Continuumix #25 (69′06″)
A mix by Continuo – November 2016. Stencil artwork: L.F.
Listen to previous Continuumixes at Archive.org.
/ / / T R A C K L I S T / / /
(00:00) Patrizia Oliva – Numen, life of Elitra Lipozi, cassette, Staaltape, 2016
(04:00) Patrizia Mattioli – Increase, netrelease, Electronic Girls, Italy. 2016
(08:37) Michael Garfield – IV (Your Heart Comes Back Online) [loop], from Balance, netrelease, USA, 2015
(09:19) Mario Ruffini – Musica Scolpita, CD, Stradivarius, Italy, 2010 [YouTube]
(09:38) Hannah M.G. Shapero – My name is Marietta Cashman (1969), netrelease, USA, 2009
(13:17) Michael Vetter – Overtones, 2xLP, Wergo, Germany, 1983
(13:36) Chris Brown – Iconicities, CD, USA, New World Records, 2011
(14:06) Norma Panduro (rec. by Ralph Koper) – Shushupe, CD, and/OAR, USA, 2016
(19:49) Sarah Washington & Knut Aufermann [voice of Carolina Melo] – City of Drizzle, Mobile Radio, Austria, 2012 [Soundcloud]
(28:33) Norma Panduro (rec. by Ralph Koper) – ibid.
(33:25) Paul Méfano – Gradiva [Pierre-Yves Artaud, flute], from LP, Le Chant Du Monde, France, 1981 [Discogs]
(33:45) ACRYLWAFFEN – Abraxas, CD-R, Attenuation Circuit, Germany, 2016
(34:53) Yin-Ju Chen – Extrastellar Evaluations II, multimedia installation, Taiwan, 2016 [Vimeo]
(40:22) Alain Bancquart – Amour Grand Terrible Champ Critique, CD, Tschann Libraire Musique, France, 2003 [Discogs]
(43:40) Marc Lauras – Ballade Tout au Bout du Monde, CD, GMVL, France, 1995
(45:02) Iris Garrelfs – Landscape Islands sculpture recordings, UK, 2016 [Soundcloud]
(46:13) Nadah El Shazly – Live at Room Art Space [poem by Sayed Darwish], Cairo, Egypt, 2015 [Soundcloud]
(52:25) Carl Orff & Gunild Keetman – Musica Poetica I: Tournois & Troubadours, LP, Harmonia Mundi, France, late 1970s
(53:00) Barbara T. Smith – Mass Meal (1969), from Performance Audio 1969–1988, 2xLP, Small Word, USA, 2013
(59:43) Komitas (by Sipan-Komitas choir) – Medzatzousstzé, from La Messe [or Armenian Holy Mass], LP, private release, France, 1975
(61:20) Scattered Purgatory – Ramming the town Roaming the mountain, from Lost Ethnography, cassette, Guruguru Brain, Japan, 2014
(Source: SoundCloud / continuo)
Baby Vulture – Fable (Perm Podcast 04), November 2016
Brilliant Surrealist and organic mix by Berlin-based DJ Baby Vulture aka Daniela Huerta, blending film soundtracks and dialogues, spiritual jazz, found sounds, sound effects, spoken word, etc. Focus is on acoustic sounds like melancholic piano, late night jazz trumpet or some ethnic reed instrument, in addition to the ubiquitous human voice. Some of these Surrealist, colorful juxtapositions and transitions –or lack thereof– are pretty original, I find – in a kind of Frida Kahlo way.
http://geist-agency.com/roster/Baby-Vulture
(Source: SoundCloud / perm-records)
Patrizia Oliva - Numen, life of Elitra Lipozi, C40 cassette, Staaltape, April 2016 [2nd edition, September 2016]
Originally from Lombardy, Italian composer Patrizia Oliva started releasing music in the late 1990s and has since recorded many works, either solo or with other musicians, at the border of experimental and improvised musics.
The Numen, life of Elitra Lipozi solo cassette is a very personal, even intimate, project, consisting of two 20mns tracks of an immersive, hypnagogic voyage in small scale music. Yet Numen is actually a collection of shorter, 2–3mns sequences, and rather varied at that, so the listener doesn’t feel trapped in someone else’s endless dream.
