Ran Slavins new album now out on Mille Plateaux
Oolong: Ambient Works is the 17th studio album from multi disciplinary artist Ran Slavin. A 74 min drone-ambient-minimal-symphonic infused LP that takes after various tea’s in the far east. Each track is accompanied by a slow and atmospheric visual journey shot by RS in East Asia and the total can be experienced in total and joined as an immersive 74 minute journey.Stream it here
It is the second release of Ran Slavin on Mille Plateaux after his CD/DVD Insomniac City in 2006 where the city is continuously alive, in an animalistic-inorganic way, as Guattari puts it.
Oolong (Wu-lung) tea originates from China and is actually transliterated from two words meaning “black” and “dragon” in English. Besides its inherent meaning, the two words describe the shape of the oolong leaves in their novel state. Oolong tea goes through a unique semi-oxidization process that ranges from 1% - 99%.
The immersive tea-walk in Zen radiates an infinity. It is an art of the path. The tea path is first and foremost a drama of water, but each place in Slavins journey represents a whole in itself. Everything in the cosmos is like the cosmos itself. Slavin’s tea path functions by adopting processes of neighboring art genres such as video, painting photographyand sound.
Slavin’s Oolong dissolves the environment into a blend of ambiences. The music integrates synthetic textures into a patch-worked concrete soundscape brimming with sonic harmonics, micro-sounds, interferences and designed noise. Slavins music is about catching the world’s alienness while reinventing the relation between materiality and the immaterial, the concrete and the abstract, and also between the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial dimension, what sounds to be here and what seems to be there.
The formal restriction to the audiovisual means of expression is similar to the minimalist concept of tea architecture. As an overall work of art, the tea path correlates to and anticipates the cinematic processes of shot, slow motion and montage. The tea path is the art of matter, body and spirit. Its not only about the glitchy ambient sound, but also about the dimension of cinematic production, in which one works with tools such as film material, camera, microphone, lighting, editing equipment and so on. The visibility leads to a comparative discourse with the sound of the movie. It is easy to recognize that the film and the tea path operate with a similar system of selective sounds. The ambient works in Oolong are not merely a signal but represent an ambiguous flow of signs with rich qualities. It is impossible to know exactly what the individual sounds signify. Sometimes it might be the intention to hear the sounds of nature. But its not a question of identifying its source and its effect. These acoustic phenomena have their subtle gradations and nuances that correspond to the vitality of the visual texture of things. Sometimes the sound refers to a traceable source, sometimes it refers to no definable source. The film acoustics, which are virtually generated have a metaphorical character comparable to the soundscape of the tea path. Not only the centripetal, but also the centrifugal orientation of the sound is imaginary. Slavins journey creates an artificial, abstract soundscape that deviates from the everyday perception of the sound environment. A microcosm and the cosmos opens up and reverses the relationship between the finite and the infinite.
First video here:
Affects & Dreams E03: Mille Plateaux Special „Derivative Quantumfield Communism“ performed by A!kira
Affects & Dreams presents a Mille Plateaux Special to coincide with our involvement in Mille Plateaux’s „Ultrablack Nonference“ happening in Graz, Austria this weekend.read more
graz: mille plateaux non-ference
ultrablack non-ference of mille plateaux FORUM STADTPARK, Graz 27. & 28.10.23
Calling all. This is our last cry before our eternal silence. This invitation is open to all. A call. A cry. Proposed is not a con-ference (con-ferre (lat.), bringing together), but a non-ference (to not carry). Negation, from the very beginning, always a line in the sand. A disintegration, coming apart and to come undone. Desonance, not resonance.
A being together in homelessness, an interplay of the refusal of what has been refused, the undercommon appositionality, a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question. The barbarian waiting before and after civilization.
Untimeliness. Discord with the false present. Ultrablackness is a determining force. The outside folding in. Background noise of the thermodynamic disequilibrium. An indifferent un_groundedness, opaque like a heterogeneous mixture or transparent like see-through fluids. Not to be differentiated, but the 0 that defines 1. Ultrablackness therefore is not to be confused with the void - emptyness -, but is intrinsically messy. That which messes with the attempt to define, to limit, and territorialize, a dæmonic force subverting the godly order, defying the One-God-Universe. Black noise, unllike the searing buzz of white noise, is barely audible. Black noise traces the quiver of things we fail to perceive. Ultrablack - blacker than black - denotes practices of negation, deconstruction, non-philosophy, pessimism and nihilism, heterogeneity, disintegration, queering, noise, insurrection, etc. etc.
