Today he turns his face towards the genre or mode of field recordings, phonography, and documentary sounds; or does he? The track titles indicate we’re hearing recordings of a radiator / heating system coming to life, the rain falling on a metal roof, and a clock ticking; yet the credit notes indicate FW is working with synths, electronics, and a sound design environment called KYMA. It’s possible he fed his home recordings into this processing set-up, in order to create the effects he’s seeking. “The album is about daily sounds”, he mentions in his enclosed letter, almost implying he’s making a meta-commentary rather than embarking down the more prosaic route often followed by many phonographers. The point of regenprassein is that Wittenburg assumes we don’t pay enough attention to these small background sounds, either because we’re so familiar with them or because they’re virtually inaudible, or our brain conditions us to tune them out. Or some combination of all of these. His plan is to make us aware, and to bring out their “musical” qualities.

This all may sound familiar to some readers…I think it’s a line of enquiry that’s been showing up in experimental sound art for about 20-25 years now, and most of the artistes who do it or talk about it (from Disinformation to Aphex Twin, and Merzbow who spoke about other musicians recording their washing machines, and David Toop trying to listen to the sound of his own house) are always ready with a John Cage quote to express their alignment with the avant-garde, and Wittenburg likewise confirms that his regenprassein is “in the line of John Cage”. Although the record is extremely quiet, and you have to strain hard to perceive the details of the sound events on offer, there is something enduring about the way he’s managed to compress so much information into this space, as if a form of purification had taken place. It’s possible his editing, selection and processing work has led directly to this very compacted statement, however minimal it may be.

Still very enigmatic though, and I’m not sure if I am brought any closer to perceiving or understanding the nature of rainwater or clocks by this record, although I doubt that was his intention in the first place.

From 20/02/2024.

Guionnet has been producing very impressive large-scale, multi-dimensional collaborative enterprises of late, often occupying that increasingly well-colonised zone between composition and improvisation, and leaving me with the impression of many players scattered around the rooms of a large building, hopefully a disused art gallery, and playing for a week at a time to realise a new hope for the cosmic destiny of man. But one mustn’t overlook his skills as a solo saxophone player. If you enjoy the sound of the alto played with brio and gusto, buy some Eric Dolphy records; but tune in here if you want to hear considered, measured tones which glide through the soul with the ease of a flying drone exploring the Grand Canyon.

Lê Quan Ninh, veteran Parisian percussionist and founding member of Quatuor Hêlios (to join it, you have to be a Man from the Sun), is a fellow I haven’t heard enough, but his credentials could get him the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in the cut-throat world of New Music. His contributions to Variations VII for Epicentre Editions, an astonishing realisation of John Cage’s ideas, were as non-pareil as a sedan chair made of melons; not only playing on that record, he recorded it, annotated it, and displayed deep comprehension of the layered moving parts to that complicated exploit. What he’s doing on this record continues to puzzle marine biologists around the globe, but he can make a membrane resonate until it produces the voice of thunder and he can scrape bare metal in ways that pass beyond the noise-barrier into sublime clouds of joy.

Bien entendu, the French duo have to perform very slowly on these September 2022 recordings taped by Nils de Deyne (with special dispensation from the Embassy), so these sound-generating actions do not manifest as indulgences in extended technique, mere exercises for the bony fingers, but are rather drawn from a deep well of emotional hessian. One pocket of this deep well is earmarked “you think you know a guy”. You see, the angle which the press release is trying to work is that these two geniuses are both French, about the same age, both working in free improvisation, have passed like ships in the night on many occasions and written mutual billets-doux to each other, yet have never played together in a tournament. By the latter I mean they never performed or made a record together, until this one, although a diligent score-keeper might include a brief foray in 2014 which was connected to the journal Revue & Corrigée and its Raymond Leblanc-styled svengali editor. As part of this general misunderstanding, it seems that Ninh was convinced their fathers knew each other, yet they’d never even met up. Hence the title, of which the album comprises five variations on that sentence. In like manner, it’s possible to read every puff, every hammer, and every pregnant pause as replete with meaning and doubt.

If this had been re-enacted with more egotistical musicians in the field, the result would have been a feisty double album called My Dad Can Beat up Your Dad. But instead, they’re like two wild animals sizing each other up, using trunk, whiskers and fur to gradually come to some mutual recognition. From 2nd January 2024.

