20.03.04
Ryoji Ikeda "0ºC" reviews
Continue..."Touch Sampler 00" reviews
Continue..."Touch Sampler 3" reviews
Continue..."Touch Sampler 2" reviews
Continue..."Touch Sampler 1" reviews
Continue...Wir "Vien" reviews
Continue...Locust "Wrong" reviews
Continue...Mark Van Hoen "The Last Flowers From The Darkness" reviews
Continue...Sandoz "Digital Lifeforms" reviews
Continue...INDICATE "Whelm" reviews
Continue...Suspension
Insulation
Scala "Compass Heart" reviews
Continue...Scala "Beauty Nowhere" reviews
Continue...Various Artists "Touch Ringtones" reviews
Letter in Metro [London]:
'Mind Boggling: I read about the new ring-tone of a woman having an orgasm in Metro (Mon). How do you explain that one to a five-year-old on the bus in the morning? What next? How about a ring-tone of a fart in the toilet or someone being sick? The mind boggles.' Rosemary Thompson, Newcastle.
Continue...19.03.04
Various Artists "Spire" reviews
The thought of producing a compilation where the tracks were all either inspired by or more directly influenced by the organ had been frequently aired over the years. The conversations were always animated and expansive. The organ works of Arvo Pärt, those performed by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, a pupil of Richard Rodney Bennett at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and others, have reached a wider non-classical audience. Eventually Benny Nilsen arranged to visit St. Mary's Church, Warwick and work with one of England's finest, Charles Matthews. Crawling around inside the instrument, positioning microphones most appropriately in the Church, or 'capturing' the psalms composed by Marcus Davidson, Nilsen explored the possibilities with all the familiar lust of the avant-garde. As the brief widened, so did the responses... some contributors referred to earlier versions of the organ and its often highly political usage, others explored aged instruments themselves. Some studied the effects of the sounds produced on the physique and the psyche, others conceptualized the brief and either built their own or recorded natural or man-made phenomena which utilized the same basic process, wind through pipes. The organ represents the marriage between acoustic complexity and ritualized space. It is impossible not to be drawn upward, towards the spire of the church or cathedral, or to the huge and daunting forest of pipes themselves. The organ dwarfs all comers, and unlike other instruments, it is this non-musical element which makes the organ stand apart.
Continue...Hazard - Land
Fennesz "Field Recordings 1995-2002"
Richard H Kirk "Loopstatic" reviews
Continue...John Duncan "Tap Internal" reviews
Continue...Rafael Toral "Engine - Live at Pompidou Centre, Paris 3_04_02" reviews
Continue...Fennesz "Live at Revolver/Melbourne 3_02_00" reviews
Phill Niblock "Touch Food" reviews
This CD was one of the albums of the year in The Wire (UK), 2003
Continue...Philip Jeck - 7
Continue...Philip Jeck & Jacob Kirkegaard - Soaked
Continue...Philip Jeck - Stoke
from k-punk
Jeck's Stoke, which I recently - and belatedly - discovered courtesy of Touch's Jon Wozencroft, is another oneiric drift through the archives. Listening to the record - or rather gradually being possessed by it - over the course of the last few weeks has confirmed my initial impression that any serious discussion of sonic hauntology cannot ignore Philip. His sound could be characterized as a dyschronic, disembodied hip hop (a dream hop?) - Jeck 'started using record players in the early eighties after hearing mixers like Walter Gibbons and Larry Levan and Grandmaster Flash' - produced using dansette turntables, FX units and records found in charity shops. (Imagine what you thought middlebrow mediocrities DJs Shadow and Spooky sounded like before you actually heard the records). But Jeck's methodology - he composes his records largely from edits of live performances - makes it equally plausible to describe him as a junk shop counterpart of Teo Macero, the legendary sonic sorcerer who conjured wondrous unlive collages from Miles Davis' studio playing. (It's not at all coincidental that Eno mentioned Macero on the sleeve notes to On Land.) Both the hip hop DJ and the studio remixer are experts in the necromantic art of manipulating sonic unlife: the DJ performs live manipulations of Read Only Memory recordings, whereas the remixer takes a live performance out of the lived duration of so-called real time into the unlive no-time of the studio. Like sonic hauntology in general, Jeck - a steampunk surgeon of sound, a surfer of surface noise - is at the confluence of these two approaches. Stoke is often keeningly plaintive, although there is an impersonal, mechanical quality to the melancholy, almost as if it belongs to the aged machinery and the recovered objects themselves. Philip refers to the sonic sources he uses as 'fragments of memory, triggering associations' but it is crucial that the memories are not necessarily his; the effect is is sometimes like sifting through a box of slides, photographs and postcards from anonymous people, long gone.
In his excellent review of Stoke for Pitchfork, Mark Richardson drew out the virtual-visual dimension of Philip's work (remember that Jon W always insists that Touch is an audio-visual label):
"Listening to his most recent album, Stoke, it's hard not to think about Jeck's background in visual art, and how it informs his audio work. There's something very cinematic about these pieces, though the music sounds nothing like a soundtrack. Some of the visual referencing could come from the regular pops and scrapes in the vinyl, which are reminiscent of the sound of a spool of film being fed into a projector. Jeck's endlessly rotating platters, like the whirr of moving film, serve as a constant reminder of the time-based nature of the medium."
Continue...Biosphere "Shenzou" reviews
Johann Johannsson "Englabörn" reviews
Continue...Biosphere "Substrata 2" reviews
Phill Niblock "Touch Works, for Hurdy Gurdy and Voice" reviews
Continue...Rafael Toral "Violence of Discovery and Calm of Acceptance" reviews
Continue...Chris Watson - Weather Report
This CD was one of the albums of the year in The Wire (UK), 2003
Continue...Biosphere "Cirque" reviews
Rehberg & Bauer "Paßt" reviews
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Continue...Fennesz "plus forty seven degrees 56' 37" minus sixteen degrees 51' 08"' reviews
Rehberg & Bauer "Ballt" reviews
Continue...Philip Jeck - Surf
Continue...Parker/Casserley "Solar Wind" reviews
Continue...Mika Vainio "Onko" reviews
Continue...Rehberg & Bauer "Faßt" reviews
Continue...Ryoji Ikeda "+/-" reviews
Continue...Philip Jeck - Loopholes
Continue...Ken Ikeda "Merge" reviews
Continue...Ken Ikeda "tzuki [Moon]" reviews
Continue...Soliman Gamil "A Map of Egypt Before the Sands" reviews
Continue...Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson "Children Of Nature" reviews
Continue...18.03.04
Chris Watson/AER/Biosphere/Fennesz/Hazard/Philip Jeck/Mika Vainio - Star Switch On
17.03.04
Chris Watson - Outside The Circle Of Fire
16.03.04
Chris Watson - Stepping Into The Dark
