Hidden burn

Drama - the sense of moment, event or even ritual - figures notably large in Touch’s recent output. It always has, of course (think Kiri No Oto or Without Sinking…). But ravishing new releases like Claire M Singer’s  Solas & Bethan Kellough’s Aven seem drenched in it - most obviously because of their string & organ parts, but more broadly because of their shade & light interplay of acoustic, electronic & field recording elements.









It also seems to reflect the imprint’s growing body of live releases this year. Aven is one; Floodlines by Simon Scott – whose gripping Insomni for Touch affiliate Ash International was part of LMYE’s 2015 Festive 33-1/3 - & Fennesz's Mahler Remix two more. All clearly gain great atmosphere & power from being captured in the moment... 



Touch’s US West Coast ‘conference’ in the summer amped up this emphasis on performance. Besides Aven, gripping shows by Philip Jeck, Daniel Menche and Mark Van Hoen were shared through Touch Radio – a wonderfully rich ‘platform for recordings from artists affiliated to or whose work appears on Touch’. 

To these ears at least, it connects too to drøne’s Reversing Into the Future. This thrilling piece – surely the most kinetic non-dancefloor record in an age ("sounds moan and sing, forming their own phonemes") – feels like an honorary part of Touch’s work even if formally a debut for Anna von Hausswolff’s Pomperipossa: a collaboration between Touch co-founder Mike Harding & Van Hoen (whose digital-only Artefacts I came out on the ‘audio-visual resource for ‘emerging artists’’ TOUCHLINE in October 2015). 

Much more Touch performance in tonight's 17th Spire ("organ works past present & future") at Organ Reframed - for which Singer is artistic director. Hope to see you there...

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Thirty-three & a third

You may know the drill by now: in a sincere though inevitably clunkily artificial attempt to spread recognition as widely as possible without devaluing it too much, LMYE’s co-authors each independently pick 15 releases that particularly mattered to them during the year – but under two faintly hair-shirted constraints: no more than one selection per artist & one per label. 

Duplication across our 2014 line-ups was very limited. Only Lawrence English’s Wilderness of Mirrors (a highlight of another stand-out year for his Room40 imprint, our 2012 Label of the Year), Fennesz’s Bécs (eMego), Stephan Mathieu’s Sacred Ground (Schwebung) and Janek Schaefer’s Lay-By Lullaby (12k) featured on both initial drafts. 

This year we expand the resulting master list to a Festive 33-1/3. In particular, we throw in two epic collections that were too significant to exclude, even if they weren’t strictly speaking new music: Chris Dooks’ The Motherlode & The Otherlode (Broken20) & Kenneth Kirschner’s Imperfect Forms (Tokafi). 

In addition, a wry part-vote for Le Berger’s Interwoven Sonic Tapestry – formally released at a minute to midnight (EST, presumably) today “to ensure avoidance of any 2014 and / or 2015 'top' lists” – rounds out our initial 2014 roll-call. 

Mandatory health warning: plenty of other artists & other labels than those featured here made great music this year. As previously, we’ll acknowledge the broader universe of releases that resonated with us in a follow-up post…

Anjou – Anjou (Kranky) [jl]
Thomas Ankersmit – Figueroa Terrace (Touch) [jl]
Andrea Belfi – Natura Morta (Miasmah) [jl]
Nicolas Bernier – frequences (a / fragments) (LINE) [jl]
Alex Cobb – Marigold & Cable (Shelter Press) [jl]
Robert Curgenven – SIRÈNE (Recorded Fields) [jl]
Dalhous - Will To Be Well (Blackest Ever Black) [al]
Deaf Center – Recount (Sonic Pieces) [jl]
Loren Dent - Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 (Infraction) [al]
Chris Dooks – The Motherlode & The Otherlode (Broken20) [jl]

Kyle Bobby Dunn - Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness (Students of Decay) [al]
Lawrence English - Wilderness of Mirrors (Room40) [al/jl]
Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello – Fable (Dragon’s Eye) [jl]
Fennesz - Bécs (eMego) [al/jl]
Chris Herbert – Constants (Room40) [jl]
The Inward Circles - Nimrod is Lost in Orion & Osyris in the Doggestarre (Corbel Stone Press) [jl]
P Jørgensen – Gold Beach (Low Point) [jl]
Kangding Ray - Solens Arc (Raster-Noton) [al]
Sima Kim - Debris (Soft Corridor)
Kenneth Kirschner – Imperfect Forms (Tokafi) [jl]

