Emiter’s “Electromagnetism of the City” reviewed by Anxious

Natura i miasto… Jeśli zestawimy ze sobą te środowiska w kontekście tego, co słyszymy, naturalnie pojawić się może przeciwstawne porównanie – cisza i hałas. Gdyby jednak spróbować usłyszeć w miejskim zgiełku harmonię jego odgłosów? Dobrym punktem wyjścia będzie tu nowy album Emitera. Już sam jego tytuł zachęca do wgłębienia się w dźwięki otoczenia i spojrzenie na nie w zupełnie inny sposób.

Emiter, czyli Marcin Dymiter od lat eksploruje nieoczywiste dźwiękowe przestrzenie z kręgu szeroko rozumianej elektroniki, field recordingu i muzyki improwizowanej. Na swoim koncie ma również wiele instalacji dźwiękowych i słuchowisk. Tworzy również muzykę do filmów, spektakli teatralnych oraz wystaw. Z pewnością można go tym samym zaliczyć go do artystów zupełnie osobnych, których twórczość tak dalece wymyka się wszelkim definicjom. Jednak gdy pojawia się z czymś nowym, można być prawie pewnym, że będzie to twórczość tak samo oryginalna co zupełnie nieoczywista.

Nie inaczej jest w przypadku tego wydawnictwa. Choć dźwięki miasta często mają swoje industrialne pochodzenie, na tym krążku brzmią one wręcz organicznie i niezwykle naturalnie. Łącząc się i przenikając raz po raz tworzą wspólnie dźwiękowy kolaż, na bazie którego dostajemy bardzo zgrabne, transowe kompozycje. Choć zatytułowane są one dość sugestywnie np. Hundreds, Thousands of Devices, czy Harmonies of Noise to paradoksalnie brzmią one wręcz kojąco i bardzo harmonijnie. Nieco surowiej robi się choćby w utworze  Dusts and Fluids, gdzie na tle lodowatego minimal techno powtarzana jest fraza – „Nadciąga atomowa burza…”. Takie smaczki nadają całości ciekawego kontrastu. Całości, która zawiera w sobie pełen koloryt otaczającej nas miejskiej rzeczywistości, dokumentując ją przy tym w bardzo wyrafinowany sposób oraz zamykając ją w muzycznej formie. Wojciech Żurek

via Anxious

New release: Emiter’s “Electromagnetism of the City”

We’re very happy to present the new album by Emiter, Electromagnetism of the City. This album is composed from the broad range of noises that surround us in contemporary urban life, on the impulses, discharges, and harmonies of the city. Emiter explores feedbacks, noises, densities, and how streets are like a circuit board where houses are chips and other buildings akin to resistors. The city is then seen as an integrated circuit, as a score for the discharge of electrophonics.

Emiter is a project of Marcin Dymiter, who works in the field of electronic music, field recording and improvised music, creating sound installations, radio plays, film music, theatre performances, exhibitions and public spaces.

Electromagnetism of the City is now available as a limited-release CD, stream or download from Crónica and Crónica’s bandcamp page. 

Marc Behrens’s “Clould” reviewed by The Sound Projector

We’re still reeling from Mut Att Narc Imm which we noted in 2019, continuing in our way to typecast this player as severe and extreme in his very distinct approach to minimalism, but it’s more likely we’re still enduring self-induced nightmares and sleepless nights from that image of a red claw. In fact this fellow has a wide range of milieu in which he operates, including installations, performance, theatre, fine art and photography, and not just making records. It’s also important to note that text and image are arguably equally valuable weapons in his Stanley FatMax bag. Matter of fact even the title of Clould is an ingenious compacted piece of textual wordplay, splicing together the “clouds” so familiar to both weathermen and airline pilots, and the verb “could” – strongly implying something our own human potential for doing something.

