Shelter Press HHV Records 21 Items

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one's internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable.We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, its alinear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music's margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson's phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on "Sorry," arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on "Pensées Magiques." These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson's music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or a...

Aunes is a rare solo album from peripatetic Australian cellist-composer-performer Judith Hamann, presenting six pieces recorded across several years and countries. Developing the collage techniques and expanded sound palettes heard on their previous releases, Aunes makes use of synthesizers, organ, voice and location recordings alongside the dazzlingly pure, enveloping tones of Hamann's cello. The record takes its name from an old French unit of measurement for fabric, varying around the country and from material to material. Unlike the platinum metre bar deposited in the National Archives after the Revolution as an immovable standard, an aune of silk differed from an aune of linen: the measure could not be separated from the material. In much the same way, in these six pieces_which Hamann thinks of as `songs'_formal aspects such as tuning, pacing, melodic shape and timbre are not abstractions applied universally to musical material but are inextricable from the instruments and sounds used, even from the places and communities in which the music was made.Audible location sound embeds the music in its place of making, as in the delicate duet for church organ and wordless singing `schloss, night', where shuffles and cluttering in the reverberant church space form a phantom accompaniment, gradually displaced by a uneasy shimmer of wavering tones from half-opened organ stops. `Casa Di Riposo, Gesu' Redentore' documents a walk up a hill to an outdoor mass in Chiusure, layering voices near and far with footsteps, insects and other incidental sounds. Like in the work of Moniek Darge or Luc Ferrari, location recordings are folded on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect. On other pieces, it is the emphatic presence of the performing body that grounds the music, whether in the intimate fragility of Hamann's softly sung and hummed vocal tones or the clothing that rustles across a microphone on the opening `by the line'. The idea of a music inextricable from its materia...

Entering its 26th year of activity, the morphing, Los Angeles based experimental outfit, Sissy Spacek, joins Shelter Press with Entrance, among the project's most captivating outings to date. Encountering the duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma joined in various configurations by an incredible cast of collaborators - Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky, and C Spencer Yeh - collectively transformed into a series a deeply intimate and delicate gestures of musique concrète, Entrance radically repositions the possibilities presented by group improvisation outside of time and place.Founded at the end of the last millennium, the Los Angeles based project, Sissy Spacek, initially emerged from the knotted, fiery context 1990s American noise and grindcore, producing sheets of visceral sonority that quickly set the scene on its head. Going through numerous evolutions, before eventually settling as a duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma - joined by a rotating and often recurring cast collaborators - over the last 25 years the band has continuously entered states of evolution that have defied the expectations of its own context, seeding the sonic extremes noise with subtle and sophisticated approaches to free improvisation and musique concrète.Fiercely positioning its efforts within the outer reaches of contemporary experimental music, while resisting the constraints of a singular sound or proximity, Wiese regards Sissy Spacek as being primarily centred around the practice of musique concrète and the pursuit of extremes. From its earliest releases - collage treatments of material gathered from the band's full throttle practice sessions - the project's conceptual framework has continuously evolved within a deeply engaged process of experimentation, not only reworking tactical approaches, but also definitions and perception regarding the location and action of their work. In recent years, this has led to an increasingly varied and diverse output. Percolating within, is a t...

