Lutnahimat . Erosions

Lutnahimat is a London-based project, formed in 2002 by composer/sound sculptor Ian S. After studying music technology in London, Ian has experimented with numerous acoustic instruments including strings, woodwind, brass free-reed and prepared instruments. Not wholly satisfied with the sounds available, he has also built several electronic instruments from scratch and created a variety of recording techniques to go with them. Lutnahimat has been working on soundtracks for short films, sound installations and exhibitions as well as releasing several limited editions on labels such as Entra’cte and EE Tapes. After concentrating at length on acoustic recordings Lutnahimat is currently working on minimal electronic music using purpose-built devices and self-written signal processing programs. For Erosions Lutnahimat used some of these instruments as well sound samples recorded in India and Cameroon

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Tomas Phillips, Francisco López . IC

Two compositional responses upon the same sonic matter.

Tomas Phillips (b. 1969) is a composer, novelist, and teacher whose sound work focuses on improvisational performance and minimalist through-composition. Labels to release his music include Trente Oiseaux, Line, and Non Visual Objects. He began composing electronic music in the early 1990s, releasing limited edition cd’s under the moniker Eto Ami (with Dean King), and has since created music for installations and collaborations in dance and theatre. Tomas has taught in the disciplines of literature and fine arts at various universities in the US, Québec, and Finland. He completed an interdisciplinary PhD at Concordia University in Montreal in 2007.

Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of the sound art and experimental music scene. Over the past 30 years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from the limits of perception to the most dreadful abyss of sonic power, proposing a blind, profound and transcendental listening, freed from the imperatives of knowledge and open to sensory and spiritual expansion.
He has realized hundreds of concerts, projects with field recordings, workshops and sound installations in 60 countries of the five continents.
His extensive catalog of sound pieces (with live and studio collaborations with over 130 international artists) has been released by more than 200 record labels worldwide, and he has been awarded three times with honorary mentions at the competition of Ars Electronica Festival.

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Szilárd Mezei . HŐ

Born 1974 in Senta, Serbia (then Yugoslavia) as a member of the Hungarian minority in the multiethnic region of Vojvodina. Completed his violin studies in Senta and Subotica and studied composition for four years at the University of Arts in Beograd under prof. Zoran Eric. His orchestra plays contemporary improvised music, mostly performing his own compositions. As a composer, Mezei is interested in exploring the relationship between improvisation and composition (similarly to Witold Lutoslawski’s aleatoric and Anthony Braxton’s creative music methods), incorporating elements of jazz and authentic folk music as well. As a young musician he followed the path of B.Bartók and Gy.Szabados.Mezei is also very actively involved in composing scenic music (among others with Josef Nadj). He has released CDs with labels like Leo Records, Not Two, Creative Sources, Red Toucan. Played so far with musicians/improvisors like Matthias Schubert, Tamás Geröly, Róbert Benkő, György Szabados, Tim Hodgkinson, Albert Márkos, Peter Ole Jörgensen, Jens Balder, Joe Fonda, Michael Jefry Stevens, Joelle Leandre, Hamid Drake, Herb Robertson, Frank Gratkowski, Charles Gayle. His writings on music have been published in many periodicals in Former-Yugoslavia and Hungary.

Duration 69.25 | Released March 2010

Compositions for solo viola and solo double bass.
Composed & Performed by Szilárd Mezei.
Recorded in Novi Sad- SERBIA.

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KGB . Noise Forest

Noise Forest is the latest performance project by the KGB trio, following 2008`s release Smoke on Devil`s Mountain; a recording comprised of performances and field recordings made at an abandoned NSA station in Berlin.

The Noise Forest environment was created in Berlin during the weeks before the two day long performance. Involving found objects, metal constructions, machines, contact microphones and various traditional instruments. The Audience was invited to enter the environment from above through a ladder leading from Chef Manuel Czech`s kitchen.