„Everything has to be rejected – and everything has to be rethought. It needs an act of major and painful disruption, an act of distancing, maybe even of violently marking a break, a rupture, a stopping of routine communication: the axe that is hacked into the table during conversation. It is a kind of disaster studies, an act that breaks down the formal structures of space and time. In the mimicry of this approach to electronic music, both in science and in music, the formal structures of time collapse, regress to mud, and space is pushed back and forth until it bends to be trampled by the pulsations of alien music, while the thinking space becomes seasick: this is the disruption as it can be experienced when ultrablackness hits you. When the all-consuming, all-absorbing and all-imploding might of ultrablackness exercises its power of radical, pervasive and fundamental negation. The one message, the one action, the one intervention of ultrablackness is taking an axe and ramming it into the fake common ground or shared table and says: NO.“
WHY FRETS? 2083 by Marko Ciciliani
“In 1833, Sieglinde Stern, a professional weaver and amateur engineer, invented the first electromagnetic pickup and thus the first electrically amplified stringed instrument. One hundred years later, in 1933, her invention enabled the production of the first electric guitar, which became one of the most popular and widely played instruments in the history of Western music. Yet today, another 150 years later, no one plays this instrument anymore! What led to the rise and fall of the electric guitar? ..."read more
Missing Ear
Missing Ear is an undulatory and subsulatory motion between experimentation and contamination. In him prevails the continuous search for a sensory identity and a "cultural" openness that indulges in extra-dimensional places revealing the nakedness of new sonic places. Missing Ear (Matteo Gualeni), whom I met at the Triennale on the day summer gave way to autumn, illustrated his new work "Skyquakes" to me; a synesthesia through which the senses mingle and merge into an absolutizing perception.To be able to pre-order "Skyquakes" and hear a preview track click HERE.
A brand new project; a system that proposes continuous parallels between music becoming literature and literature becoming music: essential conceptualizations; transcendental and metaphysical ascending explorations.
A resident of Radio Raheem, Matteo Gualeni's artistic journey is immersed in one of the most creatively characteristic areas of the Lombard capital, Ortica. It is here that jazz, electronic and AV realities intertwine, the spatial idealization matching the atmospheric conditions of an abstractly real and inclusive music.
But let's leave it to him to tell us about himself through his interview with Parkett....
Hi Matteo, very welcome your return to Parkett! You will soon present your new work "Skyquakes," and, as is your wont, you will amaze us both for your stylistic choices and for the contents that refer to the transversal and universal value of music. An artistic flow whose creative exegesis seems to start from an interiority that looks inside the complexity of what it represents, an essential and existential value. An outside and an inside, a parallel weave that finds its natural expansion in the creative-compositional process? Basically I let emotion do a lot of the work during drafting, trying not to get caught up in too much architecture. This, in a nutshell, means that I like to let the moment-act free to actively explore the sound environment that is expanding, that is being built, without giving myself starting or ending points.
I like that you use the term "transversal" because I find it very much in line with the way I make music. There are so many influences, not only musical, that during my approach make their way into my head and so this has a not inconsiderable weight in the result then sonic.
To give you an example with respect to reading, a text that has really influenced me at the moment is: "AUDINT-Unsound:Undead" (edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys, Eleni Ikoniadou)
The absolutization of space points back to a broader observation of what is really going on. It's interesting to talk about spatial restitution, that is, minimizing physicality and then posing it as a whole. When we met, you dwelt on what sound represents for you; you defined it as the matrix of a project, as a primary instinct, first point on a blank page. Your essentialism actually appears to be a basket full of metaphors and coincidences. Explain more about what you mean... For me, as I think for all musicians-artists working in the world of music, the alpha element is vibration. The latter for me, as a native drummer, perfectly fits the idea of primary need. To strike a surface, a membrane, a cymbal represents the beginning of the journey, it also perfectly represents the original feeling of contact that I need to perceive that alpha element.
Whether this then that is developed in a more electronic language (like drum machines, I am really about machines like DRM1 Vermona MKIII drum-synths) or acoustic there is no difference; for me the rhythm line is the essence, the backbone that holds everything up and even sometimes the only thing needed to sustain an idea.
Essentialism could be summed up in a few lines in this response, although it then more broadly embodies a whole other (opposite) "overload message" argument that perhaps we'll reserve for a future chat!
The system of perceptions seems to indicate the fields of research in your latest work. In your perception, sound takes the forms you intend it to take. In a room or in a box (no matter where), perceptions, so understood, take bilateral and equivalent directions. Whether it is perception itself, the first filter? And how much do they coincide between what you feel and what you convey? Yes, I was so much influenced by research work I had done for my Sound Design studies in Conservatory, but in fact it is nothing more than a more "academic-scientific" view of the boundless love I have for percussive/rhythmic patterns.