Franco-Swiss composer François J. Bonnet, aka Kassel Jaeger, returns to Shelter Press with his new solo album, Shifted in Dreams. Over the years, Bonnet has been working closely with Shelter Press on different projects, whether as a musician (Zauberberg, Swamps / Things), a theorist (The Music To Come) or as Director of parisian institution INA GRM (spectres, Recollection GRM, Portraits Grm). The common axis of all these actions is the exploration of the deep causes of music, its own potential and its possible appearances. Shifted in Dreams is a continuation of such research but takes a somewhat deviated path. If we use the metaphor of music as a paradoxical mountain — an unreachable “Mont Analogue”, then this record tries to opens up a way that at first seems simpler and marked out by the distinct presence of familiar harmonic and temporal elements. This path, however, is simple only in appearance, for soon it becomes less clear: its contours get blurred, drowned in the mist. Silhouettes form in the distance, like uncertain shadows. We grope our way forward, in this infra-sensitive thickness of the world outside of signs. The recognized markers disappear, giving way, at best, to reminiscences, but increasingly making way to qualities, occurrences, events. We leave the known world of musical codes to join that of sound apparitions, their memorial imprints and the impressions they produce. Following a compositional approach stemming from the musique concrète tradition, without adopting a structuralist aesthetic, Shifted in Dreams explores a wide range of instruments and techniques, going seamlessly from instrumental improvisation to field recording, via micro- editing and asynchronous looping. Mixing the electronic waves of an ARP 2500 synthesizer with the acoustic drones of a positive organ, articulating guitar layers with resonances of a Cristal Baschet, bringing together recordings of slamming windows and sounds produced by complex modular synthesis patches, among other things, Bonnet offers a rich and generous palette of sounds, inviting a constantly renewed sonic investigation. Shifted in Dreams, despite its title, is not a dreamlike record. The dream here does not designate the symbolical space of interpretation and reinterpretation of reality through cultural patterns. It designates the intermediate, blurred and uncertain state where the reality of signs loses its consistency, while, paradoxically, the reality of senses and impressions becomes imperative, obvious. The reality of demons

Shelter Press extend a quietly cine-poetic invitation to visit the Outer Hebrides via immersive sounds - field recordings of psalm singing and local dialect - collected and arranged by interdisciplinary artist Joshua Bonnetta, going hand-in-hand with Shelter Press’ core interests in the fading light of its 10th year in operation. A beautiful artefact - complete with 60 page photobook - Riyl Francisco López, Chris Watson, Salm.

Accompanied by an evocative photo study and access to an accompanying film and essay, Bonetta’s second release for Shelter Press following 2016’s ‘Lago’ imparts a real feel for the archipelago, off the north west coast of Scotland, where he was stationed during an artist’s residency during 2017-2019. Stitched together from observant field recordings and interviews with residents on the islands of Barra, Berneray, Harris, Lewis & North Uist, the work elicits a sense of timelessness in its slow drift between shores, hills, standing stones and the intimacy of its voices, including Gaelic spoken word, folk song and whistling. Save for the appearance of a plane overhead, the sounds of car and boat motors, plus a little bit of electronic disturbance that pull you into the modern era; the results practically imagine what it would have been like to visit the islands with a recording device at any point since the last ice age.

For Bonetta, who hails from rural Canada, the similarities between his formative landscapes and those of Scotland must have appeared familiar, perhaps a subconscious recall/reminder that the two places shared a landmass, albeit 425 million years ago. His sound sensitive subtlety and cinematic ear in arranging his collected sounds serves to highlight the way the modern world only just infringes on Innse Gall’s ancient landscapes and only relatively modern tongues (if we’re thinking in geologic terms of scale). We hear the sounds of its avian population seamlessly eliding its humans in the whistling of Alick Macauley, and the natural cadence of of its mild oceanic climate mirrored in lilting Gaelic folksong, here performed by Calum McDonald, Joey Morrison, and Maggie Smith, and more generally practiced by only a tiny percentage of Scotland’s population (some 1%) but still surely alive in its meridian isles where time moves much more slowly.

With the nuance and poetry expected of a Shelter Press title, ‘Innes Gall’ reflects on the area’s anglicised name, meaning “islands of the strangers”, with calming, soberly documentarian results as heartwarming and fascinating as a visit to the area, just without the effort of travel, and from the comfort of your own living space. Bonnetta is incapable of ignoring the cinematic frame, and intersperses each shot with enough poetry to keep you entranced.

»Image Langage« is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls "a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist." And then there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channelling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments.

