Pure‘s new CD release in Crónica, “Ification†— with wonderful cover art by Jan Rohlf — is now in production and copies are expected soon. In the meantime, you can have a sneak peak here.
This release, mastered by Martin Siewert at Motone Sound Services in Vienna, comprises 7 trackswith collaborations from Christoph De Babalon, Martin Brandlmayr, Alexandra Von Bolzn and Anke Eckardt.
A long (and interesting) program featuring Osso Exótico, Carlos Santos, EmÃdio Buchinho, André Gonçalves, Nuno Moita, Paulo Raposo, The Beautiful Schizophonic and many others. (Not much) more information at projectochao.blogspot.com.
Cem Güney is the first to admit that Turkey still has a long way to go in terms of radically progressive music and Sound Art. Admittedly, there are hotspots, clearly confined oases of demanding sonic experimentation. But overall, the main focus still seems to be firmly placed on maximising profits and importing ideas instead of exporting the country’s own, undeniable creativity. Güney, then, is a leader in his field. Treading the fine line between Musique Concrete and Contemporary Microtonality, his style has grown from a past in Jazz, DJing and playing the Trumpet into a subtle, psychaoctive amalgam of different influences. His language is prismatically broken along various lines – typical perhaps for an artist who is only starting out career-wise, but also refreshingly diverse and decidedly exciting. Even though obvious oriental or exotic references are all but absent, there is a discreet mysticism emanating from tracks like “Somewhere between the Middle”, which marks Güney as a voice to follow. Considering he has already established contact with labels from all over Europe, it may soon come to be heard far outside of Turkey as one of the country’s first experimental exports.
read the full interview at tokafi.com
For this year’s Night of the Unexpected festival, part of Gaudeamus’ Muziekweek, Martijn Tellinga has produced a performance of Iannis Xenaki’s revolutionary Mycenae Alpha, work for computer that was generated with The UPIC system.
The UPIC enabled Xenakis to compose grahically and transform visual information into sound. The UPIC system was conceived by Iannis Xenakis in the early 1950s, the first version of UPIC was built by Xenakis’ research center in the late 1970s, and continues to be developed to this day. With the performance, original slides of the graphical score of the piece will be shown.
Night of The Unexpected will take place coming friday September 5th at Amsterdam’s Paradiso, 20:30. More information at www.thenightoftheunexpected.nl
The name Cem Güney sounds like a name I heard before, but I have no idea when and where. He hails from Turkey, where he taught himself how to play the trumpet and he studied in California. There he got interested in sound art and started to play electronic music. That’s the basic stuff I do understand of the press text. The rest is too hard for me to comprehend. Lots about language, voices, talk, spiritual learning and more such things, but I must admit I have great difficulty in finding out what this has to do with the music he created using laptop, field recordings and radio. It sounds all pretty decent in terms of microsound, glitch and processed field recordings, but I fail to see the relation with language as such. What Güney does here is alright, but there is nothing here that we haven’t heard before. The glitches, hiss, loops, twitter and tweak, it is very common ground. I must say that Güney does a fine job in terms of production and execution but doesn’t get the price for the most original thing of the year.
via Vital Weekly
Swiss sound artist Gilles Aubry is no stranger to Crónica, having collaborated in two of the label’s compilations, “Essays on Radio†and “Mus*****câ€. We are now very pleased to present his first CD in Crónica, the exquisite “Berlin Backyardsâ€.
Continue reading “New CD release: Gilles Aubry’s “Berlin Backyards—
O sonho antes de acordar, quando as formas começam a ganhar contornos e a consciência começa a organizar os últimos fiapos de matéria irreal. Em “Hidden Nameâ€, Stephan Mathieu e Janek Schaefer, cúmplices de anteriores apresentações públicas, como os festivais MUTEK/2002 (Canadá) e Musica Genera/2005 (Polónia), tornam perceptÃvel essa passagem de forma plasticamente sedutora, oscilante e circular no movimento cÃclico de ampla e planante espacialização. A acção passa-se no meio das paisagens naturais e ambiente bucólico de que beneficiaram os artistas aquando da estadia conjunta no Verão de 2005 na Manor Farm House, uma cottage propriedade de um compositor de música clássica, situada algures no Sul de Inglaterra.