Le Berger – Interwoven Sonic Tapestry (in the key of) (self-released) [jl]
Stephan Mathieu – Sacred Ground (Schwebung) [jl/al]
Neel - Phobos (Spectrum Spools) [al]
Duane Pitre & Cory Allen – The Seeker & The Healer (Students of Decay) [jl]
Abdulla Rashim - Unanimity (Northern Electronics) [al]
M. Sage - A Singular Continent (Patient Sounds) [al]
Pascal Savy - Adrift (Eilean Records) [al]
Janek Schaefer – Lay-By Lullaby (12k) [jl/al]
Shifted - Arrangements in Monochrome (Part 1 & 2) (Avian) [al]
Nicholas Szczepanik - Not Knowing (Desire Path) [al]






TCF - 415C47197F78E811FEEB7862288306EC4137FD4EC3DED8B (Liberation Technologies) [al]
Tegh - Night Scenes (Inner Ocean) [al]
Mike Weis – Don’t Know, Just Walk (Type) [jl]
Cody Yantis / Nathan McLaughlin / Josh Mason / Joe Houpert – Line Drawings (Desire Path/FET Press) [jl]



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Millions of gods

Two gilded Touch-related treats from a pair of mitteleuropaische artists so distinctive & irreducible their surnames are all the marker needed. Fennesz's new AUN - the beginning & end of all things soundtrack (Ash International) yields the lullingly reflective Hikari, while the glowing tones of Sinus 5 append to Steinbruechel's Tapeworm cassette Sinus. 



Blurbs: "‘AUN – the beginning and the end of all things’ follows the strings of thoughts the late Claude Lévi-Strauss revealed in his anthropological essays throughout the 20th century, as well as those of Japan’s unique Shintoism who’s millions of gods inhibit and preserve nature. The film focuses on the dichotomy man/nature and envisions a future world where life will be nothing but sensual. It contains references to Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Italian anthropologist Fosco Maraini and the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada."


"A simple synthetic-based, sine wave generating freeware program was used as sound source for creating single pulses and long static tones in several different tonal pitches. No additional sound design or other analogue or digital processing was used during the creation of the sounds. The single sound elements were layered and sequenced into different movements of varying shapes and colours focusing on the pure essence and aesthetics of sound. Each track interweaves longer, stretched, tonal segments and rhythmic patterns into sine-curved compositions.


The four Sinus tracks were sequenced at one hundred and twenty beats per minute in nineteen ninety nine by Steinbrüchel. They were previously released as a personal CD-R edition of 10 copies. "

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

"when the future was still a good idea"

Even if it's old, new Fennesz has to be heard, clearly. Especially if it's old, some might say... 


Judgemental nostalgia aside, though (mostly a reaction to last year's hit-&-miss Seven Stars, anyway) , a new oldie - Liquid Music - is deeply beguiling & indisputably prime ("premiered during the Touch tour of 2001, the time of Fennesz’s Endless Summer and the steady movement towards Venice", according to Touch). A buzzing, scratchy fuzz, pinging tones, a restless, pulsing base: & a whole vastly more than the sum of the parts. 


Oh, & it comes as a USB stick "in velvet string bag". Even without the object porn dimension, though, Liquid Music would stand out among this year's releases - & tower over many. Hear a clip of its ebbing, bobbing riches below.  

Also feast below on the affecting bonus remix of Shift, Seven Stars' outstanding moment.


& finally here's a 10-hour Spotify playlist for your inner train-spotter... 



fennesz wozencroft - Liquid Music [excerpt]


Liquid Music was made in 2001, in conjunction with the music Christian Fennesz was developing during that fertile period when the future was still a good idea. The first version – this is it – was premiered during the Touch tour of 2001, the time of Fennesz’s Endless Summer and the steady movement towards Venice.

The footage for Liquid Music originates from Prague, Paxos, Crete, Cephalonia, Messinia, London and one short clip from Monterey Bay. It was filmed on Hi–8 and mini–DV between 1995 and 2001. The main idea was to film everything through the lens, with no post production other than the compilation of many years work into a coherent whole. Fennesz’s music, and its ascendent quality, made that a pleasure. The optical quality is on the cusp between analogue and digital resolution. In many respects it’s an exchange of values as much as working methods.

I feel it’s one of the best works we did in the last 10 years. The Brighton concert, where the audio comes from, was a key moment on the Touch 2001 tour. The PA was Loud. Everything worked. The film, as on all nights, was played in parallel, it is not sync’d in the conventional sense. Every time is was shown it was different. On this night, the second night of the tour, the audience was shocked in a way that shock rarely happens these days.