Recorded Live at Die Remise, Berlin – Nov 22/23 2008

Founded in 2004, KGB makes music using digital, electrical and acoustic instruments, creating music incorporating field recordings and processing, and performs as a trio and with an orchestra of improvising musicians. The Swiss Pharmaceuticals CD was released in 2005 on Utech records. Henneböhl and Dougherty have been working together in various Berlin experimental/noise outfits (Idiot Switch, Oktoschloks, Control, “Wendel Collective”), and perform with Cascone as KGB whenever Kim comes to Europe. The group has played venues across Europe including Instants Chavirez (Paris), FIM (Basel), Ausland (Berlin) and SKOP (Frankfurt). Kim Cascone studied electronic music at the Berklee College of Music and the New School in Manhattan. He founded Silent Records in 1985 and has released more than 30 albums of electronic music on Silent, Sub Rosa, Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton. Cascone has performed with Merzbow, Keith Rowe, Scanner, John Tilbury, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros and worked on two David Lynch films as Assistant Music Editor. Cascone founded the microsound list in 1999 and has written articles on post-digital aesthetics for Computer Music Journal and Contemporary Music Review. Guido Henneböhl builds and performs on his own analogue and electronic instruments. He has performed across Europe with artists such as Travis Just, Alwynne Pritchard and works in the groups Idiot Switch and the Oktoschlocks. Brendan Dougherty was born in Philadelphia and has been located in Berlin since 2002. He works as a composer and performer in the areas of improvised music, jazz, and collaborates often with Dance and Theater Productions. He has worked with the likes of Jeremy Wade, Billy Bang, Aleks Kolkowski, Jon Rose

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Thanos Chrysakis, Wade Matthews, Dario Bernal-Villegas : ENANTIO_DROMIA

Thanos Chrysakis’ output consists of composition, performance, and installation. He was born in Athens in 1971, residing for the last ten years in the UK. His work has appeared on various independent labels, and events in various countries. He composes for electronics, acoustic instruments and environmental sounds, focusing on the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter. His work “Inscape 5” was amongst the selected works at the International Competition de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2005, in the category œuvre d’art sonore électroacoustique, while “Nekyomanteion” received an honorary mention at the 7th International Electroacoustic Competition Musica Viva in Lisbon. Recent compositions include: A Scar In The Air (Aural Terrains 2008), “Threadshelters” for prepared piano + harpsichord (for Kate Ryder and Jane Chapman, 2007), and “Passage Dangereux” for prepared and toy piano, soundscape + video (for Kate Ryder, 2008). In addition to his compositional activities he has recorded/performed with Dario Bernal-Villegas, Wade Matthews, Oli Mayne, James O’Sullivan, Jerry Wigens among others.

Advanced academic studies in composition helped French-born American musician Wade Matthews realize he was not interested in telling other people what or how to play. In 1989, he moved from New York to Madrid and became part of the international improv community. Drawing on his knowledge of electronic music, he approached the bass clarinet and alto flute as “acoustic synthesizers,” rethinking their sonic possibilities, phrasing, and relation to breath in a musical language based on real-time creation. When faster processors made laptop synthesis viable, Matthews returned to his first love, tweaking a virtual synthesizer to allow very rapid control of sound parameters for solo playing and dialog with others. In 2007, he founded INTERMEDIA 28 with photographer Adam Lubroth and guitarist Julio Camarena << www.myspace.com/intermedia28 >>. There, he began to combine field recordings with electronic synthesis in a 2-computer setup that has since become his main instrument.

Darío Bernal-Villegas is a composer, improviser and drummer from Mexico City. Improvisation has been an essential part in his work as composer and performer. Many of his pieces deal with improvisation, as his aim is to create an intense, creative interaction between the performer and the score; in other words, creating the conditions for a more intense dialogue between the performer and the composer.As an improviser he has worked with musicians like Raúl Tudón, (Tambuco Percussion Group, México), Wade Matthews (USA, Spain) Thanos Chrysakis (Greece), Sebastian Lexer (Germany) Oli Mayne (UK), David Plans Casal (Spain) among others. Nowadays, he is working with the Mexican improvising collective Generación Espontánea and with the composer Tom Corona in his group “The Coming Burguers”

duration 55.00 | released September 2009
Enantio_Dromia was recorded in Madrid, March 2008.
Sound-synthesis + field recordings + percussion.

THANOS CHRYSAKIS
maxMSP+super_collider & electronics

WADE MATTHEWS
Digital Synthesis &
Field Recordings

DARIO BERNAL-VILLEGAS
Percussion

Order

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Jeff Gburek : Remote Provinces

This CD “remote provinces“, composed of materials recorded in Germany, Belgium, and Poland, mixed in with my own prepared guitar and signal processors, requires with each listening
a process of interpretation. They are not documentaries nor are they pure: I cannot imagine as a naturalist that one edits out impurity. I cannot imagine that as critic of naturalism one edits out impurities. So in some sense it is a work that is in argument with formalist phonography yet it accepts the basic premise which I call “seeding across time“. My work is a bit like what one might call “wild-scaping“—allowing urban decay to express itself unchecked while nature takes over. It is in this regard I include “technical breakdowns“: wrinkles to remain in the table-cloth, stains on the tie or runs in one`s stockings to show through. Some sounds are designed to enter the “center“ of ego-consciousness, while others seem peripheral. And yet I have invested equal energy in these “remote“ fringes and I like to imagine the music evolves with your environment and rides on a continuum of sound that surpasses every rendering and is renewed with each listening. The “remote provinces“ are all around us. They may be places of exile but also places of solitude, introspection and transcendance but they are nevertheless characterized by ruptures and coincidences of attention. Each of us is a remote province integrating and disintegrating, emerging from and immersed in empire. I have tried to build in sound a sense of worlds inside worlds living, at the occasional expense of transparency, transparently.