Today’s item A Right To Silence (MEENNA meenna-952) is unusual – three CDs in the box, and each one represents an individual member of the trio making a “choice” of the same source material, that is a corpus of music recorded live during a 2021 residency in France. Starting with the exact same “raw recordings”, as described here, the end result is three different albums. I’m quite prepared to believe all that, although I haven’t yet had the time to make detailed comparisons between them; and if one would like to know a little bit more about what the “choice” actually entailed, then I direct you to the intensive and detailed booklet, compiled by Thibault Walter, which conveys the process quite vividly, starting out with the proposal that these “three CDs act as an aural diffraction plate” – about as disarming a conversation-starter as you could desire.

There’s nothing bad about any of the music in this box, but the surprising dimension to me is that DDK apparently live by a strict rule, that of “non-influence-in-each-other’s-choice”, and they’ve been adhering to it quite carefully for several years. Non-influence? This is quite a radical take on free improvisation, which for years has been open to the possibility of other musicians influencing each other, either through performing together on the same stage, or sharing recordings, or otherwise collaborating and interacting as humans, but perhaps I’m being very naive and old-fashioned, and my long-held assumptions are now called into question. The austere DDK rules are, I think, further manifested in certain track titles here: ‘One is a Different Person’, ‘Precious Inattention’, ‘Sometimes Audible and Sometimes Inaudible’, and of course ‘A Right to Silence’. Some of these sentences carry the tone of an ideology, a belief system where political correctness and tact and purity of thought are privileged over such quaint notions as spontaneity, craft, or love of music. It’s possible I’m seeing a regime of severity and prescriptive practice, where in fact DDK simply regard their method as a productive discipline. But some of this ideology, along with its stiffness, shows up in the music here. Cold, sterile, lifeless; it’s as though the musicians are tip-toeing through a roomful of porcelain, afraid to make a move for fear of upsetting the others, failing to respect the “right to silence”, or otherwise breaking the rules.

If this musical stalemate is one possible endgame to years of reduced playing, minimalism, and extended technique, I can’t say I like it much; and the prospects for the continued life of improvised music (already a very marginalised art form) are in danger of being curtailed by such inflexibility. Even so, some interesting new sounds may emerge from this box set over time, and it might be that my concerns are entirely misplaced. From 15th September 2023.

Danish label Janushoved has lately been releasing some very lovely electronic ambient music on cassette and this recording from Sejlet is a good example of what Janushoved specialises in: graceful if perhaps introspective ambient with a melancholy air. Apart from “Halvvind mod Kerteminde”, most tracks are quite short, the last couple of pieces very much so, and all of them are very distinct from one another in atmosphere and mood as well as tone. “Halvvind mod Kerteminde” especially is a dreamy piece in which you can float away completely enveloped in a cushion of serenity and peace, accompanied by occasional birdsong, insect rhythm and wisps of trance drone. Later tracks like “Sjællands Rev” and “Korshavn” may have a darker atmosphere with a more sombre, wistful mood while “Langør”, definitely not the liveliest piece here, does no more than what its name (in English, “languor”) says.

For me, the most attractive (and the shortest!) piece here is “Sælen Ved Romsø” which packs in a dreamy (even if sickly sounding) fairy-tale world with tinkly tones and bleached swirling drone, and then another dream-like soundscape of toy-like tones and background fumbles, all of which give the entire one-minute wonder (well, maybe almost two minutes) the impression of being a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it snapshot of a dizzy kaleidoscope universe filled with ever-changing colour and spectacle.

At just under 21 minutes in length, this truly is a miniature universe of wonder and magic which, if you’re willing, can expand to infinite dimensions in your head.

If you’re keen to claim a physical copy of this recording in your collection, you apparently have to fork out US$777 for a handmade copy from Philadelphia-based label Boul God if you buy it on the label’s Bandcamp page. Apart from the eyebrow and hair-raising expense involved, this minimalist ambient drone journey through forbidding Arctic soundscapes is compelling enough in itself right from the discombobulating start of long richly buzzing drones cut and shaped by an odd throat-catching drone melody loop in opening track “We Heard Him Say Prayers to the Ice”. The entire premise of “Polar Hidden Sun” is based on US naval officer Richard E Byrd’s supposed discovery of the entrance to the Hollow Earth at the North Pole on 19 February 1947. My understanding is that Byrd was actually in Antarctica from late 1946 to early 1947 leading Operation Highjump to establish an Antarctic research base (and claim a sizeable chunk of Antarctica) for the United States, but why let this fact get in the way of an intriguing conspiracy theory?