This very same year, industry experts got together in California to set the MPEG compression codes for DVD mastering. MPEG4 algorithms basically sample 3 frames out of the PAL 25 frames-per-second standard, and interpolate, which is OK if you’re trying to get a drama onto a DVD, but hopeless if the film involves very fast movement and transitions. Liquid Music is in some respects a laptop response to the celluloid flicker film from the 1960s – Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Stan Brakage – Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer. We tried everything Soho facilities houses had to offer but there was no way the film was going to master accurately onto the DVD format.

The movement of water is a difficult thing to film, and to sonify. For years the only way Liquid Music could be shown was either as a live projection or a dedicated screening – these have taken place at Tate Modern, the BFI, Austria, Hungary, Germany... Ten years later, the satisfactory outcome is to see what it looks like on an iPad or an iPhone, and then to imagine it on the big screen.





Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Turn to stone

Footnote to yesterday's track of the day from Fennesz: a preview of Seven Stars' "certain lightness" - from the luscious but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying Liminal & title track (for all its jazzy brushwork) to the more wholesome Shift & July (the former a deep, gripping drone, the latter a beautifully resolved arc out of knotty abstraction) - for the non-Spotty...

Blurb: "Seven Stars was recorded in Vienna in January 2011. I recorded and mixed the album within 3 weeks. Liminal and July were existing pieces which i have reworked. (I wrote an early version of Liminal in a hotel room in Bali in 2010). There is also a version of Liminal that I have been playing live for some time. My friend Steven Hess, with whom I have worked before, happened to be in Vienna at the time of the sessions, so I invited him to join me in the studio. Christoph Amann recorded the drums using a selection of his great microphones including his amazing new Josephson.

I wanted to make a record that has a certain lightness about it and at the same time explore new territory using drums on one track. This might be something I will continue with in the future."

Note also confirmation that Fennesz's third collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Flumina, is due out this summer on Touch.

fennesz - seven stars (album preview) [via experimedia]

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Karl Philipp Fürst Schwarzenberg

No disrespect to The Liminal, obviously, but to these ears the most compelling recent sliver of Fennesz isn't his recent hymn to the must-read site but rather today's track of the day - his hissingly vaporous, faintly mournful follow blind piece for the recent Morning Line 'pavilion' in Vienna.

(It's one of several lovely responses to the installation: hear Terre Thaemlitz & Carsten Nicolai's contrastingly maximal & minimal contributions below too. A further six in the full set, & more - including Lee Ranaldo, Chris Watson, Mark Fell & CM von Hauswolff - from earlier installations (Seville curated by Florian Hecker, Istanbul by Russell Haswell...)

Blurb ("topographic spatializations"!): "follow blind builds on a sonic world of highly processed guitar sounds and drones, a sort of signature sound Fennesz has persistently developed and honed over the past decades. Its condensations, accelerations, and topographic spatializations also form the basis for the composition for The Morning Line. Layers and parallel trajectories of superimposed guitar drones with various frequencies are combined to form an overtone melody or seem to blend into each other in their overtone ranges. Yet that melody changes constantly as the visitor moves through the installation, and so a sort of meta-music emerges that is perceived in forever new ways relative to one’s position in The Morning Line. The sounds slowly roam the structure of the pavilion; the pace of the changes is experienced as depending on whether the perceiving body is in motion or takes up a static position. The dimensions ofThe Morning Line and the large number of speakers allow the sounds to form epic surfaces."

Since the Fennesz clip is somewhat unsatisfying (much too short & watch out for the brutal chopping-off at the end), you too may be sad enough to download it here for looping...

Hear the new-ish Seven Stars (Spotify) & blurb/buy it (Touch).

Christian Fennesz_follow blind_2011

Terre Thaemlitz_TML #25_2011

Carsten Nicolai_morning line quanta_2011

Photos by Maria Ziegelboeck. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

There is Nothing Like a Dane

Kiloton - Language Lost (Side B) from Urlyd Audiovisual Recordings on Vimeo.

This from Kiloton's Language Lost DVD via Urlyd - a bunch of Danes spurning Geld to give away quality electronic music and video. The ideology of the label, we're told, "is to embrace net culture and enthusiastic music lovers’ impulse to share with each other." And we aren't about to look a gratis Dane in the mouth...