For his Shelter Press debut, Thomas Bonvalet assembles plucks, strums, hits and tones made on an arsenal of electric and acoustic instruments and devices, to make theatrical passages of sound that practically float in time. Since his 2006 debut under the L’Ocelle Mare moniker, Bonvalet has attempted to move away from music and focus purely on sound. His tenure playing guitar in various bands - most notably Cheval De Frise and Powerdove - gave him the skill and drive he needed to deconstruct his instrumentation, and ‘Sans Chemin’ is his most successful rendition of this concept. Here, he turns away from musicality entirely, zeroing in on the gestures of performance - plucks, strums and vibrations - using them to construct songs as if they were collages of memories. Each track is named like a gear list. So the minute-long introductory track is titled ‘Flute, Tambourin, Membrane, Piano Ouvert’, and we hear a flute bellowing like a kettle boiling, the scrape of a drum skin, a tambourine rattling and the sustained, multi-harmonic echo of a piano being opened. It’s that simple. Bonvalet doesn’t have a set methodology in hand, particularly, he appears to let the various sounds guide his compositions. Occasionally a track will go by in a flash, like the 46-second-long drone cluster ‘333, 328, 325 Hz’, but sometimes Bonvalet stretches things further. On the almost four-minute ‘Téléphone, Guitare, Interrupteurs, Membrane’, it sounds as if a song could materialize at any second from the rhythmic guitar taps and noisy digital interference, but Bonvalet is careful never to succumb to temptation. Instead, he allows these studies to exist just as they are: joyous celebrations of instrumentation and the vast, varied texture of sound itself. He treats acoustic sources with the same exploratory excitement as an artist like Jan Jelinek treats samples and electronics - there’s an understanding that the result is about sound itself and all the memory, cultural expectation and storytelling that comes along with it.

Over the last 5 years the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have intertwined sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle of summer’) - the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space - distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come.

Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them - each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways - prior to their first recorded
outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by 2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely - sending files back and forth, fortified by conversations on a vast range of subjects - these two albums were guided by impassioned
conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked.

Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 - a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe - its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground.

Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones - laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz - searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.

A monumental debut work for Shelter Press, ‘Death Star’ is something of a definitive statement or magnum opus in the explorative oeuvre of NYC artist/composer Marina Rosenfeld - a big Riyl Iancu Dumitrescu, Lea Bertucci, Jakob Ullmann, Okkyung Lee, Maryanne Amacher. Marina first grabbed our attention with the uncannily echoic industro-dub environs of ‘P.A./Hard Love’ in 2016 (a real precursor to Jay Glass Dubs we reckon), before showing a quieter, more sensitive side in her collaboration with Ben Vida ‘Feel Anything’. Now on ‘Death Star’ she places deeply uncanny sensibilities to stunning use across an album focussed on the microphone as a listening device and instrument - a sort of mechanical ear/eye - with impressively elusive/illusive results. The original recordings come from an installation - a plexiglas orb housing seven microphones - that picked up and fed back samples of visitors to an exhibition at Portikus gallery, Frankfurt. Marina’s album reworks those recordings with fragments of piano played into the same system or orb of mics, generating utterly enchanted ethereal spaces that speak to the listener’s atavistic responses to echoic space and acoustic phenomena. In four movements Marina grows the source material from liminal, plasmic and dreamlike as she begins to feel out the work’s scope in ‘Death Star’, all quite polite but edged with a menace that gets more complex, with a chamber ensemble playing back notation of the original location recordings in more atonal and aggressive iterations re-amped thru banks of speakers to edge on KTL’s electro-acoustic doom or Iancu and Ana-Maria Avram’s spectralist music. So good this.

Springing from body of work spanning decades, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with ‘Yeo-Neun’. Her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most ground-breaking and unexpected album to date.

Engrossing small sound science from Milan’s Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti, aka Bellows, one of our favourite production units now marking up another mesmerising addition to their frayed, knotty microcosmos of sounds following on from LP’s for our own Boomkat Editions as well as the Latency, Senufo and Planam labels.