I found in this formula a perfect junction between my past and what I would like to propose in the future. This practice is central to me, allowing me to range from ambient-timeless interludes to break-glitch rhythms and multifaceted bass, with a heavy cut and industrial matrix. To give you a better idea of the sound you will find on the record, my mentors include: Autechre, Objekct, Kangding Ray... but you'll find drumming lines inspired by Jojo Mayer or Steve Gadd.
Bergson said, "Un livre comme L'Évolution créatrice n'est pas seulement une oeuvre, mais une date, celle d'une direction nouvelle imprimée à la pensée." Creative evolution indeed can belong to a dilated time that is materiality while escaping from it. How much, in your creativity, in your art, in your music do sound images become active perceptions and break through patterns in favor of virtual circuits?How much do we talk about "sound images," and the way you posed the question I feel I can answer it by giving you a glimpse into my past. I have always had an intrinsic need to produce and express a lot of what I have inside through ambient music.
This premise for me is fundamental because how much space I give to the concept of sound images there is no formula, for, and, more apt or closer to this kind of music, of creating but also listening to it, as a listener.
This is definitely in my opinion the strongest way to provide someone with an effective way to escape and find within their "self" in images, stories and worlds to explore. One just has to find the best way to bring them out.
There are artists and musicians who succeed very well in this for me: Brian Eno, Alva Noto, Christian Fennesz or Mika Vaino to name a few. I released with Mille Plateaux, in my parallel project "Baransu," two landscape-ambient EPs: "Atmospheric Landscape I & II" (you can find them well on Bleep, Boomkat...in short various digital shops).
...And more life momentum, meaning dynamic adaptation in the environment! I understand that you want to project your sound, almost personify it, render it in a permeating atmosphere of cognitive hypnosis. If so can you tell us about it by clarifying especially how the creative moment begins? Yes, this I would love to be able to realize in live performances. That is, I would be really happy to be able to make a performance that focuses a lot of its content on the concept: experience.
I am working on a live performance that is as immersive as possible.
The idea of atmosphere fits well because that would be exactly what I would like to create and offer. (This work I am doing in parallel with a work also as a music user by attending various festivals, where from time to time I make a note of what struck me and made me feel inside the "live" and what made me stay "there" glued... so I try to treasure it and conversely also note what distracted me from the performance for example).
The excess of modern times, the speed of social mechanisms, the accelerated transformations-you claim-have perhaps torn apart the essence and qualitative volume of things thought. Your album seems to propose a reversal; it seems to have the tones of a discourse that places human beings in dialogue with themselves. How much technique accompanies your work? And how much does the work, conceived, created correspond substantially to the perceptual processes you propose? I couldn't tell you how much technique accompanies the work but I certainly have mental settings that I try to refine more and more because I want them to be characteristic of my language.
Regarding the essence and questionable quality of different material...it seems to me that it is appropriate not to hide behind a finger and be honest...I remember reading an article, maybe in DjMag, but I could be wrong, that claimed that on average one track is uploaded every second on Spotify. Assuming or not that this is true, it is quite undeniable that today we are truly inundated with music and audio content of all kinds.
Mentioning you this point, with my record, with the project in toto actually, I would like to try over time to bring a little more attention to the issue and raise more awareness on the topic. I would like to propose a record for more focused and active listening, more human-human and less algorithmic-human. Being also an underground grassroots genre I hope to reach the right niche and share with people interested in this kind of music the message and the sound itself!
Perception is defined as "a complex cognitive process of interpreting reality, which operates the synthesis of sensory data into information with meaning." It also represents a process that has natural repercussions on both behavior and environmental adaptation. Your album creates these states by also opening the door to multifaceted emotionality. What setting, what environmental/visual context do you intend to use to reach the sensibilities of your listeners? This kind of goes back to the question of live performance. I am currently studying it and I am really torn because I have two perspectives in mind, one very dark and industrial-toned (Berlin Atonal comes to mind as a possible collective imagery). On the other hand, the love I have for the AV world, which started with the "Baransu" project, also leads me to imagine a different live show from a visual point of view.
Although for this work I had the opportunity to collaborate with Marco Ciceri (who collaborated with Alessandro Cortini, Ellen Allien, Grand River) whom I met thanks to a fantastic person Aimèe, Gran River precisely. We had the chance to meet here in Milan and after immediately empathizing we reasoned about the project and collaborated on a video for one of the tracks of the album, but it is not public yet! For the moment I can tell you that we worked very well together and it was great to approach the AV world with another person, see and hear his vision and exchange feedback on this and other works.
The line between listening and an exploratory act, between observation and distraction, is very thin. Undoubtedly, "sharing" is closely related to curiosity, and curiosity is what causes us to approach what is new and original. Does this consist of your challenge? Creating a strong empathic relationship?
It's true, it's very subtle and it also risks being misunderstood but here is what I want to bet on. I would like to try to bring listening more and more toward an active line, of resistance to passivity, of real networking, between us musicians and music lovers.