No local, Stephan Mathieu e Janek Schaefer usaram instrumentos acústicos e electrónicos, e gravações de campo. O som foi posteriormente tratado no York Music Research Center, estúdio em Inglaterra tecnologicamente apetrechado para o efeito. Do trabalho de composição, montagem e edição resultou uma música carregada de sugestões pastorais envoltas em finas camadas de neblina, que ora ameaça chuva eminente, ora anseia pelo sol que a há-de dissipar.
Na mistura é possÃvel identificar estática e estalidos de discos vinyl, vozes humanas, canto de pássaros e uma infinidade de camadas sobrepostas de sons instrumentais (piano, violino, clarinete, violoncelo, flauta, acordeão, cÃtara, sinos…), transformados, processados e harmonizados em estúdio, via computador. Há aqui uma interessante dimensão conceptual de corpos em suspensão, que se vão transformando lentamente, texturas unidimensionais que se tornam progressivamente mais complexas ao sabor de movimentos lentos e formalmente despojados, em que o que conta sobretudo é a tensão que prenuncia algo que está para acontecer. O mistério adensa-se e permanece por desvendar, por muito que se ouça “Hidden Nameâ€, um disco especial. Edição recente da portuguesa Crónica Electrónica, distribuÃda por Matéria Prima. Design de M. Carvalhais.
Eduardo Chagas
A project by UBERMORGEN.COM
Sound coding by stefan Nussbaumer, visual coding by Lia, script coding by Erich Kachel
Download it here or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes.
Story
First there was silence…
Then there was data…
But there was no story…
Just images and sounds…
Cities were built and a grid was laid on top of the topography.
Within this global grid a company named eBay became the largest marketplace, with very local marketspaces. eBay is romantic and seductive, not like the local fleamarkets in Paris (Le marché aux puces de Saint-Ouen) but sexed up a million times bigger and spherically transcended, much more effective and thoroughly commercialized. We love it! “The Sound of eBay†is the affirmative high-end lowtech contribution to the atomic soundtrack of the new peer-to-peer hypercatastrophic shock-capitalism.
The sound is cool, the machine produces masses of songs and replicates millions of times throughout the networks – flooding the net, a bubbling sea of artifical songs visualized in CONTEMPORARY teletext – a continental drift within a macromusic universal urban scape. Trash-Radio.
Forget the technology, it’s lustful entertainment, baby!
In the creative experience of Gilles Aubry (Swiss sound artist living in Berlin) references are a recurring use of field recordings and, at the same time, an evident interest for some characters of musique concrète. Gilles deals also with electronics and computer programming, with results ranging from experimentation to improvisation, matters handled with personal interpretation and elaborative approach. His discography includes a release on Creative Sources (as SwiftMachine) and a participation (this year) to “Berlin Electronics†on Absinth Records. Moreover, he is involved in other projects (Monno, The Same Girl), author of sound installations and protagonist of live performances.
This new disc issued by Crónica exactly shows the side of Aubry devoted to (re)construct environmental recordings (this is what happens listening to the eight untitled tracks of the album).
Despite the use of multiple sources taken from various locations in Berlin, their perfect assemblage makes “Berlin Backyards†a work surprisingly uniform. In fact the pieces could be considered eight movements of a suite because of the continuity that each gives to the previous one, almost like a single recording from a single source. All the material has been treated to produce an indistinct mass of spatial sound, obtained with a fusion of daily life moments captured from the natural/animal world or extracted from the human living. Through his narration of what is around us, Aubry provides passages of musique concrète at highest levels.
Every now and then we need to (re)think how we communicate.
For a few months now, we’ve been considering the idea of creating a blog, something that could focus on the day-to-day news of Crónica and the artists with whom we work, keeping the main website for more permanent information and listing of releases. So, very soon, blog.cronicaelectronica.org will be the place for small and somewhat irregular news on all fronts of activity — new releases and podcasts, of course, but also related releases in other labels, events and anything else we may find interesting. The old feed will be kept exclusively for the podcasts, that will nevertheless also be announced here.
We’re still fine-tuning everything, so please be patient :)