Zelienople don’t release much, but when they do you, can guarantee it’ll be special. It’s been four years since their last album, 2020’s Miasmah-released ‘Hold You Up, and since then the band have switched up their working method. Previously stationed in drummer Mike Weis’s basement-cum-studio, Zelienople’s regular sessions were interrupted when Weis relocated from Chicago to Kalamazoo, so they used to opportunity to sharpen their approach. Original collaborator PM Tummala is brought in for added synth, Rhodes and vibraphone, while Eric Eleazer plays synth and Rhodes. Tummala also handles the production on ‘Everything is Simple’, using his own studio for the recording and taking some of the pressure off Matt Christensen, who’s here allowed to concentrate solely on his vocals and dreamy guitar parts for the first time in years. Multi- instrumentalist Brian Harding, meanwhile, is the glue that binds, playing droning woodwind and bass to create that distinct Zelienople texture we know and love

Inquiring after the ephemeral experiences of sound phenomena, Shelter Press presents Translucents , its first collaboration with American artist and composer Byron Westbrook. Comprising a single, 41 minute work divided into a series of interconnected vignettes that explore sonority’s relationship to time and memory, Translucents represents arguably the most definitive statement to date by one of the most singular voices working in the contemporary landscape of electroacoustic music. First emerging within New York’s rigorous context of experimental music over the course of the last decade and a half and now based in Los Angeles, Byron Westbrook has woven progressively intricate tapestries of sonority that bridge the worlds of sound art, installation, avant-garde electronic music, and synthesis. Working thoughtfully at an almost glacial pace - allowing the meaning and relationships within his sonic material to evolve and emerge over long durations before a piece reaches its final form - Westbrook’s practice is centred in the creation of hyper-specific sound environments that pursue a questioning or deconstruction of presumed or imposed understanding, subsequently appearing across a series of highly acclaimed full-lengths on imprints like Root Strata, Hands In The Dark, Umor Rex, and Ash International, as well as being staged at the Walker Art Center, ICA London, Moca Los Angeles, MoMA PS1, MaerzMusik, Rewire and Akousma Festivals among numerous other venues. Translucents , Westbrook’s first release with Shelter Press, was begun in 2016 at Elektronmusikstudion (ems) in Stockholm, Sweden, on Buchla 200 and Serge modular synthesiser systems. Those initial recordings, in conjunction with a broad palette of field recordings, were then edited and composed into the resulting 41 minute piece over the course of the following seven years before being completed in 2023 at Black Hole immersive audio studio in Los Angeles. Similar to Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain , Translucents is rooted in the experiential phenomena of time; more specifically the cohabitation of multiple temporalities within a single piece. Partially drawing upon an encounter with the works of the artist Blinky Palermo, during which Westbrook observed the retinal ghost of one painting transpose itself over another - imposing itself outside of its own time and presumed perimeters of experience - like his environmental and context-based installation work, Translucents stages sound as a sculptural form, setting up theatrical situations, played out as a series of interconnected vignettes that are designed to provoke unique and wholly subjective experiences through the act of listening. Incorporating complex harmonic relationships, durational tones, a heady cast of rhythmical elements, and the bristling textures of electronics and unprocessed environmental recording drawn from the natural and industrial world, Translucents is a gesture of structural virtuosity; knots of tense, sonic density unfurled before being released as trace phenomena into spacious, pastoral plains of near silence, microscopic detail, and floating ambiences. As each counterpoint of contrast indicates its own experience and representation of time - provoking an imagism that borders on synesthesia - Westbrook threads a striking balance between psychoacoustic phenomena and a reorientation of relational sound: what is perceived physically vs observationally. Conceptually rich and deeply engaging on creative terms, while remarkable beautiful and captivating, Byron Westbrook’s Translucents is a singular statement of contemporary electroacoustic practice, issued by Shelter press on CD, accompanied by a 16 pages booklet comprising a suite of photographs and an essay by the composer

