★Touch
Black Sea
Christian Fennesz takes his time. He's been a busy guy all through this decade in terms of collaborations, live records, remixes, and so on, but he's only released a few proper albums under his surname, and each has been brilliant. Just before the new millennium he released the 1999 album Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08". It took the blissed-out sense of surrender that My Bloody Valentine specialized in into a harsh and assaultive realm, and the album can seem downr…
Working Touch (USB)
USB in digipak; 11 films, three hours 55 minutes. Films includes: Praised Fan, for bassoon (2016, 17 min) Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon. Commissioned for the Adelaide Festival, Australia, by Ilan Volkov. Material recorded at Marcus Schmickler's P I E T H O P R A X I S studio in Koln, Germany. First Out, for guitar (2015, 22:14) David First, guitar. Completed in November 2015 in Hong Kong. Premiered on Czech Radio in Prague, Czech Republic, Nov. 27 2015. Material recorded at Berklee School of M…
Stardust
Stardust uses cassette recordings from 2015-2018. Some songs (in different form) appear on the Mára recording Here Behold Your Own. Remixed using dubplates of Faith Coloccia's mixes and additional recordings by Philip Jeck in Liverpool, UK, 2020. Mastered by Denis Blackham. Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft.Faith Coloccia is an American artist and composer based in Vashon, WA. She was born and raised in Palm Springs, CA, and attended Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles (BFA). H…
Living Space
Following Slow Fade for Hard Sync (2009) and Location Momentum (2010), Living Space is Eleh's third physical release for Touch. Seven years in the making, this new release consolidates the artist's parallel narrative between a series of vinyl and CD releases for Important Records -- where the emphasis is on a minimalist aesthetic -- to a visual counterpoint that hints at the cinematic and painterly qualities of the music. Sound, as a healing force, is an idea as old as the medium itself. Inspire…
Migrations
**300 copies** Recorded in Holme Fen nature reserve, Cambridgeshire, with two JrF contact microphones on 22nd to 25thMay 2020. The long lines of wires and wooden posts stretched across the sunken landscape of the Fens follow the man-made drainage canals and rivers for hundreds of miles. Bowed, plucked and struck by natural phenomena (strong winds caused by climate change) and indigenous flora, reveals dynamic sonic intra-events and hidden acoustic ecologies.
A. Red Square 14’ 14”Field recordings…
Shadow Position
"There are 4 tracks, 4 different windows to look out from our studio in Düsseldorf into the street and their different layers of sound. 4 horizons, 4 spy holes in the door, 4 eyes and 4 shopping windows. 4 landscapes.Witness the electric city and the power house. Strafe F.R. is sitting inside the fuse box. The electric chirp of the night. The socket in which we sleep. The dog comes, in order to devour Strafe F.R. First he eats the rebellion and next he bites the Strafe.The house and the body, bo…
The Heat Equation
**750 copies** The Heat Equation is a 100pp book and CD set showcasing a new photographic work by Joséphine Michel alongside a live recording of Mika Vainio's final performance in the UK, featuring all new material intended for his proposed 2017 solo CD for Touch.Following their previous collaboration on Halfway to White, Michel and Vainio had been planning a second production, and in March 2017, Michel visited Vainio in Oslo to show him the first examples of the photographs she had been taking …
Trian: Recent Works
Trian (Recent Works) is Claire M Singer's debut on vinyl and this double album gathers most of her previous output on the Touch label. During recent years Singer has focused on writing and performing a mix of organ, cello, and electronics with regular performances at Union Chapel, where, as Music Director, she runs a diverse program of concerts and educational workshops around the chapel's organ, which was built by Henry Willis in 1877. Solas ("Light" in Gaelic), which ccupy the first three side…
Agora
Agora is Christian Fennesz's first solo album since Mahler Remix and Bécs. Fennesz writes: "It's a simple story. I had temporarily lost a proper studio workspace and had to move all my gear back to a small bedroom in my flat where I recorded this album. It was all done on headphones, which was rather a frustrating situation at first but later on it felt like back in the day when I produced my first records in the 1990s. In the end it was inspiring. I used very minimal equipment; I didn't even ha…
Genera - Live at AB Salon, Brussels
A lifelong expatriate, Bana Haffar was born in Saudi Arabia in 1987 and spent much of her childhood in the GCC. Having trained as a professional bass player and a classical violin player, she has now embraced electronic music fully, exploring live modular synthesizer performance. She is an enthusiastic proponent of the latest Moog and eurorack technology and has a growing discography of releases (VENT, Make Noise Records) in the last couple of years that highlight a unique melodic direction. Thr…
Albania, There Where the Avalanche Stops
**300 copies** For one week in every five years, two thousand singers, dancers and musicians along with fifty thousand spectators make their way to the small town of Gjirokastra in southern Albania for the Festivali Folkloric Kombelar. In the great castle overlooking the town, they participate in the incredible National Folk Festival of Albania, hoping to attain the highest level of interpretation and win one of the many awards available at the festival… the banner, even. Considering the compara…
Sensudestricto
Has there ever been a better time to fuck off to the stars? Is a prison breakout ‘escapism’? Crisis carve some wound-space to let the dreams back in. In nights we turn to fire, in flight we burst into stone, where are the exits in this theatre of the damned? Strict luggage allocations – guitar (David Knight), saxophone (Stephen Thrower) – and all the electronics your thoughts can carry. Headspin echoes, round and around, tilt wind-sails at a dark horizon, cut a stutter through the distance barri…
The Debatable Lands
In December 2017, Howlround (Robin the Fog) was invited to
perform at "The Winter Solstice Soundscapes" for the recently opened
record store "Vinyl Café" in his home town of Carlisle, Cumbria.
