Touch 25 Features
Contemporary Magazine (UK):
Getting close to Touch – the London-based project founded 25 years ago by Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft who still run it today - is a strong perceptual experience, in which the sense of listening is challenged and gains depth by means of a multifaceted number of stimuli. The outcome of Touch – not just a music label but rather, as its founders claim, an audiovisual project - sheds light on a network of productions in music that seem to have sprung out of nowhere but in actual fact reveal more than one connection with the most obscure experimentations of the 80’s. As you journey through the Touch catalogue, ominous drones merge with clear-cut sonic shapes, ruthless rhythms screech against the surface of polished sound washes, unpredictable field recordings run parallel to frenzied percussive patterns, pictures of idyllic landscapes are presented near urban sceneries or close-ups of flowers and plants. Over the years, Touch has been reshaping the way sound is perceived as a whole and not only as a purely aural experience. Not only did this happen through audio constructions that transcended and re-interpreted reality into new forms, as witnessed by the early cassettes from the 80’s in which gamelan or ethnographic recordings would mingle with the most avant-garde instances of post-industrial sound collage – it also did so by means of a striking graphic design and considerable attention made to the record sleeves and packaging, resulting in one of the most enduring graphic identities to come out of the Nineties alongside raster-noton’s.
Eclecticism is one possible key to access Touch, ensuring unique experiences in a style that is never rigid but dynamic in scope and in genre: Touch stands out for promoting some of the most original voices in experimentation, which may have sounded eccentric when they first appeared, but often turned out to highlight pioneering new paths in music and foresee their most daring developments.
Thanks to their vision, Harding and Wozencroft have been promoting off-the-track approaches way ahead of time, rather than lazily sheltering themselves beneath easy perpetuations of style: publishing the enigmatic and hard-to-label work of Chris Watson with field recordings, or believing early on in an outsider such as Philip Jeck, at a time when the new emerging credo seemed to be digital abstraction above all things - Jeck’s aesthetics of dust and memory, seeping through his use of old vinyl and turntables from the 50’s and 60’s, anticipated many nostalgia-hued productions of the late 90’s. In the same span of years, Touch released one of the most extreme records in clear, sharp abstraction, +/- by Ryoji Ikeda, which is considered today as a landmark release for minimal computer music.
For Harding – who also runs the Ash International label - Touch can be considered ‘an ongoing conversation’ and ‘a developing narrative’, which through the years has been matching the most unlikely forms of sound. Today, the customary publication of cd’s is paralleled by the web broadcasts of Touch Radio, streaming at www.touchradio.org.uk, and the Spire touring project, in which organ music is adopted and redefined in a new sonic creature which includes suggestions from past and present, and brings forward notions of site-specificity and ‘history-specificity’.
Not only giving space to an impressive mixture of genres, Touch also favours musicians from different generations and backgrounds – take a father of drone-related experimentation such as Phill Niblock, and a master in edgy digital architectures such Peter Rehberg; consider the meandering analogue constructions by Mika Vainio and the fluctuating arabesques of orchestral music by Jóhann Jóhannsson, alongside younger artists such as Jacob Kirkegaard and BJ Nilsen. All of them are documented in Touch 25, the cd that was published earlier this year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Touch, choosing to focus on current and most recent musicians involved with the label, rather than recollecting names and moods from the back catalogue. Nilsen’s powerful yet nuanced recordings in the island of Gotland open up the space for the oscillations in Oren Ambarchi’s electric guitars, which walk a thin line between what’s overwhelmingly solar and the deep dark shadows that lurk beneath. In a singular moment tones seem bathed in light, the very quality of Ambarchi’s touch in abusing those notes brings forth an alien feel - a picture of stasis that is mirrored in Kirkegaard’s accelerometer recordings carried out in a former nuclear power plant in Sweden, echoes chasing one another in ring-like trajectories that never open up. A variety of noises and fragments are slotted in-between tracks, forming a connecting thread and making us wonder what sounds are around us and which of them are picked up, or overlooked. “Please consider this music a romantic journey”, thus the Touch 25 cd liner notes, “to be firmly linked to a narrative that is neither nostalgic nor processed to a temporary screen value… An enduring attempt towards building a more progressive relationship to the activity of listening and the idea of ‘awesome’.” By locating itself deeply in the present, not giving in to any nostalgic recalling of ‘ways we were’, Touch 25 sets the standard for yet many more awesome releases to come. [Daniela Cascella]
Big Load (Germany):
Club Intro (Turkey):
In Turkish, click here
Beat (Spain):
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