Having suggested early on that we, as human beings, believe in supernatural beings who live in the clouds and influence us (citation needed), Behrens returns to matter-of-fact realist mode by presenting us with five segments of sound art that have their origins in airports and airplanes. That’s right, field recordings taken from these environments – and I seem to recall that recordings made inside a jet airliner were once quite common among avant-garde sound artists, as they flew from one highly-paid gig to another, but Behrens intends something quite different. For one thing, he’s reprocessing voice recordings (radio announcements?) on these tapes, and grinding them down into atomistic fragments, thereby making some further conceptual and artistic points – he likes the idea that ghosts can appear out of these digital artefacts, that he’s somehow deconstructing language, and even that he’s realigning things on the principles of Buddhist mysticism in some fashion. By this means he circles back to his original proposition about the gods who live in the clouds.

While this thought-equation certainly works on a cerebral level, not all the music here succeeds in manifesting the ideas very strongly, not even when we get to the lengthy climax of the ‘5th Movement’, where the voices truly start to emerge. The nuances of tone variation here are handled with tremendous skill, but the over-familiar digital crunching and time-stretching techniques used on the voice parts are a bit naff, and tend to distract from the plan. I’m not asking for an Erich Von Daniken moment, but surely the voices of the Gods ought to be more convincing, more profound, more articulate than this? Ed Pinsent

via The Sound Projector

Haarvöl’s “Horizons of Suspended Zones” reviewed by Music Map

Haarvöl è il nome di un progetto musicale portoghese fondato da Fernando José Pereira, João Faria e Rui Manuel Vieira.

Pensata e sviluppata come esplorazione delle proprietà del suono, e finalizzata alla definizione di ambienti sonori cinematografici e immaginativi, la proposta del trio trova un suo nuovo manifesto in “Horizons of Suspended Zones”, album pubblicato dalla label portoghese Crónica quest’estate.

Il disco si ispira ad alcun scritti di Hakim Bey, filosofo statunitense che, alla fine degli anni Novanta, parlava del virtuale come un’altra strada possibile per l’espansione del capitalismo, introducendo il concetto di “temporary autonomous zones” per parlare di spazi, fisici o simbolici, in cui le persone possono sottrarsi al controllo sociale e politico dominante, esplorando forme libere di comunità, creatività e relazioni.

Gli Haarvöl dichiarano il proprio intento di creare delle “zone sospese”, sulla scia di queste elucubrazioni, che siano il contrario degli eccessi che la tecnologia offre e consente oggi: suoni nudi, semplici, che si presentino esattamente per quello che sono.

Senza alcun tipo di post-produzione, gli Haarvöl costruiscono un disco contrassegnato da tre elementi fondamentali: ripetizione, silenzio e durata.

Sospeso tra pulsioni ambient, una composizione minimale e un forte afflato sperimentale, l’ascolto di “Horizons of Suspended Zones” è contemplazione, scoperta e riscoperta del silenzio e attenzione per i dettagli.

Il nuovo lavoro firmato Haarvöl, destinato a una nicchia per quanto pregno di significato, conferma l’ottimo stato di salute di una band autentica e pressoché unica nel suo genere. (Piergiuseppe Lippolis)

via Music Map

David Lee Myers’s “Terrenus” reviewed by Chain DLK

David Lee Myers has been called many things – pioneer of feedback music, sonic cartographer, stubborn alchemist of electronics – but with “Terrenus” he plants his machines firmly in the soil. If so much electronic sound gazes longingly at the stars, Myers insists on digging his fingernails into mud and moss, coaxing voices from tangled root systems. The nine pieces here feel less like tracks and more like field reports from a landscape that doesn’t exist, a kind of imaginary ecology built out of loops, delays, and self-fed circuits that breathe like compost piles alive with hidden organisms.

Unlike the piercing shrieks or metallic chatter often associated with feedback, the textures in “Terrenus” flow with a strange softness, like fog rolling over a river delta. Feedback is here less a scream than a system of weather: drifting cloud, sudden squall, sunlight scattering across wet stone. The beauty lies in its indeterminacy – processors turning back on themselves until they generate their own small climates, cycles of decay and regrowth audible in real time. Myers has long been fascinated with these recursive architectures, from his work as Arcane Device through collaborations with titans like Asmus Tietchens and Tod Dockstader, but “Terrenus” is perhaps his most grounded exploration, committed to evoking earth rather than ether.