For such a minimalist ambient work based on repetition, and featuring such strange mysterious sounds, “Polar Hidden Sun” is a fascinating sprawling soundscape universe of dark art, full of mystery and danger as we follow the album’s protagonist into the chthonic underworld. If the first track was hypnotic and enticing, the second track “Out of the Darkness, a Slow Strobe of Purple” is ominous, even threatening as extended tones are pushed beyond their usual ranges of expression and mood into deeply unsettling sonic shadow territories. Subsequent tracks – the album features four tracks altogether detailing Byrd’s adventures beneath the North Pole – are even more filled with dread and murky subterranean mystery. Final track “We Carried Him to the Thaw Box” – I hope I’m not giving away the ending here – is the only track to have a definite (if rather angular) rhythm structure. The mood here seems resigned, as though catastrophe had already occurred while we were occupied with earlier tracks and all that remains is to recover a frozen body, or frozen bodies.

It is mostly quiet, with no sudden earth-shattering climaxes, and some listeners may feel put out that the album stays resolutely sparse in its approach to its subject matter right through to the final fade-out.

By the way, you can get the album for just US$5 at Boul God’s Big Cartel page.

Initially this recording by Dutch-Czech vocalist / musician Marianne Svašek comes across as serene and straightforward, just right for easy-listening relaxation, and perhaps for many people it will be no more than that, but I find that the more I listen to it, the more mysterious and demanding it actually is. Svašek sings in the dhrupad style of classical Hindustani (north Indian) vocal music. This style of music is traditionally performed solo or by a small group of singers to the beat of a barrel drum with accompaniment by a sitar or a tanpura (a long-necked, four-stringed instrument). Songs sung by dhrupad singers are usually religious in theme and may be dedicated to praising particular Hindu deities.

Although “Marwa” was released as an album, it is actually a one-track recording in which Svašek performs an alap raga. In dhrupad music, the alap is usually the first part of a three-part song, but it can last as long as an hour before the main melody begins. The alap is slow and controlled, and consists of a set of recurring syllables, the intention being to emphasise the purity and clarity of each note sung with perfect pitch. There is no drum accompaniment, just the tanpura or sitar. As with much classical Indian vocal music, dhrupad music does not use harmony and only uses one single melodic line.

Svašek’s performance of the alap raga runs true to dhrupad music tradition; hers is a steady and gradual exercise in restraint that results in a tranquil and restful yet still intriguing work. There is an unearthly quality about it as well and at times the singer seems as much awed as we are by what she is singing. The improvisation betrays no egotistical impulse: the singing is good as a result of it adhering to what dhrupad music demands of it. At the same time, there’s no denying that Svašek has a distinctive voice with a clear, slightly nasal quality.

Listening to “Marwa”, I feel that time stops still and the whole world pauses, entranced by Svašek’s singing and the hypnotic tones of the two tanpuras (one played by Svašek, the other played by Vilhelm Bromander, with whom Svašek has collaborated in the past). My head feels very clear after hearing this album – that surely must be a recommendation in itself to others!

Roel Meelkop’s career as a sound artist stretches back some 40 years since he started the post-industrial project THU20 with four other musicians in the early 1980s, and later decided to dedicate his career to investigating sound and music while studying visual arts and art theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. Among other things, his discography as a solo artist and collaborator with others (including Kapotte Muziek with Franz de Waard and Peter Duimelinks) is staggeringly huge, and Meelkop’s recorded output since 2022 has been consistently steady and prolific. “Viva in Pace” is one of two solo albums Meelkop released in 2023, and its title (in English translation from Italian, “Live in Peace”) expresses an anti-war theme and Meelkop’s own frustration that, as one person out of billions living on Earth, he has very little control or influence over global events and the processes and decision-making that lead to outbreaks of conflict and war between nations or groups of nations.

