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Thomas ANKERSMIT
“The Dip”
Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit’s trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements.
Primarily known for a site-responsive approach to sound, often realized in the moment of performance, Ankersmit’s turn toward the studio in the last few years has opened up a new dimension within his practice. It is in this quiet rupture that The Dip emerged, a study in internality and suspended states, rich with cinematic undercurrents and ghostly spatial suggestion. Here, electricity itself feels transfigured – becoming supple, even organic – within an environment shaped entirely by analog signals.
Over the past two decades, Ankersmit has established himself as one of the foremost practitioners of the Serge, the notoriously idiosyncratic and expressive instrument that has remained central to his work. On The Dip, he harnesses its potential not for brute force or disorientation, but for spaciousness, resonance, and lyrical abstraction. Without resorting to additional processing or effects, he draws out tones that feel simultaneously raw and refined, articulated and blurred – intricate structures that seem to breathe and evolve of their own volition.
The result is a kind of auditory hallucination, a “cinema for the ears,” wherein impressions, emotional arcs, and imagined topographies unfold. Each side of The Dip plays like a single gesture unfolding in time – a spatial narrative constructed through vibration, density, and the movement of air.
The Dip follows acclaimed works on PAN, Touch, and Shelter Press, and reaffirms Thomas Ankersmit’s position as one of the most focused and probing voices in contemporary experimental music. Quietly radical and meticulously constructed, it is less a departure than a deepening – a descent into a more private sonic world, where the boundaries between perception, memory, and pure signal dissolve.
25,00€
In stock
LP
FLUTTER RIDDER
“Flutter Ridder”
Flutter Ridder is the duo of Norwegian multidisciplinary artists Espen Friberg and Jenny Berger Myhre, both of whom play important roles in Oslo’s contemporary art and music underground. The pair first collaborated during the production of Friberg’s debut solo record, “Sun Soon” (Hubro, 2022), quickly recognizing in one another a creative kinship rooted in a playful, intentionally naive approach towards making art. In November of 2023, the pair decamped to the coastal town of Hvisten in southeastern Norway to record what would become this debut, self-titled album in an ancient wooden church. Drawing from a palette of Friberg’s idiosyncratic Serge modular system and the church’s resident pipe organ and intoxicating acoustic reverb, they began recording and sculpting music informed by the notion that air and electricity share a common flow, a continuous current that can be directed through valves and potentiometers. The pair came to think of the Serge and pipe organ as sibling instruments, the former yielding characteristically unpredictable and complex timbres that complement the wooly, reedy drones and strange, microtonal overtones of the latter. At once sublime, liturgical, and whimsical, Flutter Ridder offers its listener a series of moving, cinematic natural landscapes, affirming the sensibilities of its makers and the indelible influence of the environment in which it was produced.
25,00€
In stock
LP
Marja AHTI
“Still Lives”
“Still Lives” is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist’s words, “These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind – selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines – objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations.” Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective.
18,50€
In stock
LP
Anne GUTHRIE
“Gyropedie”
“Gyropedie,” Anne Guthrie’s third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into her hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie’s own words, “Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching snow, frozen playgrounds, broken synths - I spent a year decoupaging over this, but of course it's still there. A second moon appears occasionally in the daytime, and there are frequent, murky transmissions. California has something alien about it I'm still trying to grasp. Primarily vintage, unabashed, corny, I find myself becoming an impressionist.”
Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player. She studied music composition and english at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she completed her Ph.D in 2014. Her music combines her knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Her composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Her French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Her acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.
17,50€
In stock
LP
BLUE CHEMISE
“Daughters of time”
Blue Chemise documents the hermetic soundworld of Australia’s Mark Gomes. “Daughters of Time” follows 2017’s brilliant full-length “Influence on Dusk,” released in micro-edition on Gomes’ own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. These pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor’s evocative “airs,” conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable."
16,50€
In stock
LP
Crys COLE
“Beside Myself”
Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist Crys Cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (2015, Black Truffle), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift.
'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams.
'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focusses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'.
Francis Plagne (November, 2019)
Original price was: 17,50€.12,00€Current price is: 12,00€.