There’s also a sly humor in calling this earth music. For all its groundedness, it never pretends to be naturalistic – there are no birds, no waterfalls, no literal imitation. Instead, it’s as if Myers is saying: here is geology reimagined by machines, here is soil filtered through delay units, here is the shimmer of lichen captured in a feedback loop. Each track feels like a hand-drawn map without compass or legend, guiding us not toward destinations but through atmospheres – uncertain borders, shifting terrain, a sense of wandering where the ground itself hums back at you.

In the end, “Terrenus” reminds us that the earth is not silent. It buzzes, it resonates, it feeds back upon itself. Myers simply builds the circuits that let us hear it. If we tend to imagine electronics as cold and detached, here they feel damp, fertile, full of breath. These are not machines speaking from the void – they are roots talking to rocks, voltage entwined with loam. And if the journey feels at times bewildering, well, so does walking through fog until the landscape itself begins to hum. Vito Camarretta

via Chain DLK

Ilia Belorukov’s “NRD DRM TWO 2022-2024” reviewed by Music Map

Ilia Belorukov è un musicista originario di San Pietroburgo e attualmente di stanza a Novi Sad, in Serbia.

Da tempo attivo nel campo della musica sperimentale, del noise, dell’elettroacustica e dell’improvvisazione, Belokurov è tornato recentemente per Crónica Records con “Nrd Drm Two 2022-2024”, una raccolta di pezzi realizzati nel triennio in questione con un Nord Drum 2, un sintetizzatore per percussioni con sei canali.

Alla base della produzione c’è l’idea di muovere da un pattern 1-step per indagare le capacità di alcuni elementi, come i cambi di tempo e di frequenze e i riverberi, di alterare la percezione di chi ascolta.

Belokurov ha dedicato ampio spazio a quest’ultimo aspetto, con un focus particolare sull’impiego di algoritmi del riverbero in grado di costruire “spazi artificiali” e di modificare in maniera anche radicale il suono.

Nel corso dei tredici brani, la centralità del synth per percussioni consente al disco di conservare coerenza e di mitigare, almeno in apparenza, un approccio sperimentale comunque forte, mentre l’ostinata ricerca del concetto di spazialità del suono si percepisce e si lascia apprezzare.

Di contro, con le uniche variazioni reali presenti nei tempi e nelle frequenze, l’ascolto potrebbe risultare ostico sulla lunga distanza. La certezza è che “Nrd Drm Two 2022-2024” richiede un ascolto attento e meticoloso, oltre che una certa familiarità con l’ambient sperimentale, ma il suo fascino è fuori discussione. (Piergiuseppe Lippolis)

via Music Map

Matilde Meireles’s “Loop. And Again.” reviewed by Musique Machine

Loop And Again is a CD album themed around magnetic fields. It blends recordings of said fields, drone texturing, sudden pitch rising detail, and general field recordings. The three tracks featured are eventful, moody, at times atmospherically jarring- with a sound that dips in electro ambience, pressing drone texturing, and even droned out avant jazz.

Matilde Meireles has been active since the late 2019’s, with five albums to her name to date. From 2024, Loop And Again, focuses on magnetic fields, intricate wiring arrangements, and their interconnectedness with the shifts in the surrounding landscape. It’s part of X Marks the Spot, a larger project which used sound to map specific telecommunication boxes—only those emitting an audible drone—in the city of Belfast between 2013-2019.

We open with “Introducing Variables”, which is the longest track here at twenty-one minutes. It begins with a blend of subtly piercing drones & the sound of rushing water. As we move on, we get darts of bird and motorbike field recording- which are ebbed by growing & more piercing electro drone pitches- nicely breaking the initially feeling of sinister disquiet, though this does return again, though with the constant threat of sudden seared tone twists.