"Listening is resistance" is a statement that a very dear friend of mine Daniela Gentile wrote in one of her texts thus titled "Listening as an Eco-Political Form of Resistance," and after reading it, it really helped me more and more to develop a personal and more critical thinking, at the same time broader than the POV of the single release, trying to bring the whole project towards a more solid and recognizable identity.
The people around us are crucial ... to stir up ideas, feelings and devise larger projects. Moreover, this sense of "activation" is a process that is also socially necessary in my opinion.
The Radio Show that I have been running for a long time on Radio Raheem I am trying to make it fully fit into this, where since the beginning of the year every month I have been trying to collaborate, share and exchange feedback with so many musicians, DJs and artists because I feel that this is how we can regain that sense of sharing, listening to each other true...
Collaborating on a mix is not just sharing a "slot" but sharing a moment, a call, sources of inspiration from which friendships can be born! In fact, for this I would now also like to thank Halina Rice, Sara Berts, Eluize, Syntax Erika and Mille Plateaux .
Yours is a new, complex and understandable album and we are as curious as when we receive a gift and cancel the rest, ... we can't wait to unwrap it! Thank you and all of you at Parkett.
//parkettchannel.it/missing-ear-skyquakes-educarsi-alla-condivisione-spaziale-dellascolto/
Article by Bienoise
An interface is choice frozen.You can read more by clicking here
Let’s shuck the lid and expose the underneath:
YOU ARE NOT INNOCENT: YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE LEADING TO A BAD LISTENING EXPERIENCE. THIS IS TAP WATER.
The truth of a text is never really written anywhere: we have to build this together. Not even Tolkien explained everything.
You never write a book of fragments.
You never approach a canvas clean.
You are not innocent: you are not immune to propaganda; you are not immune to nostalgia – there are traces of memberberries in any food, we’re domesticated by meaning.
ALBERTO ONCE ASKED ME: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF A FORTISSIMO TODAY? WHAT IS THE MEANING OF A FORTISSIMO TODAY?
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF A FORTISSIMO TODAY?
Pierre Menard, the writer of the Quixote according to Borges, tried to become a masterpiece, a De Cervantes whose words are sincere, but twisted into a strange panopticon of prismatic perspectives by the weight of time: not in vain three hundred years passed.
You never approach a canvas clean: everything is symbolic.
//non.copyriot.com/this-meaning-today/
Article by Andy Cowling (mit Foto)
In my album “star of the west” I documented the events that transpired in the USA between November 2020 and January 2021.You can read more by clicking here
The original project creation and development was funded by a Stipend from Musikfonds e.V. The following is an excerpt taken from the original project proposal (written in September 2020 with realization timeframe from November, 11 2020- April, 30 2021):
“In recent months, the public sphere of art has rapidly transformed into a domestic private sphere. In this respect, social distancing means not only distance from other bodies, but distance from the events of the world. Music and media serve as escapist means of distraction. On the contrary, my project tries to let the world enter our homes through music. The core of the project is an electronic composition that will relate directly to a contemporary political-social event. This event will most likely be social unrest.”
As a speculative endeavor, the series of events that are documented in “star of the west” were not totally unexpected. The unforeseen part was not the direction they would take, but, rather, just how dramatic the escalation became, beginning with the typical useless politicking involved in a presidential election and finally culminating with the storming of Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The sonic preservation and re-representation of these events on “star of the west” takes the form of an anthropological sonic documentary that draws on wide range of source materials, such as amateur cell phone videos, political speeches, Twitter/YouTube videos, mainstream news media, and sporting events, in addition to original materials, to provide an in-depth look at the subject matter. Some of the sampled materials are understandable and provide the general narrative for the events unfolding, while others are warped and distorted nearly beyond the point of recognition, used only to provide the necessary musical context to the events being covered.
//non.copyriot.com/against-escapist-entertainment/
Nonplusultrablack
From November 21, 2021 Synnika Frankfurt presents the installation
NONPLUSULTRABLACK in collaboration with the Frankfurt music label Mille
Plateaux.
Since 1991, the network initiated by Achim Szepanski around the labels
Force Inc, Mille Plateaux, Position Chrome, Communism Records and many
more has had a subterranean influence on the development of electronic
music from Frankfurt. Thus, entire genres such as Clicks & Cuts and
Glitch were significantly influenced by the releases of Mille Plateaux.
Glitch music is usually characterized by a transformation of sound
artifacts that can be caused by malfunctions of digital technology, such
as bugs, crashes, system errors, hardware noise, CD jumps and digital
distortions. „For us, glitch is more a part of Clicks & Cuts: dark
glitch is the non-signal used not to capitalize on the click or error as
a signal for the quasi-derivative of the surplus of successful
goal-setting, but as a non-successful swim in the noise of non-music.