Consisting of experiments with loops, sound effects, wordless vocals, found sounds and small instruments, the music is particularly unreal and out-of-this-world. The great success of the project is that it actually sounds like a dream-in-sound, rather than the sound of a dream. On a technical side, Patrizia Oliva takes great care to make her electronics sound analog and her computer loops sound like tape loops, so that the voyage is also a voyage in time, which is part of the charm of the cassette.
https://soundcloud.com/patrizia-oliva
(Source: staaltape.bandcamp.com)
Sergei Eisenstein – The Spherical Book
Some of you may already be familiar with “books”, a technology enabling a subject to read page after page of a printed text in a practical way. But now might be the time to get acquainted with Spherical Books, where the reader proactively organizes chapters or articles in a way that makes sense to him/her, prioritizing topics and circulating inside the book according to one’s prefered path.
A prefiguration of the ebook envisionned by Soviet film director and essayist Sergei Eisenstein in 1929, the Spherical Book was devised as a way to hypothetically present a collection of his theoretical articles in a modular fashion devised by the reader, called “mutual reversibility”. This concept arose from Eisenstein’s unrealized film The Glass House (1926) about a transparent building where walls won’t block camera moves, where social hierarchies and notions of directions would be abolished.
Such a book was just published by Aalto University School of Arts Design and Architecture, in Helsinki, Finland, and is available for free from a dedicated website – from which all pictures in this post come from. The spherical book is called Culture as Organization in Early Soviet Thought: Bogdanov, Eisenstein, and the Proletkult, a collection of essays edited by Pia Tikka.
http://crucible.org.aalto.fi/spherical/
Via Monoskop:
https://monoskop.org/log/?p=17785
Quarantaine – Lichtempfindlich!, cassette, Baba Vanga, August 2016
Formed in Czechoslovakia around 1982, Quarantaine was the duo of Jaroslav Palát and Slávek Kwi, the latter still active today under the Artificial Memory Trace alias. Several of Quarantaine’s cassette releases have been digitized and published by the CS Industrial 1982-2010 label on their Bandcamp – see links below–, including the 1984 cassette Lichtempfindlich!, which is now also remastered, augmented and reissued by Baba Vanga on cassette.
Quarantaine is a rare example of Industrial Rock in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, yet I’ve heard very industrial-sounding tracks by DG307 or Micholas Chadima’s Ex Tempore Band and MCH Band, especially the 1982 Krokodlak cassette. The Lichtempfindlich! album collects monotonous, instrumental tracks based on crude rhythm box programming, primitive sound effects, and occasional, heavily distorted vocals and shouts in the background. As befits an Industrial music project, alarm sirens and falling bomb shell sounds abound and the music exudes isolation and depression. Quarantaine is an interesting addition to our knowledge of Industrial Rock as an international movement from the 1980s. Note photo cover inspired by Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý’s own blurry photographs.
https://csindustrial1982-2010.bandcamp.com/album/lichtempfindlich
https://csindustrial1982-2010.bandcamp.com/album/quarantaine
https://csindustrial1982-2010.bandcamp.com/album/the-strategy-of-the-cross-cut-up-piano-e-p
http://csindustrial19822010.blogspot.com/
(Source: babavanga.bandcamp.com)
Victor Kopytko (composer, b. 1956) – ЗАВЕТ [Testament], for 2 performers and pre-recorded tape, 2012.
Text by Venedikt Erofeev, from “Moscow - Petushki” [Moscow Stations], chapter “On the way to Moscow Kursk station”, 1969.