Organised in four parts, of which three are quite lengthy, “Viva in Pace” is dominated by synthesisers though Meelkop makes use of electronics, modern and vintage, in parts. The album has a very minimal presentation in which passages of quiet or even silence are as important as bursts of angry noise or insistent drone. Listening to the four tracks, I do get the impression the album is bursting with conflicting tensions and feelings, all related to Meelkop’s own state of mind and anger when he recorded this work over 2022. What is the role of the artist or musician in situations where the world appears to be heading inexorably towards war because some parties with their own agendas, backing and manipulating governments and politicians, plan to profit financially from the outbreak of conflict? How can artists, musicians and others try to lead people back to the path of peace when everything appears to be against them? There is a lot of anger and despair in the music, especially in “Viva in Pace II”, there is loneliness and frustration, but there also seems to be some hope and a determination to keep going, to keep trying, if only to keep one’s head clear of confusion and one’s spirits from falling into depression.

Accordingly the album can appear uneven, starting very loudly on “Viva in Pace I”, maintaining a steady flow of noise and drone on “Viva in Pace II” and then going quiet or introspective on the remaining tracks with more fragmented sounds and noises. The album doesn’t exactly end on a triumphant note but perhaps the point of the work ending as it does is that we as individuals who care about the state of the world must make our own decisions as to what appropriate actions we should take to protest the directions and decisions politicians and other so-called leaders are taking and making that are dragging nations – and us – into unnecessary wars, violence and mass deaths.

Originally from Calabria in southern Italy, Alessandra Rombolà trained as a flautist in contemporary classical music in France, Italy, Spain and the UK, specialising in extended techniques, the notation and the contemporary classical repertoire of the flute. She lived in Madrid for 20 years where she taught at the Madrid Royal Conservatory and worked as both a soloist and collaborator in various musical projects. Currently she lives and works in Oslo as a freelance musician concentrating on solo projects, one of which “Out of the playground” is a record of Rombolà’s recent collaborations with four composers – Daniela Terranova, Jan Martin Smørdal, Ingar Zach, Lasse Marhaug – on solo flute and electronics with the aim of breaking out of their respective music genre confines (“the playground”) to discover new musical territories.

Jan Martin Smørdal’s two pieces “Répétition II” and later “Répétition” feature the addcoder, an instrument developed by Smørdal that records, amplifies and plays back at once. In these pieces, Rombolà plays a phrase that the addcoder throws back at her and which she has to replicate exactly, so that the addcoder ends up layering her efforts continuously and creates network upon network of iterations and repetitions. The resulting flute music can be very eerie and otherworldly, and especially on “Répétition” you can feel you are in a very stark natural environment where your only companions are the rocks strewn over bare ground and biting cold air whipping your bare face. “The Ring”, composed by both Rombolà and frequent collaborator Zach, is a minimalist game of hide-and-seek played by Rombolà on light-footed bass flute, piccolo and pre-recorded flutes in succession with Zach’s slow and steady electronics. Terranova’s “Breathing Rust and Clouds” showcases Rombolà’s flute work only, with no electronics, and this work shows the flautist in full flight, skipping through the space with feather-light flurries of melody and a series of light percussive bops that almost seem alive.

On the last piece, “Our Forbidden Land”, Rombolà plays flute, piccolo, alto flute, bass flute and electronics, from which music so generated Lasse Marhaug created a work and gave it to the flautist to create more melodies for more recordings by Marhaug. The resulting work is a gradual construction from the initial woodwinds into a massive structure of flute melodies, electronics, unusual percussion effects and a low-end steady droning ambience. In its last few moments the composition becomes a huge noisy, even screechy and very heavy dronescape.

Of the five pieces, the contributions from Marhaug and Smørdal are definitely worth the price of the album even if Marhaug’s piece might be slow in its evolution from light and fragile to a solid monolith of flute-and-electronics noise. The other compositions are interesting in revealing the flute’s potential for extreme music and playing techniques though they also demonstrate the limits for that potential: they do sound very fragile, even insubstantial at times, and need another instrument or set of instruments to contrast with and complement the flute and its delicate character.

As a media artist, academic and researcher, Bill Seaman has produced a considerable corpus of work, including installations, and commissions spanning the globe over the past 40 years, but his work as a composer and musician is probably not quite as well known. From what I have been able to see online, Seaman released an album of musique concrete and experimental music in 1991 but his musical career didn’t really take off in earnest (as measured by album and other releases) until 2014, and since then his output has been steady with solo and collaborative work.