There are songs that have been so entwined in shared public consciousness that they barely exist in their original form, viewed as phantasms, haunting the architecture of modern life in the background of adverts, movies, hotel lobbies. Hoff describes this phenomenon as not unlike the "tinnitus effect" in movies - listeners don't hear the compositions themselves, just their overfamiliar pitches. For his Shelter Press debut, he attempts to hack away the flesh from a few of those canonised themes in order to unleash dark spirits inside. "Scratch any pop song hard enough and you'll find sadness underneath it." he explains in the accompanying press release. There's an air of immediacy to each of the four pieces that sounds faintly tranquillising and his choice of instrumentation is similarly near-field: canned orchestral swoops and plasticky flourishes that grate against high-pitched synths and crumbled digital detritus, to remind us that we're fully at the mercy of apps, ads and hypnotic algorithmic propaganda.

From what we can surmise, 'Eulogy for a Dead Jerk' is Hoff's vaporisation of David Bowie's 'Space Oddity', a shimmer of woodwind, piano punctuations and occasional glitches. There's none of the original track's theremin-laced stargazing, but Hoff digs out the message from deep inside, one of isolation and dislocation. Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' meanwhile is simmered into Satie-like slo-mo piano motifs and reverberating pads on 'Everything You Want Less Time' - an almost lackadaisical redux that's fittingly casual for a song that's been used on countless TV shows, movies and adverts. Reed dismissed the interpretation that the song was about his relationship with addiction, but in Hoff's hands its eerie mundanity feels claustrophobic, narcotic and nauseatingly repetitive.

Madonna’s ‘Into the Groove' is almost unrecognisable on 'The Lowest Form of Getting High'. The driving disco-cum-electro pop thrust and the double-tracked vocal melodies are gone, replaced by rainy, operatic woodwind swells and unsettling, buzzing drones. Hoff saves his most effervescent alteration for last, bending the faintest traces of Blondie's 'Heart of Glass' around mangled sonic outcroppings. There's barely anything of Debbie Harry's iconic delivery, just billowing harmonies and occasional flaws that draw a rough outline without filling in any of the gaps. It's a statement on cultural churn, but also a wry wink that acknowledges the popularity of Paulstretch ambient gear - the kind of YouTube-friendly slowed down pop revisionism that's morphed peppy radio-friendly commercial hits into sleeping aids. Hoff takes Eno's original concept for Ambient music and makes wallpaper out of tracks we're all supposed to know inside-out, filling a dry, digital space with cryptic patterns. It's a sad statement, but a vital one.

140g record housed in metalic bronze printed outer and innersleeve.
Sealed copy. Cover corners slightly dented.

Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated »World in World« (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date.

Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated »World in World« (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date.

‘Halos of Perception’ was inspired by Lerkenfeldt’s encounter with a member of Cave Clan, an Australian
“urban exploration” group who probe abandoned forts, drains, bunkers and tunnels, searching out places that
most people ignore or purposefully avoid. Her friend would travel underground to visit a small room and read
alone by candlelight, prompting Lerkenfeldt to consider how sound travels through concrete tunnels, and how
people used to put on underground shows. She recreates this nervous atmosphere using nebulous piano loops
and rumbling, bass-heavy throbs, letting gentler sounds trickle through the darkness like dripping rainwater.
Considering the importance and trickiness of memory and oral traditions, Lerkenfeldt makes her music
difficult to decipher, abstracting her phrases with irregular loop points and blurring her instrumentation with
obscured field recordings and kinetic drones. On ‘Stairway to the interior’ it sounds as if she’s jamming in a
cavernous tunnel, with wind rushing around the concrete as she plays. ‘A fragrance of moss and chalk’ is even
sludgier, looping indistinct piano notes over waterlogged scrapes and foley clanks. But there are cracks of
light throughout: ‘Cobwebs’ finds glistening beauty in the system of caves and tunnels, and ‘Amulet of sweat’
pairs Lerkenfeldt’s elegant piano playing with crunchy distortion, teasing the darkness with bright, dazzling
sunshine.

