Out of stock
LP
COMPILATION
SOUNDS OF SILENCE
NEW EDITION limited to 200 copies !
“Sounds of Silence” is an anthology of some of the most intriguing silent tracks in recording history and includes rare works, among others, by Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Maurice Lemaitre, Sly & the Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, John Denver, Whitehouse, Orbital, Crass, Ciccone Youth, Afrika Bambaataa and of course Yves Klein. In their own quiet way, these silences speak volumes: they are performative, political, critical, abstract, poetic, cynical, technical, absurd… They can be intended as a memorial or a joke, a special offer, or something entirely undefined. The carefully chosen silences of this anthology are intrinsically linked to the medium of reproduction itself and reveal it’s nude materiality. They expose their medium in all its facets and imperfections, including the effect of time and wear. At the most basic level, these silences are surfaces. And it is in their materiality that they distinguish themselves from the conceptual experiments of John Cage with “4’33”. From the 1950s silence has found a place in the economic structure of the record industry and since then it would increasingly be appropriated by a vast array of artists is a vast array of contexts. Indeed, the silent tracks seems to know no boundaries. The LP presents the silences as they were originally recorded, preserving any imperfection that the hardware conferred upon the enterprise, without banning the possibility to satisfying the ear. The liner notes provide historical background for each track, revealing the stated (or presumed) motivations for these silences, while providing novel sound correspondences or interferences. This album is meant to be played loud (or not), at any time, in any place: a true aural experience ! Co-produced by alga marghen with Sound-Houses-FRAC Franche Comté.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Alessandro BOSETTI
“Renard”
Composed by Alessandro Bosetti. With Alessandro Bosetti (voice, oscillator), Laurent Bruttin (clarinet, bass clarinet), Seth Josel (classical guitar). Recorded at Börne45 by Roy Carroll, June 2012. Mixed by Alessandro Bosetti. Mastered Giuseppe Ielasi. A chamber music project on LP by the Italian composer, sound artist and performer, inspired by an African divination ritual. Renard is a chamber music project by composer Aleassandro Bosetti, commissioned on the occasion of this LP release by the regional fond for Contemporary art FRAC Franche-comté. The inspiration for the collection of pieces comprised in Renard came from a video that Alessandro Bosetti saw at the ethnological museum quai Branly in Paris. The video was showing an african woman divining the future by mean of throwing handfuls of objects on a table and reading their configuration in a relentless sequence of questions and answers to herself. Fascinated by the ritualized simplicity of this practice Bosetti and designer Annette Stahmer, selected a new pool of objects, devised an interpretation code and recorded several divination sessions with a few invited participants. Participants had been instructed on how to "read" the objects and they were able to elaborate answers to each other questions on matters as love, health, family, money, travels and whatever else they may have wished to receive advice on. Distilled fragments of those intimate and emotional exchanges were portrayed in this series of pieces for voice, guitar and clarinet. The ephemeral and conversational nature of the original recordings eventually transformed into its opposite and got frozen into stylized music compositions. All material was derived from the spoken interactions —as it is common practice in Bosetti’s work—although this time speech is often not heard as such but rather used as root material for the creation of geometric melodic patterns that eventually proliferate into thematic constructions.
While Alessandro Bosetti is used to incorporate fragments du reel in his compositions—in the tradition of composer and radio makers like Luc Ferrari and Yann Paranthoen—the particularity of his method this time resides in his avoidance of sampling and recorded reproduction while creating life size casts of the portrayed scenes for voice and instruments in a sort of hand made hyperrealism.
The chosen form is a chamber trio with classical guitar, clarinet and voice with the occasional insertion of sinusoidal waves. It that may loosely remind of Anton Webern’s three songs op. 18 (with piccolo clarinet and soprano swopping roles with bass clarinet and tenor voice ) or of Jimmy Giuffre trio explorations in the 60’s.
The instrumentalists—both adopted Berliners by now - are New Yorker Seth Josel - one of the most in demand new music interpreters on the guitar that has been closely collaborating with composers as Tristan Murail, Helmut Lachenmann, Richard Barret and Phill Niblock and Laurent Bruttin from Lausanne mostly know for his work with the Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva.
The music—thoroughly notated—is naked, cristalline, highly formal and stripped down to the bone with instruments and voice completely exposed in both fragility and virtuosistic precision. The focus is shifted away from noise and extended techniques and pointed towards the unfolding of melodic and prosodic possibilities as if a speech-melody section would have been added to Nichlas Slonimsky’s thesaurus of scales and melodic patterns.
The name of the project, Renard, reminds of another african divination technique, that of the Dogon people, where the white fox, Renard pale in French, is interrogated overnight by tracing coded drawings on the sand and reading it’s tracks in the following morning.
12,00€