Mikhail Konstantinov, voice, drums
Veronica Praded, voice, drums
Live recording, Small Philharmonic Hall, Minsk, Republic of Belarus, January 2013
Sister / Body - Spells, Cassette, Baba Vanga, Prague, Czech Republic, September 2016
This is the 2nd release by Sister / Body, the Czech duo of Miss Camilla and Head in Body, or h/b, the latter a member of Prague electro-industrial duo Lightning Glove. Spells is a collection of hazy, slowed down electronic songs topped by abstract lyrics softly murmured by both members – Miss Camilla uttering nonchalantly with a sexy voice ala Debbie Jaffe, while h/b sounds like a slow mo Alan Vega filtered through Dirty Beaches’ 2013 “I Dream in Neon”. Most successful tracks here combine a dub-by bass line, minimal electronic embellishments and undertone, declamatory lyrics. Smooth sound processing throughout insures an immersive listening experience and a high replay value, despite the deppressive atmosphere of all tracks.
More info:
http://easterndaze.net/post/79970500093/sister-body-lucifer-efekt-tesla-tapes-2014
http://www.radioblackforest.com/lightning-glove-black-forest-mix-01/
https://soundcloud.com/lightning-glove
(Source: babavanga.bandcamp.com)
José Pérez de Arce – Son Ido, free internet release, Pueblo Nuevo, Chile, 2007–2016
José Pérez de Arce’s Son Ido album was originally digitally released in 2007 by Chilean experimental music netlabel Pueblo Nuevo, but was recently promoted again in view of the imminent total disparition of some inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in Southern Chile – namely, the Yaghan and Selk'nam people – and their unique dialects, now said to be spoken by a unique individual only, respectively, if not totally extinct. The situation was already desperate when Folkways Records issued their own double LP of Selk'nam people speech and ethnic music recordings in 1972, titled Selk'nam (Ona) Chants of Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. With Son Ido, ethnomusicologist Pérez de Arce (born 1950) has created a poignant and fascinating homage to these vanished people in a coherent suite for spoken word, chanting, interviews, sound collages and electronic loops, all based on traditional Chilean instruments – the trutruca (trumpet), jew’s harp, pan pipes, ocarina, drums, etc. Drawing from archive documents like interviews, traditional ceremonies and ethnic music, Pérez de Arce manages to create a colourful, life-affirming sound world which is both immersive and gripping. The most ambitious track is the 30min epic that closes the album, a vast collage of aboriginal dialects, folk music and musique concrete loops – using insects, birds, sea surf, phonemes, etc. For those who, like me, missed the original 2007 release, the audition of this untitled Track #3 is highly recommended. Far from being a melancholic elegy to some extinct people of Tierra del Fuego, Son Ido is a tour de force, musique concrete composition whose musical achievement can be heard as a paean to human resilience.
Thomas Bayrle and Bernhard Schreiner Record Launch
celebrating the release of WARP WEFT by Bayrle and Schreiner
and Some Personal Appearances by Schreiner
Featuring a performance of WARP WEFT with live drum accompaniment by Dennis Duck and Ted Byrnes
Thursday, October 20 at 7 PM
356 S. Mission Road / Ooga Booga
Excerpts from a fine article by Bence Meijer (Archaic Inventions) on the legacy of experimental music blogs ca.2006–2016, published in KNiK Magazine, Amsterdam, February 2016.
“2016 marks the tenth anniversary of music blogs on the internet. The birth of music blogs meant a redefinition of traditional music history and the uncovering of previously unknown music to a broader audience. […]
The most important and now legendary blogs of avant-garde, experimental, psychedelic, minimal synth, home-taping, weird, punk, industrial, improvisation, rock in opposition and library music (just to name a few genres) that arose about ten years ago were a.o. Mutant Sounds, No Longer Forgotten Music, Direct Waves, FM Shades, The Thing on The Doorstep and Continuo. So many obscure releases were uncovered and compressed on these blogs that people could endlessly dig into the history of strange alternative, underground and deviant music. These blogs are still recommended because they provide a great amount of information. Most importantly they told such a relevant story of music history that it altered conventional music history enormously.”
Pierre Larrieu – 17 Flashes de Musique Incidentale, excerpts (9′21′’)
From 17 Flashes de Musique Incidentale, 10inch mono LP, self-released, France, ca.1959–1962. For more info see previous post.