The intimate familiarity of friendship and long-running collaboration oozes from the fine-tuned steel
strings and prepared piano notes of O’Malley & Pateras’ 2nd collaborative album; a glacial, moonlit homage to
departed pals - RIYL Morton Feldman, Michael Pisaro, Loren Connors, Keiji Haino...
‘Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé’ continues a longstanding creative union deepened on the
2011-2016 recordings featured on their ‘Rêve Noir’ debut. This new album cleanly swaps out electro-acoustic
experimentation for a more plaintive dialogue of O’Malley’s just-intoned strings and the vaporous overtones
of Pateras’ prepared piano, which are left to linger in the air with an unhurried conversational quality that
draws us right into their mood.
In fact, the album features O’Malley’s most extensive recordings on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an
instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones), and is Pateras’ return to the
prepared piano, which he had rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the
21st century exploring its possibilities. Recorded during a period when the duo were each grieving the loss of
recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven pieces possess a reflective, at times almost mournful
quality.
Album opener ‘déjà rêvé’ faithfully characterises the duo’s approach to patiently unfolding minimalism with
O’Malley’s metallic/acoustic gestures slowly chiming in mid-air with the wilting off key softness of Pateras’
prepared piano, operating to no meter or tempo other than the ponderous speed of late night thought.
Unadorned and shy of tricks or stunts, the pathos of their music is stark and enhanced by an inherent use of
alternate tuning systems and a sense of displacement from the norm.
The preceding parts make the penultimate ‘déjà trouvé’ feel almost flush with pain, despite its ostensible
stillness, before they offer a sense of resolution with only the barest materials in ‘déjà raconte’ that
epitomises their long honed ability to make every deliberate note count. It’s a notable departure from either
artist’s work in recent years, taking cues from departed friends and musical allies for a solemn, reflective
work that’s measured with harmonic nuance.

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The Beat My Head Hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison— becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it’s still full of negative spaces and exhales. It’s thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.

When Latifa Echakhch was tuning the concept for her presentation at the Swiss Pavilion during the 59th Venice Art Biennale, she wondered how it might be possible to alter her visitors’ perception of time. She invited Berlin-based drummer and composer Alexandre Babel to come up with a response to her silent exhibition, held inside a striking multi-room building designed by Bruno Giacometti and originally intended for the display of classical art. Babel assembled field recordings captured at the Pavilion alongside pre-recorded viola, contrabass, flute and percussion sounds contributed by Jon Heilbronn, Rebecca Lenton, Theo Nabicht and Nikolaus Schlierf, combined to construct an immersive slow-creep of detailed micro-sounds designed to gradually alter your temporal and spatial bearings. Opening with echoing footsteps over a discomposing whirr of modern machinery, our attention is drawn to the physical space and the natural rhythm of walking. Pinprick clicks add an extra layer of microscopic grist, as water droplets form an incoherent pulse that eventually turn to woodblock clacks and toms. Resembling the innards of a clockmaker’s workshop as though heard from the central hall of a vast gallery space; Babel’s rhythms are so finely drawn that they’re hard to grasp at first blush, demanding multiple listens in order to fully comprehend their abstruse latticing. Spray can blasts and white noise bursts dance in tandem, ushering in low-end rumbles that cautiously mutate into the album’s central segment, where a bass drum slowly ushers in a pressure shift. It’s at this point where the music begins to fully betray its influences, linking the freeform heartbeat-led expression of Milford Graves and his under-sung student Jake Meginsky with crys cole’s lower-case sonic journeying. When more traditional instrumentation rings out from the rafters, it’s to reinforce the piece’s rhythmic thrust, not drown it out with buttoned-up respectability. At its peak “The Concert” sounds lost between genre and temporality, both electronic and astonishingly biotic. It’s the rare site-specific installation piece that truly meets its brief, forcing listeners to consider not just the three-dimensional space it’s responding to, but also the constant rhythms that surround them in day to day life.