Dark glitch is the non-signal used not to capitalize the click as a
signal for the quasi-derivative of the surplus of successful aiming, but
as non-successful swimming in the noise of the non-music. When we listen
to a track, we always hear other things, which Deleuze describes as
forces, duration, sensation, and lightness, depending on how tempos,
rhythm, and sound are varied.“ (Achim Szepanski)
Mille Plateaux has never merely affirmed techno-utopianism,
accelerationism, or Eshun’s Afrofuturism. They have been even less
impressed by the toxic and creative trends of techno capital, which has
brought the world to a frenzied standstill with its music of
simple-minded harmonies and metrics. Instead, explicitly political
stance is combined with aesthetic difference. For example, in 1993 with
the compilation Destroy Deutschland! or in recent years on the NON blog
(non.copyriot.com), which is closely linked to the label and on which
international theoretical and artistic contributions on topics such as
nonmusic, necropolitics, EconoFicition, GenericScience, Philofiction are
collected and published.
The focus is on the concept of ultrablackness: anonymous, dark, black,
hidden, concealed, encrypted, opaque, undercover, incomprehensible. The
concepts of invisibility work against the wars of appearances.
Ultrablack of Music dares the exodus and listens to those forces and
sounds that tell of the unheard in music. Sound, that is the vibration,
resonance and diffraction of waves in the black cosmos. „What is
Ultraback if not a project of political-aesthetic ex-cursion? We use
darkness to denote the outside. The outside has many names: The
disruption, the contingent, the void, the silence, the unexpected, the
random, the collapse, the catastrophe. But we also have protective
barriers, that’s the purpose of Deleuze’s ritornello, reminding us of
our own strength even as we travel with alien sounds and allow ourselves
to be led into the outside.“ (Achim Szepanski)
Blackness is a crypto-ontology, a crypto-sound that is absolutely closed
to being. Blackness is the basis of a non-music, a new musical utopia
rooted in the generic black universe. Mille Plateaux says with Laruelle:
„Simplify the color! …See black, think white! …Don’t see, be a seer.
Stop seeing and start visioning. Be a visionary.“
„We keep coming back to Deleuzo-Guattari’s politics: the nomad and the
poly-rhizome, the stranger who speaks in a small language, the
non-musician who traces, beyond the time of day, the immanent
rhythmicity of the rhythm in the hearing-within-the-rhythm that
transcends the beat of the significant „ding ding ding ding.““ (Achim
Szepanski) Today, all retro styles are sold as contemporary precisely
because there are no truly out-of-time alternatives. If everything is
retro, on the one hand it makes no sense to call certain phenomena
retro, on the other hand nothing is retro anymore. Time turns white and
techno, like rock before it, is end-stored in the museum. Mille Plateaux
is not about writing new music that draws from older recordings, but
about constructing new non-music inspired by the technological
conditions under which those recordings were made. The installation
NONPLUSULTRABLACK at Synnika opens a window into the history and present
of this attempt with contributions by Achim Szepanski, Thomas Köner,
Demystification Committee, Lain Iwakura, Frédéric Neyrat, John-Robin
Bold & Andy Cowling, Simona Zamboli and the Realism Working Group.
synnika.space/events/opening-nonplusultrablack
Achim Szepanski Interview: “Clicks'n'cuts is not a genre”
1. How is the newest reboot of Mille Plateaux different from all the previous ones?
To be more than constructive, the action of a label policy must free itself from the idea that salvation lies only in publishing now and in the future. In this framework, time remains trapped by declaring what is to come. The opposite is true when time is subverted, for example, when it is said that what is happening now makes a certain past possible, it becomes possible once again, but differently. So there is definitely a kind of intra-temporal communication between one period and the other. New label politics not only allows for a better understanding of yesterday's label politics, but, by freeing it from the force field of circumstances, it allows label politics to be experienced as an ongoing task, to be brought to its true, ephemeral conclusion. At the same time, the horrors of yesterday, thus imprinted on memory, are in this way zero and void. To do this, one must have the courage to partially excavate the old and, together with the new, allow it to become the protagonist of memory.
I mean, political music is music without words. It is not oriented towards the world (it has no object in the world that captures it), nor is it a question of perception. Political music indicates a non-world of pure auto-impression. It is radically black. The black aesthetic, which works without representation, contains the superposition of theory and music and leads to a suspended or non-communicative relation.
Only by subtracting from the system of light and color one can see the generic reality of blackness. Alexander Galloway refers at this point to the Haitian Constitution of 1804, which states that, regardless of their skin color, all citizens are called black. This pure blackness, such a cataclysm of human color, overrides color and denies the endless dynamics of black as white or white as black. Black is no longer the limit case, no longer the case of the slave, the poor, the indentured or debt-ridden worker. Black is the condition for a new Uchronia, a new utopia of the colored based on the generic black universe. It is about a new form of black justice unilaterally determined by the real, but never by a worldly reality.