“The Clear Distance” may be Seaman’s third collaboration with electronic musician / media artist Stephen Vitiello, on which the two swapped various sound materials and worked on one another’s recordings, then swapping them again for further work. The overall result though does not sound overworked or loaded with layer upon layer upon layer of music and effects; rather the entire album comes across as very minimalist in its approach, contemplative in mood, and sparing in delivery. Space seems to be as much an instrument in its own right as are the piano (the dominant instrument on most tracks), banjo, clarinet and various other acoustic instruments that feature on several tracks. Some electronic treatments appear on the last track “The Rest”. Recordings by other musicians, worked on and arranged by Seaman and Vitiello, also feature on a number of tracks.

Although the music is organised in eight tracks, you could listen to them all as one long continuous soundtrack, due to the improvisational nature of the music, but the pace is very slow and languid, and changes in the music are usually gradual. You can treat the music as background relaxation though on some tracks, like “A Solumn Nature” (sic), the mood can be very solemn, even melancholy, and it goes downright dark on the following track “Found Notes”. It may not be the kind of music you’d play at parties – unless of course you need something to chase out the stragglers at 6am in the morning – but during times perhaps when you are feeling a bit low, and a soundtrack that empathises with your mood and helps you clear any bad feelings is called for, this album may be your best friend. Rather than constantly doing or searching for something, or working towards a goal or climax, the music is just in the moment, and is content to just be.

TSP readers may recall that the last time we came across Sam Dunscombe, which was over two years ago, they had recorded an album inspired by their discovery of some tangled old tape impaled on a lonely cactus in California’s Mojave Desert. Their new opus “Two Forests / Oceanic” – not necessarily following on directly from that album (“Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco”) – is based on work they have been doing on the role music can play in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (the use of psychedelic drugs in treating mental illnesses). Using field recordings of forest noise ambience and of waves rising and ebbing on beach shores respectively, along with analysing the pitches of the original recordings to generate new sets of pitches based on Just Intonation and then weaving them into the original works, or combining several field recordings into one set, Dunscombe creates two long compositions that can serve as therapeutic tools to aid in treating patients. I’m assuming therapists are free to use these compositions as they see fit, that the music can be used as an active tool by both therapists and patients in treatment, and not simply as a pleasant soundtrack playing in the background.

“Two Forests” begins pleasantly enough in a California forest with birdsong and insect noises dominant, from which listeners can discern rhythms appearing that may hold potential as structuring elements for the entire track. As the track continues, you can sense something growing from within the background ambience behind the bird twitter and insect chitter. Sure enough, a dense quivering drone develops that captures your attention and invites you to draw closer to it, at the same receding so that you need to concentrate on it further. You start to forget all the birds and other animal sounds that introduced you to this forest. You eventually find yourself in a vast space when you realise these other sounds are fading away, save for a new repeating, gentle clack-clack motif. It turns out we are now deep in the rainforest near Manaus, in Brazil. In the space of a few moments, we have actually crossed vast distances of time and space through a time-travel portal.

“Oceanic” can be quite a stupendous work of surging ocean waves, swelling and crashing into one another, while a quiet metallic drone putters away through this soundtrack, seemingly unfazed and unaffected. I confess, the first time I heard this track, I started feeling a bit seasick halfway through! It does sound as though the waves are becoming stronger and choppier, and you half-expect the huge swell to come crashing down on your head and the freezing wind to blow into your face. You might even expect to hear the bleating noises of seabirds riding the wind on their migrations. The best moments of the track (and perhaps of the entire recording) come after the tenth minute when sharp waves of pointillist tone fly across the space, and you can almost feel yourself being pulled back and forth, and even thrown about.

Relying entirely or almost entirely on the forest and beach field recordings as sound sources, and constructing soundscapes faithful to the source material, Dunscombe ends up creating astonishingly expansive and hypnotic works that really do open up the mind to worlds and visions that would otherwise remain hidden. “Oceanic” especially is a very dynamic piece that invites the listener to be an active participant in becoming immersed in a world that exists in the main through action, rather than as a static sound or drone track. A very remarkable achievement.