Download Three Questions and an Answer in the TouchShop
www.ashinternational.com
1: Pillars of Wisdom - 5m27s
Filmed and edited by Paul Williams on location in Abu Dhabi.
Soundtrack: Gel by Philip Marshall, published by Touch Music [MCPS].
Paul Williams writes: "Arriving in Abu Dhabi my initial reaction, standing on the balcony of my hotel room on the 20th floor, was disorientation and near-vertigo. Laid out before me was a building site on a scale I had never seen before; a small island was under construction.
This was “a room with a view” of a very different kind. Not some picturesque vista illustrating historical achievement but a vast, stark scene of becoming; a display of the knowledge, effort and will required to alter the landscape and create a new world. The skyscrapers I was watching turn from plans into reality suggested the phrase “Pillars of Wisdom”, adapted from the title of T.E. Lawrence’s account of his life in Arabia.
As the days went by the view became a site of contemplation. There was always something going on, some detail that warranted attention: the endless comings and goings of the work-crews, the slow gestures of the cranes, the shifting patterns of aircraft warning lights.
I wanted to capture something of what I was witnessing so, as you survey these monuments rising from the white sand, look closely and you will see tiny events occurring: the slow trajectory of a car's headlights, the flare of a welder's torch at night, even a bird flying across the face of the sun…
As I have come to know this landscape I am continually reminded that even though we live beneath the gaze of giants, made with our own minds and hands, it is our simple joys that continue to define us as human."
Buy Pillars of Wisdom in the TouchShop
www.ashinternational.com
Track listing:
A: Carboneras Saints Day, 16 July 2002
B: Solo Piano Improvisation #54
Outside: Carboneras Saints Day, 16 July 2002 – procession of the Virgen del Carmen, recorded at Carboneras in the provence of Almería.
Inside: Solo Piano Improvisation #54 – one of two improvisations recorded at Eastcote Studios, London, 2003, for the film "I'll Sleep When I'm Dead", directed by Mike Hodges.
Both tracks edited by Philip Marshall.
Buy in the TouchShop
www.tapeworm.org.uk
www.myspace.com/simonfisherturner
The Tapeworm is pleased to announce that its tapes are available through all good distributors. Its buddies at Touch have kindly offered to stock their releases online in the TouchShop. Full release information can be found on the brand new website www.tapeworm.org.uk.
The cassette will never die!
Long live the cassette!
8pm – 11pm, Saturday 22 August
Hoffmann Building: Britten Studio and Jerwood Kiln Studio, Snape
Tickets: £10.00
Box Office: +44 (0)1728 687110
Book tickets online
Faster Than Sound bring more imaginative experiments with sound and image to the Snape Proms with The Suffolk Symphony, a specially commissioned residency and new work by leading sonic and visual production company Touch. Inspired by the historic coastline of Aldeburgh and its surrounding area including Aldeburgh Music's Snape Proms and its history, Touch will create a new audio-visual symphony from scratch, using only locally sourced sounds and images. Beginning on 16 August, Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Jon Wozencroft, Philip Marshall and Mike Harding will go on a week-long treasure hunt to unearth old records, field recordings, home-made sounds and images to create a new multimedia Suffolk Symphony, culminating in its first performance on the 22 August.
Following the offer of an Aldeburgh Residency by Faster Than Sound’s creative producer Joana Seguro, Mike Harding responded with the idea of creating a new multimedia work purely from locally sourced sound and image. Mike and BJNilsen went on an exploratory field trip in May to make initial field recordings which are being made into vinyl to be used in the performance, plus to kick start the project website www.thesuffolksymphony.net. The artists are already busy exchanging ideas in preparation for the residency in August, with Jeck drawing inspiration from the work of Benjamin Britten, especially his Simple Symphony, and Jon Wozencroft planning to describe the special place of Aldeburgh on film, shot in real time during the residency.
Directed by Mike Harding with sound by Philip Jeck and BJNilsen and images by Jon Wozencroft, the whole week will be documented for an interactive website by Philip Marshall. The residency will feature workshops and presentations by Philip Marshall and Mike Harding, including interviews with the other artists and a Touch showcase, culminating in the performance which will take place in the recently converted industrial space of the Hoffmann Building. The Suffolk Symphony will be subsequently released through Touch.
The interviews by Mike Harding during the residency will include a discussion with his partner Jon Wozencroft about his vision for Touch, now nearly 30 years old, and an assessment of the changes which have occurred in that period. Philip Jeck will discuss his work, particularly the method behind his live and recorded output, which eschews conventional instrumentation. BJNilsen assesses how field recordings have developed as source material for his work, and Philip Marshall describes the way artists communicate their ideas online and how this affects the relationship between them and their audience. Each interview lasts for one hour, including a 15 minute Q & A session, and dates and times will be shortly be announced via the website.
www.thesuffolksymphony.net
www.fasterthansound.com
www.aldeburgh.co.uk
Book tickets online
Philip Jeck is perhaps best known for his highly subversive work Vinyl Requiem (Time Out Performance Award, 1993) with Lol Sargent, a performance for 180 Dansette record players, 12 slide- projectors and 2 movie-projectors. In his performances, recordings, and collaborations Jeck combines samples, loops and scratches from various analogue sources to create complex, highly involving and often moving soundscapes. He has released 4 albums on Touch since 1995.