Inspired by the reception to his first ever performance in the great
border city, he covered his parent's dining room table with the same
equipment, stretched loops of tape around his mum's seasonal
candlesticks when she wasn't looking... and this LP is the result. The
only equipment used on the alb…
Soundings
Soundings, Simon Scott's debut studio album for Touch finds the composer and sound ecologist using field recordings from various cities around the globe; modular synthesizer treatments; live strings and laptop electronics to create an album of transition and shifting time zones. The recordings were edited and composed in hotels rooms across the world as Scott was constantly on tour as the drummer for Slowdive, who successfully reformed in 2014. "Hodos", the album opener, begins with 85 mph Storm…
Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone
Touch issues Jana Winderen's Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone.
The marginal ice zone is the dynamic border between the open sea and
the sea ice, which is ecologically extremely vulnerable. The
phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the oxygen on the
planet. During spring, this zone is the most important CO2 sink in our
biosphere. On Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone the sounds of
the living creatures become a voice in the current political debate
concerning the officia…
Ecce Homo
Ipek Gorgun's Ecce Homo explores the lighter and darker shades of the human psyche, behavior, and existence, and humanity's ability to create beauty and destruction. What lies in the essence of such complexity has become a core idea for the album, while Gorgun seeks to figure out if there is a true meaning to being human, and human being. Starting with "Neroli" as a human fascination with nature and finalizing with "To Cross Great Rivers"; a never-ending, hopeless dream of the mankind to conquer…
Elusive Balance
Ozmotic is a multidisciplinary artistic project, deeply fascinated by the dynamics of contemporary society, by architecture, cities, and vast uncontaminated spaces. Ozmotic creates world sounds characterized by an intense tonal variety and a refined rhythmic research. The interaction between electronic music and digital visual art in real time is an essential trait of Ozmotic's aesthetic. Having previously collaborated with Fennesz, Murcof, Bretschnider, and Senking, Elusive Balance is their thi…
Invisible Threads
Mark Van Hoen on Invisible Threads: "In mid-2016 I did a brief tour of the west coast with Philip Jeck, Simon Scott, Daniel Mensche, Lee Bannon, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Pye Corner Audio, and Marcus Fischer. The music of all these great artists and the experience of playing these shows with them all informed what would become Invisible Threads which was primarily composed and recorded in the latter half of 2016. I had not played live at dates in such a dense cluster for many years, and the exposure t…
Semper Liber
Semper Liber consists of a series of duets featuring Marcus Davidson, Hildur Gudnadottir, Mike Harding, Charles Matthews, Clare M Singer, Maia Urstad, and Anna von Hausswolff
and are drawn from recordings made at Spire events since 2009. Mixed by
its curator, Mike Harding, at the Völlhaus, and mastered by Mark Van Hoen,
this powerful four track collection -- to be played as one piece --
explores the sonics of the mighty organ in all its thundering glory.
Warning!: Extremely low frequencies …
The Bird Was Stolen
Based in Düsseldorf, Germany, Strafe Für Rebellion, or Strafe F.R., is a long-term collaboration between the artists Bernd Kastner and Siegfried M. Syniuga, which started in 1979. After a long period of hibernation, The Bird Was Stolen
marks their return to Touch following four previous releases in the
'80s and early '90s. From their early connection with the local scene,
centered around the Ratinger Hof in Düsseldorf, Strafe went on to
develop a unique and influential form of sound sculptur…