Please check the full Interview Here: www.datawv.com/2021/09/interview-achim-szepanski.html
Fazemag Interview With Achim Szepanski
Admittedly, this magazine rarely deals with the thought models of philosophers and psychoanalysts. But without the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari, the following interview would hardly be possible. Both published a book called “Mille plateaux” in France in 1980, which was published in Germany in 1992 under the title “Tausend Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia ”. In 1993, under the influence of this post-structuralist philosophy, Achim Szepanski founded the label Mille Plateaux, in which, to put it simply, theoretical reading meets experimental sounds. Szepanski had previously installed Force Inc., a techno label that is now legendary. While this mixed up the club nights with breakbeats and a straight bass drum, avant-garde artists such as Alec Empire researched on Mille Plateaux,
However, the EFA sales bankruptcy in 2004 represented a turning point. Hard years followed. Mille Plateaux kept appearing and disappearing as well. But for some time now the label has been shining again with regular book and music publications. There are composers like Gianluca Iadema, Andrey Detochkin or Thomas Köner (solo and as part of Porter Ricks) and authors like Robby Basler. The clever and critical head Achim Szepanski has also brought an equal A&R on board with Iain Iwakura.
Please check the full Interview Here: www.fazemag.de/mille-plateaux-der-zustand-des-ungeformten/
Simona Zamboli Review By Groove Magazine
Eternity in the ether? On her label debut with Mille Plateaux, Milanese producer Simona Zamboli sounds as enigmatic as the title of her album. Remnants of techno tracks can be found in her analog-digital hybrids at best as rhythmic patterns that rarely need a beat, yet decidedly rely on repetition. The club is merely a memory from the pre-pandemic world in this narrative touted as "ultra-black," but arguably incompatible with the reality of Ethernity. Zamboli, who has sometimes indulged her penchant for rumbling bludgeoning techno in other releases, such as Insane Industry, succeeds here in a seemingly paradoxical coexistence of amorphous and textural, a kind of abstract downtempo, if you will, in which atonal frequencies peacefully coexist alongside harmonic figures, brittle-repellent and strangely homey-warm at the same time. For all its detail, the music never seems self-indulgent, but definitely like an end in itself, a resounding, strange attractor.
Fifteen Questions Interview With Simona Zamboli
Fifteen questions interview with Simona Zamboli
The Luxury of Being Weak
Name: Simona Zamboli
Nationality: Italian
Occupation: Post production sound engineer, sound artist
Current release: Ethernity on Mille Plateaux
Recommendations: The visions of Hildegard of Bingen. 1928
Please check the full Interview Here: www.15questions.net/interview/fifteen-questions-interview-simona-zamboli/page-1/
RA Introduces Porter Ricks On Mille Plateaux
A 25th anniversary edition of Porter Ricks' 1996 debut album Biokinetics will be released on Mille Plateaux on June 21st.
The German duo comprising sound engineer Andy Mellwig and mastering engineer Thomas Köner first released music as Porter Ricks in '96 over three 12-inches on Chain Reaction, a sub-label of Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus's Basic Channel imprint. The tracks from those three releases, along with two new cuts, were compiled to form Biokinetics, the first full-length to appear on Chain Reaction and one that's still considered one of dub techno's finest LPs.
When it was released in 1996, Biokinetics was only issued in full on CD, and it wasn't until 2012, when Type Records reissued the album via a run of 700 vinyl copies, that it became available on wax. Mille Plateaux's anniversary edition comes as a double-vinyl set and features newly-designed cover art.
Read Will Lynch's review of Biokinetics and check out our label of the month feature on Basic Channel.
ra.co/news/74823
Neural Magazine Review
Achim Szepanski is the mostly known as the founder of two historical music labels, Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, but he is a quite distinctive figure in the electronic music scene. His original musicological positions blending Deleuze, Marxism and radical politics are unique and always intriguing through the lines of argument. He edits this book with an attentive international selection of artists, theorists and musicians researching both political and technical aspects of electronic music composition and economy. Among the essays we find the cosmological and ecological aspects of spectral music introduced by Frédéric Neyrat, an extensive explanation of the title’s militant and structural meaning by Szepanski himself, Holger Schulze defining the current capitalist use of sound as Panacoustic Society with its Sensology (sensorial ideology), and Shintaro Miyazaki describing his definition of ‘Counter-Raving’, a poetic collective attempt to reclaim a different timing to enable liberating practices. It’s a theoretically challenging text, where sound and music are nodal elements of a political scrutiny, supported by good doses of theory (McKenzie Wark is one of the most cited authors). Indeed, this surprising book includes also a code to download for a whole compilation of tracks, intended to be its aural consistent extension.
