and an array of domestic gadgets.
Currently based in Baltimore - Daniel is an associate professor in the Department of English at Johns Hopkins University-, they formed in San Francisco in the 90s, where Schmidt worked as a teacher in the New Genres Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and Daniel was taking his doctoral studies on the literary cult of melancholy at Berkley (University of California)
Over the last 2 decades Matmos have gained a reputation as the new masters of musique concrete through their conceptual approach and the use of unusual sound sources. Their productions are challenging but also infused with a playful touch of domestic humor and a disregard for genre conventions.
They first entered the more mainstream musical consciousness in 2001 through their collaboration for Bjork’s album Vespertine and they toured the world with the singer for next 2 years. Today they manage to balance their academic careers with touring some of the most entertaining and unpredictable live shows in electronic music.
Matmos were at Unsound this year presenting Robert Ashley’s “Perfect Lives”. Today, more than ever, it feels like a premonitory chant for the disassembly of a crying America. The performance was an exciting, challenging and thought-provoking experimental “soap opera”. It could take you some time to get into their weird, spellbinding universe but once you managed it unruled into a touching experience.
We met with Drew and MC the morning after Unsound’s infamous karaoke night for what was a really entertaining chat. It was really great to have an insight into the procedures that tight together all their disparate artistic endeavours. Hoping you enjoy it as much as we did.
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow. Music from Ultimate Care II kindly provided by the artists
CLOT Magazine got the chance to talk to musician Robert Lippok and video artist and live performer Lillevan during 2016 edition of Unsound Festival: Dislocation (Kraków, Poland) where they were presenting Gletschermusik together with musician Askat Jetigen from Kirzystan.
Robert Lippok is an avant-garde German musician and visual artist and composer which has been an influential player in Berlin’s thriving experimental music scene from a very early age, with bands like To Rococo Rot for which he is best known, while his solo work has been featured in the renowned label Raster-Noton. Lillevan an animation, video, and media artist, was a founding member of the visual and music group Rechenzentrum (1997-2008) and has performed and collaborated with many artists like Christian Fenesz and Vladislav delay
Gletschermusik is a dislocated audio-visual performance that blends art, science, and folklore. It uses the sounds and images of Central Asia’s melting glaciers as a source of inspiration to promote a dialogue and raise awareness of the deterioration of the planet, climate change, and environmental problems.
Retreating glaciers, rising sea levels, and shrinking lakes are some of the consequences of rising temperatures and changes in weather patterns. This is particularly important for the people of Central Asia, whose water supplies depend on the region’s glaciers.
The rising temperatures, global warming and the hole in ozone layer (which luckily is beginning to close according to dr Ryan Neely, Lecturer in Observational Atmospheric Science at Leeds and will be “healed” by 2050) are the three main agents taking part in the melting of the glaciers.
We talked to Robert Lippok and Lillevan over one hour about the inspiration behind Gletschermusik, how the expedition was, their experiences during the project, new ideas about what dislocation is, isolation, solitude, and loneliness.
Hoping our conversations makes you reflect on the problematic issues we are facing in these challenging times and how artists can question our perception on such important matters.
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow. Music from Gletschermusik and An Trinse kindly provided by the artists
Media historian and artist Kristen Gallerneaux is the Curator of Communications and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum (Dallas, USA), where she takes care of things like computers, and also things like radios, televisions, things that have tubes and transistors. The museum is one of the largest historic collections in North America. Kristen’s universe, who was raised in a generations-long Spiritualist family, is surrounded by visionary architecture, local micro-histories of sinister small towns, ‘thing theory’, vernacular technoculture, aesthetic failure, contact magic, monster magazines, learning to weave, sound studies, and visual legends and legend trips, in her words. Through her writings, she has covered an extensive range of topics like the audible history of paranormal culture and the visual history of telepathy research.
CLOT Magazine got the chance to speak to Kristen during 2016 edition of Unsound Festival: Dislocation (Kraków, Poland) where she gave the talk ‘Sonic Spectres’. There she told us about ‘the strange sonic spectres that haunt space around us, from the mysterious ‘hum’ reported in so many locations around the world to unusual structures with possibly occult or UFO provenance to old synthesizers, the picking up of noise from black holes.’ Late 2017 will be a busy time for Kristen. Her forthcoming book, High Static, Dead Lines, will be published by Strange Attractor Press in October and her essay compilation Unsound/Undead will also be out in Fall on Univocal Press. On the other hand and in tandem with her book High Static, Dead Lines Kristen tells us via email that she is working on a video/analog performance project blown out of sound waves, salt crystals forming, salt mining and local heavy industry. This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow. Piotr Figiel kindly shared the glacial remix of the Unsound performance
(This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin)
What happens if we alter the traditional methods of sensing by adding an extra sense? What changes if we extend our perception and abilities by enhancing our senses? In her A Cyborg Manifesto, written in the early eighties, Dora Haraway defined cyborg as ‘A cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction.
Neil Harbisson, cyborg artist, co-founder of The Cyborg Foundation and Cyborg Nest, ‘became technology’ and therefore cyborg more than a decade ago when he implanted an antenna in his skull that allows him to hear colours. Born with achromatopsia, a rare condition of colour blindness that makes him see the world in a grey scale, the antenna, which Harbisson calls ‘eyeborg’ represents the perfect cybernetic union between human and technology. He even wears it while showering. For Harbisson, the son of a Catalan mother and an Irish father, his identity as a cyborg is official — the antenna is included in his British passport.
Harbisson’s cyborg art is mainly focused on creating music and portraits through the new sense. In Piano Concerto No. 1, he painted a piano with different colour paint and then the antenna played the frequencies of the colours while he created portraits in Sound Portraits by listening to the colour of their faces. Another appealing artwork is The Human Colour Wheel, a colour wheel based on the light of the human skins.
Apart from his artistic work Neil Harbisson co-founded together with cyborg choreographer Moon Ribas The Cyborg Foundation in 2010. Its aims are to help people to become a cyborg by giving them the tools and the information to achieve their goal. More recently, in 2016, Harbisson and Ribas launched Cyborg Nest. As Neil says, Cyborg Nest is a company that ‘[offers] senses for people. (...) so people can extend their senses by applying or incorporating new sensory organs in their body.’
How would the world appear to us when we sense it in a broad and different new ways? Exploring new ways of communicating beyond our senses and languages of sounds and signs will allow us to comprehend the world in broader dimensions. The world would not be perceived any longer in three dimensions.
For our innagural podcast we would like to introduce you to the work of Johannes Klabbers. Johannes is an Australian artist, writer and also developer of the intriguing discipline of posthumanist therapy.
During Unsound Krakow 2016, he acted as resident posthumanist therapist and he also presented his work as the performance "How Can a Posthumanist Be?". For it, he used an improvisation method developed by John Cage in 1958 for his piece Indeterminacy.
In his latest book "I am Here" (2016), Johannes Klabbers gives insights to help understand the process of death and dying and help people cope with suffering. It is about listening and talking to people who are dying, and about life and death.
We had the pleasure to talk to him during the Festival about how quantum physics influenced his theory and what a posthumanist therapist actually is and does
This podcast was produced by CLOT Magazine editorial team and Stephen Mclaughlin for Unsound Festival in Collaboration with OFF Radio Krakow. Piotr Figiel kindly shared the glacial remix of the Unsound performance