New release: µo’s “.appnd”


.appnd is an EP with six tracks of abstract electronic music composed by Danish composers Jonas Olesen and Morten Riis. The music is edited versions of excerpts from live performances from 2005 to 2010. Jonas Olesen and Morten Riis played a series of improvisational concerts during this period, primarily with analogue instruments, such as modular synthesizers and home-made electronic devices. The recordings are as such, not a documentation of these concerts, but rather radically edited versions of these. The raw sound material went trough a series of digital processing sessions, editing long concert sessions down to the length of a single track. The tracks reveal themselves for the aware an mindful listener as delicate quite endeavors in investigating the relationship between silence and noise, between the audible and the non-audible, between the form and detail. These sonic and aesthetic experiments use the entire dynamics and frequency range, thus making of .appnd an appreciate alternative to the over-consumption that defines the current reality of music listening. Due to the rather extreme frequency content of the audio, this digital version has a different sound than the vinyl.

Jonas Olesen (1979) is a sound artist and composer living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. He runs the label BIN.

Morten Riis (1980) holds a PhD degree from Aarhus University and is educated in electronic music composition from the Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus. He currently holds a post doc position at Aarhus University, and was director of electronic music composition at the Royal Academy of Music 2013-2014. Besides his academic work he is a very active sound artist having received numerous grants and commissions, released several albums, played numerous concerts and exhibited sound installations in Denmark, Sweden, England, France, Poland, Finland, Germany and China. He has previously released Digital Sound Drawings in Crónica.

.appnd is available as a download from Crónica or Bandcamp.

Gintas K’s “Under My Skin” reviewed by The Wire


Gintas Kraptavičius is a prolific Lithuanian sound artist whose work exists somewhere on the left side of the glitch continuum. His music is composed of many short-term electronic events, most of which are somewhat melodic in-and-of-themselves. Much of the work here occurs inside a fairly tight sonic field, so it can feel a bit repetitious, but that has more to do with palette than technique. It’s definitely an abstract assemblage, so it just allows a lot of listener drift. Which is not always a bad thing. Byron Coley

New release: Gintas K’s “Under My Skin”


We’re very proud to present Gintas K’s (and our own) first tape release, Under My Skin.

Gintas K has been active as a composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist since the 1990s, focusing on experimental digital music aesthetics — overloaded massive structures, static and physically overwhelming frequencies, melodic ambiences, voice and field recordings. Gintas K has released several albums, four of which in Crónica: Lengvai / 60 x one minute audio colours of 2kHz sound (2006), Lovely Banalities (2009), So On (2010), and now Under My Skin.

Under My Skin makes no use of field recordings, and was composed exclusively through digital synthesis. This album is available as a limited-release tape and as a digital download.

“Nowhere: Exercises in Modular Synthesis and Field Recording” reviewed by Chain DLK


The “Nowhere” in the title is initially a barren place, the first three minutes of the opening track little more than faint geiger-counter-like glitches, before being crashed into by industrial electronics and barely discernible vocal declarations that form a jolting chaos for a couple of minutes, before disappearing as abruptly as they arrived, leaving only a radiophonic workshop-esque scenario of meandering tones.

This largely sets the tone for the entire work, which is substantially improvised, in Smolders own words “letting things flow and interfering only when necessary”, “I have left the idea of a preconceived/designed composition”, “there is only a vague idea before I start recording”. Large expanses of gentle scientific, sometimes sci-fi ambience are occasionally gatecrashed by sudden and acrid assaults of white or discordant noise so abrupt they ought to carry a health warning; five minutes into third track “For Rudy Carrera” being a prime example. “Song For Maya Deren” is like REM sleep briefly troubled by monsters, before the sleep of “Up Up And Back To 1982” mixes distant hums with vinyl crackle sounds akin to rain on a window before, once again, the nightmares return around the six minute mark. This evaporates, warm bottle-music arpeggios arrive, but these in turn are crushed into lo-fi, 8-bit 4-bit and beyond. It’s a pattern that repeats unpredictably and it’s certainly not always pleasant.

Were it not for the rather petulant sudden storms that whip up irregularly, I would be full of praise for the confidently sparse, measured soundscapes that are created here, a form of contemporary digital remodelling of music concrete that forms the larger part of the work. And while I certainly wouldn’t want to suggest that music should be anaemic or palliative, in this case it’s the furious interludes that don’t complement the whole, and a more measured temper throughout could have left this as a very elegant album, and it’s the cacophony-free pieces such as track 2 “NowHere” and track 6 “NoWhere” (do you see what they did there?) that are the strongest. Stuart Bruce

via Chain DLK

Futurónica 185


Episode 185 of Futurónica, a broadcast in Rádio Manobras (91.5 MHz in Porto, 18h30) and Rádio Zero (21h GMT, repeating on Tuesday at 01h) airs tomorrow, February 3rd.

The playlist of Futurónica 185 is:

  1. Eliane Radigue, L’île Re-Sonante (2005, L’île Re-Sonante, Shiiin)
  2. Eliane Radigue, Onward 9,5 (2009, Vice Versa, Etc.…, Important)

You can follow Rádio Zero’s broadcasts at radiozero.pt/ouvir and Rádio Manobras at radiomanobras.pt.