“Magnetic Fields” is next- this comes at just over the thirteen-minute mark. It opens with a hauntingly wavering and slow-fading in- taking in two or three mid to high drone pitches. As it grows, you can make out a more hovering & jittery hissing tone- this is added to by higher electro pulse hits. Later, we get the addition of rushing water- as the pitch hits seem to start to split & disappear( for a time).

Finally, we have just over eleven minutes of “Cross Parade with Fingal, Bronagh, Paul and Tullis”- I say this is the most interesting/ surprising of the three tracks. It begins with a woman speaking, before a blend of distant knocking & searing appears (possibly a mic up coffee machine). At around the three-minute mark, what sounds like a stretched trumpet or horn tone is added- this switches between being grainy & playful, to more droned out. All the while, this vague harmonic/ mind range drone is carried on. Towards the end, the female voice reappears, with a male voice, as the pair talks about cooking a dish.

As a release, Loop And Again often puts the listener in a state somewhere between intrigued, strangely soothed, and on the cusp of building tension. With a creative use of sound art, field recordings, and subtle instrumental detail. Roger Batty

via Musique Machine

Simon Whetham’s “Successive Actions” reviewed by Musique Machine

Successive Actions takes in sixteen tracks built around recordings of motorised devices, sourced from obsolete consumer technology. Track lengths vary between one and eleven minutes, with the recordings moving between textural studies, erratic blending of several different elements, and all-out/ intense sound crafting.The CD album comes presented in a dark blue card gatefold featuring what looks like lines of tiny ‘T’ ‘s set out in a series of vertical lines.  The release appears on  Crónica and can be purchased directly from here.    Since the early 2000’s  Mr Whetham has been sonically active. His work often utilises environmental sound, employing a variety of methods and techniques in order to obtain often unnoticed and obscured sound tendencies. He also explores ways of creating physical traces of sound and transforming energy forms. He has performed/exhibited internationally, has received a large number of commissions and awards, has many published composed works, and regularly collaborates with other artists.We open with the track “Action” which is a blend of low-key drilling tone sweep, several layers of ragged tone buff, and a few moments of thicker tumbling rip. As we move on, we have “Redaction” with its mix of circular scape, bumbling hiss, and busy/close-up like insect-like fumblings.Later on, we have the slurred pitch stabs, rolling drone clutter, and small motor clutter of “Compaction”. There’s the purring chop, firing electrodes, and the loose slicing of “Counteraction”. Or the knocking scarp, electro buzz/ simmer, and circular grain detail of “Abstraction”.Throughout Successive Actions, Mr Whetham certainly mines some worthy tone / textural detail. I personally felt it would have been nice if there had been a larger range of different types of textures, as well as more thought put into the compositional elements- yes, I know it’s primarily noise, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have that element present. Roger Batty

via Musique Machine

New release: [MONRHEA] + AGF’s “INvolution”

We’re happy to announce the release of the new album by [MONRHEA] + AGF, “INvolution”, now available to download or stream from Crónica’s Bandcamp.

Monrhea and agf met online, as admirers of each other’s productions on Soundcloud. They later collaborated in the Darmstadt summer course program “Sonic Writing & Soundings”, curated by agf and Cedrik Fermont. In 2023 they met in person in Darmstadt for the performance of the pieces created in the summer course program.

After Monrhea invited agf to an online workshop and a lecture to Nairobi artists, they started dreaming about a production collaboration and developed the application of the mathematical concept of Involution in music and run with it remotely between Hailuoto and Nairobi. Their first sessions in this project happened during March 2024, the season during which Monrhea’s Kikuyu culture marks the new year and the beginning of a new season. Their work then focused on creating pieces that celebrated the rain, Spring, rebirth, the inversion into a new season. This line of inquiry led them to come across the concept of self inversion, involution.

Involution is explored in the context of various disciplines. In Psychology, Sociology, or Anthropology, but also in Biology and Medical sciences, in the natural phenomena of arising and passing away. Involution is a natural process of maintaining balance and order, and can be a formula to restoring balance.

“INvolution” is now available!