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Thanos Chrysakis, James O’ Sullivan, Dario Bernal-Villegas, Oli Mayne, Jerry Wigens : Instant-Cascade-Distant

The continuous presence of the guitar creates the main axis for these improvisations that happened between 2007-2008. Different sound sources, from electronic sounds to the clarinet, and prepared piano interchange roles, swarm around and together with the guitar creating sonic and harmonic fields that oscillate between the spectral and the gestural.

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Thanos Chrysakis : A Scan in The Air

duration 31.49 | released December 2008

A continuation of the “inscapes” series; a set of compositions based on the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter;
a confluence and at times collision of composed and decomposed sound-spectra, based on field-recordings, synthesized and acoustic sounds.

Thanos Chrysakis’ output consists of composition, performance, and installation. He was born in Athens in 1971, residing for the last ten years in the UK. His work has appeared on various independent labels, and events in various countries. He composes for electronics, acoustic instruments and environmental sounds, focusing on the structural and aesthetic capacity of sonic matter. His work “Inscape 5” was amongst the selected works at the International Competition de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques de Bourges 2005, in the category œuvre d’art sonore électroacoustique, while “Nekyomanteion” received an honorary mention at the 7th International Electroacoustic Competition Musica Viva in Lisbon. Some recent compositions include: A SCAR IN THE AIR (2008), “Threadshelters” for prepared piano + harpsichord (for Kate Ryder and Jane Chapman, 2007), “Frontal fusion” for oboe + clarinet (2008) and the short piece “Passage Dangereux” for prepared and toy piano (for Kate Ryder, 2008). In addition to his compositional activities he works on performing and recording projects – playing computer/percussion/piano – with musicians such as Dario Bernal Villegas, Oli Mayne, James O’Sullivan, Jerry Wigens and others.

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Dan Warburton : Profession Reporter

Profession Reporter – the reference to Michelangelo Antonioni`s 1975 film of the same name is entirely deliberate and for you to figure out – is the latest in a series of works, following on from Warburton`s Walks series and Compendium Maleficarum III (with Frederick Farryl Goodwin), that seeks to further break down the already fragile barriers separating composition and improvisation, natural (field recordings) and man-made (improvised) sound. Sourced from recordings made in Morocco in three different locations at three different times of day – morning, midday, evening – and extracts from live improv concerts in France, featuring Kyle Bruckmann, Bertrand Denzler, Greg Kelley, Jean Sébastien Mariage, Bruno Meillier, Bhob Rainey, Fabrizio Spera and Warburton himself – it`s voyage of discovery across space and time for composer and listener alike.

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T. Chrysakis, D. Bernal Villegas, O. Mayne : Palimpsesto

Thanos Chrysakis, Dario Bernal Villegas, Oli Mayne : Palimpsesto

duration 60.48 | released February 2008

Palimpsesto is the result of real-time compositions (in other words improvisations); a palimpsest of interwoven sonorities and aural structurings, based on two classes of sounds, electronic, and percussive (pitched/unpitched).

Is music but a palimpsest in the air? A moment to moment of writing and erasing different temporal layers? A coexistence of what we have accumulated, and how we relate, and respond to the instruments and to each other, in the course of a musical encounter? If I was to describe this CD with two words, I would prefer to call it a coloured palimpsest.

Thanos Chrysakis : vibraphone

live-electronics

marimba

inside/string piano

prepared piano

Dario Bernal Villegas : drums

marimba

bass-drum/cymbals

inside/string piano

Oli Mayne : vibraphone

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Thanos Chrysakis / Klage

Thanos Chrysakis / Klage

duration 47.22 | released June 2007

klage, the first release of AURAL TERRAINS, contains compositions based on a relatively wide range of timbral, rhythmic and melodic material, aiming to achieve a confluence between its structuring forces; acoustic instruments and electronic sounds. It is preferable to be listened to not as separate tracks but as an aural manifold of different distances/proximities, and contours; at times creating a sense of hovering, suspending time, while at others a more directional trajectory.

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