Excerpts from:
- Flash #03 (1:23)
- Flash #05 (1:17)
- Flash #07 (2:17)
- Flash #10 (1:14)
- Flash #11 (1:22) [African style]
- Flash #15 (1:05) [dog imitation]
- Flash #16 (1:34) [ticking clock]
Pierre Larrieu – 17 Flashes de Musique Incidentale, 10inch mono LP, total time: 23mns, self-released, France, ca.1959–1962.
French composer and music director Pierre Larrieu (d.1964) started his carreer in the late 1920s. During the 1930s, he wrote song orchestrations for French singers Damia or Joséphine Baker, among others, as well as playing the Ondes Martenot accompanyment of the Burlesque show at the Folies Bergère cabaret in Paris – a menial work for many impoverished Parisian composers, like Pierre Boulez, for instance, later in the 1950s. Larrieu started composing film music in the late 1940s and was a renowned original soundtrack composer during the 1950s.
The 10inch LP “17 Flashes de Musique Incidentale” was self-released in the late 1950s, apparently as an early example of library music – like the title implies – to be used by professional film makers. The album consists of 17 instrumental tracks for small orchestra with Ondes Martenot accompanyment. These compositions include musique concrète sounds, tape loops and Theremin-like effects on the Ondes Martenot. While the first side features traditional string arrangements in the style of George Delerue, the B side consists of more original and varied compositions covering different needs of a film maker, like the African atmosphere of Flash #11, the glockenspiel of #13, the dog imitation on Ondes Martenot (!) of #15, or the menacing, ticking clock sound of #16. The entire Musique Incidentale project has similitudes with Jean-Jacques Perrey’s Prélude au Sommeil (1957), George Delerue’s stage music Ici A Commencé L'histoire (1961), Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia OST (1962), or Pierre Barbaud’s algorhythmic film music (Algorithme I and Les Abysses, 1963).
Various – Wanda Is Not Here, mixtape, UK/Germany, Wanda/Ono, August 2016
The inaugural release by a new UK/German label, Wanda Is Not Here is a cassette mixtape intended as a homage to Barbara Loden’s 1970 film, Wanda. These simple premises work as a unifying concept helping the integration of a variety of tracks into a miraculously coherent, alternative soundtrack. I particularly enjoyed the flawless and faultless transitions betweens tracks, sometimes thanks to film excerpts, sometimes, it seems, thanks to pure magic encounters. The music is bathed in a strong cinematic atmosphere full of spoken world, ambient beds and smooth acoustic guitar, reminiscent of famous film soundtracks like Eraserhead, Valerie and Her Week of Wonder, Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks, as well as landmark albums like From Brussels With Love or The KLF’s Chill Out. In addition to pre-existing recordings, this mixtape includes a track by Fith, apparently the next release scheduled on Wanda. See detailed tracklist on Bandcamp.
(Source: wandaportal.bandcamp.com)
This NTS Live mix is a lovely collection of short tracks from the Tellus Audio Cassette archive by Vancouver-based DJ Jaro Sounder – aka Taro Bremner. Free download from his Bandcamp page.
(Source: jarosounder.bandcamp.com)
Yoshimasu Gozo – The Voice Between: The Art and Poetry of Yoshimasu Gozo, retrospective exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, June–August 2016. See press release PDF.
During the 1960s and ‘70s, Japanese poet, visual artist, film maker and performer Gozo Yoshimasu (b.1939) developed a kind of poetry called Naked Memos, based on cut-ups, phonetic transcriptions, chance operations and collages, often in strikingly original page layouts – cf. 2011 interview and slideshow for Asymptote. A prolific writer and diarist, Yoshimasu’s drafts and original ideas fill up many notebooks since the 1960s, but are also the base for cassette recordings of his own voice – amounting to around 1,000 cassettes– as well as experimental videos of his own footage in specific places with narration, a practice he calls gozoCiné. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Yoshimasu has been working on a work-in-progress poem titled Monster, including multicolored handwriting, watercolors and collage works. He also experimented with the photographic medium and embossed copper designs. The exhibition catalogue comes with accompanying 2xCDs of Yoshimasu audio diary.