Kiloton is, it emerges after a sneaky search, Mads Weitling, a name ambient-industrial-drone heads might know as one half (with Danny Kreutzfeldt) of Rumforskning, a somewhat heavier proposition than Kiloton, as the relevant bit of this Gears of Sand label profile indicates (see para. 5).
In Language Lost Kiloton offers something with a melodic consonant character, but unfluffy, with that chilly Nordic thing reviewers of anything Scandinavian have to stereotypically mention (oh, sh.. oops!). To be fair, the label itself plays the Nordic card, their description speaking of "an abstract, wordless and dark dreamy album that carries a distinct nordic tone. Characterized by sharp, abrupt rhythms under deep, smouldering and crackling dubscapes, Kiloton has developed an almost cinematic sound that leads its listener through changing moods; beatiful and sincere as well as melancholic and thoughtful." Dunno about 'sincere', but I can dig 'beatiful' (sic.)

Kiloton - Mille Tendresses by Urlyd Recordings

Kiloton - The Third Kind by Urlyd Recordings

Kiloton - Recovery Capsule by Urlyd Recordings

Kiloton - Language Lost (Side A) from Urlyd Audiovisual Recordings on Vimeo.

The album/tracks are also available for free download from the label’s site.

Danish music mag Gaffa awards the album 4 out of 6 stars and the Danish blog Undertoner makes comparisons to work of, among others, John Cage, Fennesz and Paavoharju in their review. Dutch site, DJ Broadcast, gives it 4/5. Thanks to the intervention of the reliably random babelfish, we have a clear understanding of what the review had to say:

“After well receive album of Tone, on which introverted popsongs in an electronic jacket stood Kilotons debut album especially fodder for ambientfreaks are. Langerekte, harmonious and slowly sliding drones between which float shreds of short golf-ruis and ijle melodies. As if you float solo in rusty Sputnik above the pole circle and from time to time picks up radio indicators of the ground. Mads Weitling worked two years for Language discharge and that can hear you. To be compositions seems fragile and delicate, but with much care has been constructed. Which nevertheless draw the change purse and it (limited) decides vinyl to buy, dvd get with splendid work of Danish and German video artists. In this case good deal.”

LMYE can but concur.

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Impromptu interference

A pair of reverberating, churning 'impromptu' collaborations between Fennesz & Festive 50er Rafael Anton Irisarri last July & September - the longer, more recent one eventually gushing out into a floodplain of partial resolution. The two emerge as Irisarri (a key part of one of LMYE's shows of last year, though he's too modest to acknowledge it...) makes a 'pay what you want' album of compelling live performances available via his Bandcamp.

While the London & Seattle shows were SoundClouded earlier (coverage here & here), the Milan & Krakow appearances are new - & striking. No bowed guitar judder, no lush swells - instead a lulling, crepuscular delicacy.

Fennesz + Irisarri > Live at Decibel Festival

Fennesz + Irisarri > Live at Interferenze Festival

Fennesz at Decibel Festival 2010, Seattle

Bonus (rated by Irisarri as one of 2010's best shows):

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Databases flee leer

Labels' role as visible exercisers of taste, as rallying points, as cultural lenses, was at least as crucial this year as last. Following our label of the year (Low Point), LMYE highlights five other curatorial efforts that helped define 2010.

Besides our picks - below, alphabetically - you could also make credible cases for Raster-Noton, Root Strata, samadhisound & Under The Spire, which all had notably strong years. So too did the fine alternative choices (just one overlap with our lot) over at The Liminal.

Broken20 - LMYE's new label of the year: making the alluring promise of "releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz" - & delivering. Even if only a couple of official releases emerged (though you could treat the excellent Rose & Sandy Play Cat's Cradle on Moving Furniture & Erstlaub's typically huge Sleepwalking Into The Underworld for the soon-gone-&-already-much-lamented Highpoint Lowlife as honorary B20 works), not only were they outstanding but their supporting cast of precursors & 'casts was spectacular - particularly the genius down-pitching of Erik XVI's The Fading Splendour of a Technological Future & label chief ruaridhTVO's 4-hour, cast of thousands Broken Roots epic...

TVO > Keep Away From Fire And Flames [excerpt; re-up]

Erstlaub > The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep [excerpt; re-up]

hellosQuare - LMYE's neglected label of the year: distance may play a part in it, but hellosQuare's low profile was never more baffling than this year when the great Australian label was dishing up must-hear releases from Scissor Lock, Spartak & label head/Spartak member Shoeb Ahmad (plus a part-exclusive release for Mapstation) - deep & often deeply different sounds from down under...