Born in 1975, BJNilsen has been active with experimental music since the early 90´s with various constellations. For the past 10 years he has been releasing albums on Touch, making music and sound for documentary film, television and commercials. He is focused on the sound of nature and its effect on humans, field recordings and the perception of time and space as experienced through sound, often electronically treated. He has also worked closely with Chris Watson on the project Storm, released in 2006, and a duet with Icelandic cellist Hildur Guðnadóttir.
Jon Wozencroft is graphic designer, author and instructor. In 1982 Wozencroft founded Touch, an independent multimedia publishing company. In 1988 Wozencroft's book on his colleague Neville Brody was published as The Graphic Language of Neville Brody. Wozencroft and Brody went on to found and publish FUSE – an experimental publication of graphics and experimental fonts. He has been a lecturer at Central St Martins College of Art & Design and at the Royal College of Art, both in London. In 1994 he was appointed main tutor and assistant course director for MA Interactive Multimedia at the Royal College of Art. He is currently Senior Tutor in the Communication Art and Design Department at the Royal College of Art.
Mike Harding is a curator & Producer; occasional exhibitions/installations/performances; Lecturer & Publisher; Author & Editor.
Philip Marshall is a freelance print and digital media designer of eleven years standing. Working out of London, Paris and Berlin, Philip has collaborated for the past six years with David Sylvian and his art director Chris Bigg developing the Samadhisound website and artist sites, and again with Bigg on projects by Jóhann Jóhannsson for the legendary 4AD label. He has been designing online for Japanese fashion house Comme des Garçons since 2005. He is a participant in the Touch audio visual arts project, founded in 1982, and its sibling label Ash International, working closely with founders Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding. Hands-on exploration of sound design was the natural extension of his work for Touch.
“Special case this one here…
This music-cassette (you know: plastic cases with brown wire that turn) was produced in an edition of 104 copies for Ash International and is being courageously distrubuted by Touch. Whoever still owns a cassette player is lucky: this tape is a thing to have!
Originally the music on this tape was part of an installation, displayed during an exhibition in Berlin. It was the plan of Philip Marshall to highlight everyday and not everyday sounds that we hear during our hectic activities, but to which we don't pay any attention. In this scheme he was absolutely unsuccesful. He did however succeed in putting our fantasies in motion. Let me explain: this cassette contains a not uninteresting mix of cut ups, white noise and button-turning-resort. So far the intention of the artist. The fact that the cassette is divided into an “Angel” side and a “Ghost” side, makes our imagination rather run wild. According to a certain theory, angels and ghosts would be able to make themselves audible by making use of certain radio frequencies, as if they could virtually surf on the radio waves which circle the world. Every now and then someone realises that entities want to make contact. The “Angel” side rather feels like a “Ghost” side, but the resulting effect doesn't lie: one gets the feeling that during bad radio reception we're able to catch sounds from another dimension.
Creepy!? intriguing, rather…
Consider this little sketch candy for soundfuckers, which I gladly consider myself.”
Buy Three Questions and an Answer in the TouchShop
www.darkentries.be
Also playing will be the fabulous Zerocrop and the glistening They Destroyed His Image, with the spectral Philip Marshall of Ash International DJing and playing whatever he jolly well wants (…with Baraclough's Dale Cornish supplying some audio muck otherwise from the charming caresses of his Macbook at the start)
]]>The old punk rocker in me had cranked the volume thinking I had to make it LOUD to get over the opening night din. When I turned it down to a normal (still loud) volume the work’s built in distortions were suddenly audible."
Read more about the Psychometry installation from the curators point of view at D-L Alvarez's blog.
You can follow his updates by clicking to: god-jr.livejournal.com
]]>Opening Friday, February 06, 6-9 pm with a live performance of Excerpted Maria Braun Marriage Crawl by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy with a commissioned soundtrack by Sam Long.
The all-star line up of Psychometry includes: Adrian Hermanides, Alexandre Estrela, Animal Charm, Anne McGuire, Aykan Safoglu, Benjamin Alexander Huseby, Brenna Murphy, Craig Goodman, Jack Falanga, Jennifer Locke, Kim Brauer, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Mike Kitchell, Nao Bustamante, Patty Chang, Philip Marshall, Stanley Lieber, Stephen Beachy and Wayne Smith
Psychometry Screenings:
Psychometry Artists’ Films, Saturday, February 7, 2009: 9:30 PM at Basso (Köpenicker Strasse 187-188) - Exile and Basso present an evening of haunted videos. Artists include Patty Chang, Nao Bustamante, Mike Kitchell, Aykan Safoglu, Craig Goodman, and Alexandre Estrela
Crash (The Crash of Flight 401), 1978: Sunday, March 01, 2009: 6:00 PM at Exile (Alexandrinenstr 4, HH 3.OG) - This screening brings to the disaster movie connoisseur the other film made about the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401. Fresh homemade popcorn will be served to enhance the thrilling movie atmosphere.
Anne McGuire: Adventure Poseidon, The (The Unsinking of My Ship), 2006, Sunday, March 08, 2009: 6:00 PM at Exile (Alexandrinenstr 4, HH 3.OG) - McGuire’s film restructures another Seventies’ ‘disaster flick’ with Ernest Borgnine, The Poseidon Adventure. Her story starts with the ending and ends at the beginning, sending our heroes deeper and deeper away from the rescue they so desperately fight for, bringing the dead back to life, and eventually reversing the tidal wave that threw them into each other’s unlikely company. The action moves forward, but the film is edited in a backtracking sequence that creates a new narrative without otherwise altering the footage.