You can read Neural magazine review by clicking Here
Vienna Unground By Bill B. Wintermute
a) Cut-Up: "unground"
The inability to remember is usually associated with the paralytic symptoms of memory holes; Crypt(-ion), non-place, holey space, crack or column, formations with a degenerate whole, hidden folds or eclaves, ( ) hole complex, hidden writing, chaining mechanisms, transposition, transmission and encryption. A plot hole, the fractured symbol, does not operate on behalf of absence, but registers and conveys the activities of a sub-surface life; a concept that leaves room for fractures, silence, not least improbability, plot holes – transformations and repetitions, which in turn are re-transmitted and repeated through compulsive behavior – are psychosomatic indications of at least one more plot, encrypted transmissions, such as a flood of desires and fears, introducing gaps, discontinuous tunnels and porous spaces in the chronological sphere of memory, thus making it more prone to time lapses, abruptly schizophrenic catabases (personalitypulverizing blackouts, descents free from the hegemony of solid and void), and loss of wholeness. Every element of the external world which attracts the attention of the human being is received (eaten, physiologically, juridically, or intellectually appropriated) or split off (excreted) with the utmost brutality; densely populating itself in the holes it burrows through and digs out, a complex that "behaves like an open wound" and infects the entire psyche. For every inconsistency or anomaly visible on the ground, there is a buried shizoid consistency; the effect is produced simulatenously by two causes, two polar human impulses, with two different logics, that of excretion and appropriation: ciphering generates desire and desire generates ciphering, the line of emergene (the nemat-function) directs itself in accordance with the resistance to emergence. >>Where there is a prohibition, there must be a desire<< (the dynamism of emergence) for things that are placed under the >embargo of impossibility< to develop a >>peculiar magical power<< (the degree of porosity). The course of emergence in any medium to the formation of that medium, comparable to >>with electrically charged objects<<, the more agitated the line of emergence becomes, the more convoluted and complex the host medium must be. Such a 'charge' is equally tempting and frightening; one must enjoy and at the same time give it up, in this sense, memory holes are not accessible for the subject and its integrated self but that which is exterior to the subject and has no self (no one); unveil and re-encrypt its effect is to deterriorate the primary unified plot or remobilize the so-called central theme and its authority as a mere armature or primary substance for holding things together. The exclusion of the heterogeneous elements from the homogeneous realm of consciousness therefore has a formal similarity – structure and function alike – with the exclusion of elements as in the dynamism of emergence and formation in porous earth, which describes the psychoanalysis as unconscious and by censorship will be kept away of conscious I. This is the pattern that the crypt sets and that pulsates in the dots and dashes that it sends out. A process set up anywhere reverberates everywhere. Listening to repetition frequencies, following patterns of variations.
Superficially dynamic plot or the grounded theme (which can register itself as plot holes) by overlapping them with the surface (superficially dynamic plot) or the grounded theme. The craving for the return of catastrophe creates a need for repetition, memory gaps, with their space-time lapses, function as a ( )hole complex through which nether entities seep through, rush towards our world; Memory gaps are the instruments of their homecoming. The difficulties that confront the detection of unconscious forms of existence are similar to those that prevent the recognition of heterogeneous forms: Every hole is more footprint, prowling underneath – lust and the law.
The past as a static chronological horizon intrinsically tends to sedentarize all kinds of activities in itself, or to make itself the stabilizing ground of activities in present or future: The past belongs to the Divine and tradition – prohibitions in the name of God, prohibitions of certain pictures, Prohibitions of certain content – there are many prohibitions, but the two most important ones are incest and death. Memory as a playground of agitated activities in the past which break the organizational consistency of the past in regard to present and future. Once you've come across these patterns, they go into flesh and blood over utilizing every plot hole, all problematics, every suspicious obscurity or repulsive wrongness as a new plot with a tentacled and autonomous mobility, repeat themselves endlessly, the main plot is the map or the concentration blueprint of
plot holes (the other plots).