Spartak > 5 44 (Pillowdiver remix)

Raven > In Marrickville, In The Dirt / Adrian Lim-Klumpes > Hillside (both from Bown.Hollo.Lim-Klumpes.Ahmad.Dorrian, hellosQuare; NB: lo-res - higher-res versions on free download)

Thrill Jockey/kranky - LMYE's larger labels of the year: while kranky had the edge on its fellow leviathan last year, there was little to separate them in 2010 as each underscored improbable vigour this far into their craggy careers with a raft of valuable releases (to both rack up an improbably gorgeous bee-related album. Yes, really...) Thrill Jockey had the somewhat bigger names - Oval/Fennesz Daniell Buck/Koen Holtkamp - but kranky's sponsorship of Brian McBride, Jonas Reinhardt & Loscil, plus its re-release of the Pan.American classic For Waiting, For Chasing, demands equal acknowledgement.

pan•american > still swimming

brian mcbride > supposed essay on the piano b major piano adagietto

Oval > Encore

Sam Prekop > The Silhouettes

Touch - LMYE's pioneering label of the year: shepherding magnificent new releases by Philip Jeck & BJ Nilsen that were among the year's best anywhere is qualification enough for recognition. But Touch went further, bringing Sohrab's unmissable A Hidden Place, Daniel Menche's extraordinary Hover, early Hildur Gudnadottir goodness in the form of the Mount A re-release & further enhancing its Touch Radio series with 12 new instalments - including this Phill Niblock.

Sohrab > Live in Tehran [extract] (from Live in Tehran, TouchRadio)

Philip Jeck & BJ Nilsen > Suffolk Symphony Rehearsal [Radio 4 edit] (from Suffolk Symphony Rehearsal)

Touch 2010 playlist (Spotify).

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Old Shoes… New Gaze (Pt. II)

A welcome pretext to revisit Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s blissed and blown out epic, Love is a Stream, among the best of an uneven year for Type, is its appearance in vinyl, specifically the nifty bonus disc, Love is a Dream, on which head Type-ist, Xela, re-channels tracks from Stream into Dream.

Xela & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Love Is A Dream (Part II) by _type

'Shoegaze' has moved from among the maligned (see your LMYE resident footwear-stare commentator previously on Scott Cortez / lovesliescrushing) to being one of the genre epithets to drop when seeking to appeal to the New Ambient And Home Listening Hipster (cf. Kosmische, hypnagogue pop, cold wave, et al.). And J.C-L's first Type solo album has ridden in on the crest of this wave. It opened up a new world of shoegaze-dreampop that melded the eu- to the caco- of the phonic. Stream (and its Xela relative, Dream) is the sound of J.C-L ramping up the lowlight drone sonatas of his earlier work (see later this post) to take a walk on the wildside of bleached-out shoegaze abstraction. Sometimes summery with an upward dynamic, other times plunging cavernously, J.C-L comes on here like the bastard love-child of Kevin Shields and Tim Hecker fostered by Robin Guthrie and Fennesz, the album artfully referencing these previous while retaining its own integrity. Thrill to the sound of etiolated almost-hooks and spectral melodies buried beneath grit slurry, static flurry, and tonebent guitar motifs in a washed out tape-saturated sunburst finish.

Stained Glass Body by _type

White Dwarf Butterfly by _type

River Like Spine by _type

Mirrors Death by _type

Before this second coming was an engrossing haunting first, The Garden Of Forking Paths. "Eschewing the laptop processing of earlier work as Colophon, it was created with tape-based media (cassette and reel-to-reel) and a small arsenal of guitar stop boxes used on wide variety of instruments from electric guitar to bowed gong. [...] With its title taken from a Jorge Luis Borges short story, the album was concerned with dreams, memory, death, birth, infinity and the possibility of an approach where songs are not written so much as much as they slowly emerge out of the process of music making."


Read full review of The Garden Of Forking Paths - JEFRE CANTU-LEDESMA on Boomkat.com ©

And for those wanting to explore further there have been a number of other other short format releases, some of which through his own Root Strata imprint, like The Phantom Harp, "Recorded at Sun Place this summer on a borrowed autoharp with electronics. One 20min track of metallic architecture, as seen with x-ray eyes. This is music for airports on the moons of Jupiter"

and Voice Sutra, "A dreamy and tranquil, but still think and fuzzy, slowly shifting soundscape that spends the first fifteen minutes writhing and squirming like a downed electrical wire, buzzing with electronic fuzz and spitting sonic sparks, emitting a thick wash of sonic skree not unlike Total, eventually calming down into a more tranquil ambience, shimmering and simmering and slowly fading to black. Quite nice. Droneheads obviously need this." - Aquarius Records"

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.