( )hole complex
b) technical processing:
- transmission of the audio file "Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor From Warsaw" on tape
- the tape is buried for two months, then dug up / exhumed
- then inserted in a mixture of different detergents for several days
- finally disturbed with a magnetic-field & warmed up with fire
- afterwards the tape was redigitized; while playing back there were disturbances in between, creating gaps & distortions
- from these parts, the starting material was reconstructed, so that only small deviations from it remained
- the resulting reconstruction was played several times in the sewer of Vienna and recorded binauraly - play
& recording location, as well as perspective / position, were changed
- the different recordings were layered;
in addition, some of the tracks duplicated and delayed (delayed)
- finally, the 24 channels of 3D sound were distributed on 12 tapes, which are supposed to be played simultaneously
c) technical instructions:
The piece “vienna unground” is designed for up to 24-channel 3D sound
See: iem.kug.ac.at/fileadmin/media/iem/services/jahresberichte/2002/CUBE.pdf
24 loudspeakers have been aligned in three rings, where the lower ring consists of twelve speakers to achieve maximum localization in the horizontal plane. The middle ring is built of eight loudspeakers, where the remaining four speakers form the top ring. (see fig.3) “
It uses 12 tapes (page A), each controlling 2 of the 24 channels (Eg Ch 1.2, 3.4, 5.6, …)
The individual tapes are to be started by one person at the same time as possible
After the end (~ 7: 40min) the tapes have to be stopped again
→ Although the piece was designed for 24-channels, it can be played back on any even number of speakers.
You can listen to the track on bandcamp by clicking Here
Reason Album By Seskamol Review By Artnoir
Celebrating the mistake, the insecurities and digital breaks, it can be a lot of fun. And not only reveals gaps in the system, but possibly even the often invoked ghost in the machine. This is possible with the glitch style, extreme sound tracks are digitally interrupted and cut up, the new form hyperglitch goes even further. Seskamol , who is breaking new ground with his album "Reason", presents a prime example.
In the background light and thoughtful piano melodies can be heard, embedded in the reverb and comforting, the storm spreads over them. Rhythm and percussion become an unpredictable state, Seskamol lets the pulsating passage rise up suddenly and then collapse in a crooked manner. That could be disturbing and daunting, but thanks to the ingenious folding of the beats and basses it is beguiling and beautiful.
"Destiny" takes the piano and the extreme conditions, balances everything and turns up the contrast. In addition, there are individual speech samples, calming gaps ("Epic") and a feeling of space. Breakcore without brutality, or at least in correct relation to the rest of the form. "Reason" is a defined, raw and experimental construct at the same time, Seskamol offers a departure into a new era.
Text: Michael Bohli
You can read Artnoir review by clicking Here
Musique Machine Review
Blakk Harbor - A Modern Dialect [Mille Plateaux - 2020]
Pulsing through the crisp detritus of a 2020 street, Blakk Harbor's second album, A Modern Dialect, teases at a techno future sound while still firmly placed in the present, expounding upon modern ideas. It's this relatable foresight that gives A Modern Dialect its charm; it's the friendly tour guide from the future. Not capitalizing on set rules of sound for any genre, Blakk Harbor's latest is an interesting, propulsive thought piece of techno industrial.
Blakk Harbor's time scale mash up starts with the cover and continues on in the electronics within. The ancient sculpture (~2400 B.C.) looks both ancient and post-modern, and hints at the timelessness of experimentation. Does art always need a timed frame of reference? A Modern Dialect feels like a vision into a sleek, fast, cyberpunk future. However, at the same time, this could fit well as a soundtrack to the timelapse footage of an ancient city being erected. While it would seem anachronistic and draw the ire of many reviewers, we see that past through our modern lens, so why wouldn't we hear it with our ears? This Cycladic figurine cover image shows that we are closer to our ancient ancestors than we like to believe. Rooted in percussive beats, A Modern Dialect captures the ancient attachment of rhythm and gives it a rough, electronic skin. Pounding like a post-hunt heartbeat, the songs contained speak to the core of the listener and asks the question, "why is this not primal as well?" What makes the music fit the time frame: the skeleton or the skin? While it's kind of a chicken/egg scenario, it makes one wonder. And, while we tend to think that the further back in time the further from our modern tastes people would be, Blakk Harbor brings in a different viewpoint. Sure, the dandies playing at the early 19th century cotillion wouldn't approve of this, but it's a fair wager that early civilizations may find more in common with A Modern Dialect than with chamber music.
Oft times delightfully rough, Blakk Harbor's techno-industrial A Modern Dialect uses a percussive drive to push its electronic agenda. Shattering definitions of timeliness and modernity, Blakk Harbor puts its notion forth simply by juxtaposing an ancient sculpture with nearly futuristic electronic music. While this may not be as much of a thought piece to many as much as a reason to tear it up on the highway, the album is still there for all to enjoy. Take from it what you want, as that is why art is here, and that is why art will forever be.
You can read Musique Machine review by clicking Here
Free Download On Bandcamp
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
"IT’S THE END OF WHAT YOU SEE AROUND YOU: NOW, HERE, EVERYWHERE. I DON’T KNOW WHAT IT IS OTHERWISE." (Marguerite Duras)
Credits
Released June 3, 2020
Picture by
de.crimethinc.com/posters/a-new-world
Text cut-up; original text by Laurie Penny : pennyred.blogspot.com/2011/08/panic-on-streets-of-london.html
You can download the album by clicking Here