★Touch
Sand
This is Philip Jeck's fifth solo album for Touch. Sand was recorded live in Holland and England in 2006/2007 and edited in Liverpool in January, 2008 using Fidelity record players, Casio SK keyboards, a Behringer mixer and Sony mini-disc recorders. Following Philip Jeck's acclaimed collaboration with Gavin Bryars and Alter Ego on a new version of The Sinking of the Titanic, Sand is a set of seven new compositions that highlight Jeck's mastery of vinyl manipulation and personal and collective mem…
Amoroso
Charles Matthews played the grand organ in York Minster, during Spire Live on January 20, 2007, alongside Fennesz and Philip Jeck. This release is an homage to Arvo Pärt and the school of minimalism, specifically "mystic minimalism" or "sacred minimalism." He is considered a pioneer of this style, along with contemporaries such as Henryk Górecki and John Tavener.
Destinationless Desire
Oren Ambarchi presents Destinationless Desire: electric guitars, organ, samples, bells, percussion and motorized cymbals recorded at BJB Studios, Sydney with additional overdubs made at home in 2005-2007. Gratitude to Fairport Convention and Boris D Hegenbart.
Oceanus Pacificus
Chris Watson is the world's leading wildlife sound recordist. Oceanus Pacificus captures the voices and rhythms of the Humboldt current around the Galapagos Islands recorded in April 2006 using a pair of Dolphin Ear Pro Hydrophones onto a NAGRA ARES-PII digital audio recorder. After co-founding Cabaret Voltaire and playing in The Hafler Trio, he left all of it to become the sound archivist for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. He is now a full-time freelance sound recordist.
transition
7" vinyl only -- no legal downloads of these tracks are available. These three tracks are based on 8 different guitar recordings made at Amann Studios, Vienna, between 2005-2007. The acoustic guitar was recorded with an AKG C12 microphone. Other sounds were made using a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox AC15 amp. The 7" is part of the Touch Sevens 7" vinyl-only series, which began with Oceanus Pacificus by Chris Watson (TS 002EP).Track Listing:A1. On A Desolate Shore (5:14)B1. A Shadow Passes By (3…
Headphone musics 1 to 6. As I As
In 1967 Z'EV took a tape music class at the UCLA night school. The leader of the course was Joseph Byrd who was the founder and theoretician of the first electronic rock band: the united states of america. So while it's almost 40 years now that he has been involved in the production of electro-acoustic music, Headphone Musics marks the first release of a product exclusively featuring this form of music. All of the source material is drawn from the collection of cassette tapes Z'EV has amassed ov…
STAR SWITCH ON
Aer, Biosphere, Fennesz, Hazard, Philip Jeck and Mika Vainio working with recordings from Chris Watson.
SPIRE : LIVE IN GENEVA CATHEDRAL
St. Pierre Cathedral, Geneva, was the crucible of the Reformation in 1534… The second release in the Spire series [cf Spire, organ works past, present & future, Touch # Tone 20, 2004] is more than a document of ‘Spire Live’, which took place as part of La Batie 2004, at St. Pierre Cathedral, Geneva, on 5th September 2004. Curated by Eric Linder, from La Batie, and Mike Harding, the dynamism of the event, where the audience rotated between 3 separate venues within the Cathedral precinct, is refle…
SPIRE
The thought of producing a compilation where the tracks were all either inspired by or more directly influenced by the organ had been frequently aired over the years. The conversations were always animated and expansive. The organ works of Arvo Prt, those performed by Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, a pupil of Richard Rodney Bennett at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and others, have reached a wider non-classical audience. Eventually Benny Nilsen arranged to visit St. Mary's Church, Warwick …
RINGSTONES
99 tracks and lots of participants (John Hudak, Oren Ambarchi, Chris Watson, Brandon LaBelle, Evan Parker, Thomas Lehn, Ryoji Ikeda…) that makes music for your mobile phone.
LIGHT
4 new tracks from the 3 audio artists (Hazard, Fennesz, Biosphere) who make up the forthcoming Touch Tour [UK, May 2001]. All are exclusive tracks recorded specifically for this CD, released for the tour. Taking the everyday world as source material and inspiration, the three international collaborations between electronic sound artists and visual artists present a vivid introduction to the work of Touch, the ground-breaking audio-visual label, in its twentieth year. Hazard's compositions evoke …
0°C
As the title may suggest, 0°C is a sonic exploration at a very bottom of human perception - the fragile line between life and death, dark and light, noise and silence. The authentic being is never to be achieved with complete and definitive perception of the universe - the limited human is just negligible drop somewhere between infinity and nonentity. There is no fulcrum for pretentious awareness and peace for one's arrogant mind - obscurity, uncertainty and hesitation are the only true man's sa…
+/-
This is the third edition of this timeless classic, originally released in 1996. Ryoji Ikeda is Japan's top avant-garde minimalist electronic composer, in the tradition of Alvin Lucier/The Hafler Trio/Bruce Gilbert/CM von Hausswolff/Panasonic, etc. +/- has a particular sonority whose quality is determined by one's listening point in relation to the loudspeakers. Furthermore, the listener can experience a particular difference between speaker playback and headphone listening. The sound signals c…
Jessamine
This is New Zealand-based (and former Thela member) Rosy Parlane's second full-length release on touch. With Jessamine, Rosy develops these themes, and continues to incorporate new musical elements from unconventional as well as orchestral instrumentation. To him, everything is an instrument: from household objects to nature sounds. But it is the human element which gives his work such a distinctive sound. Ranging from ambient to noise, he gives full rein to textures of living; to start, languid…
Iris
Rosy Parlane lives in New Zealand; he began playing music with the avant-garde rock trio Thela. Thela released two cds, 'Eponymous' and 'Argentina' on the label Ecstatic Peace! He subsequently began working with abstract electronic based music, both as a solo artist and as Parmentier with fellow Thela collaborator, Dion Workman. His full and intricate soundscapes are comprised of of sample-loops, pianos, guitars, and field recordings manipulated via digital means. Parlane has released two solo a…
passt
Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) and Ramon Bauer completed their trilogy for the label Touch with the 2001 CD Passt. This album, short at 33 minutes, maintains an uncomfortable relationship with glitch electronica. Rehberg & Bauer's first CDs pioneered the genre, which quickly went through an ossification process. Closing their series, the artists try to distance themselves from the glitch culture, bringing a humorous and critical touch to the music. But meta-music this is not; we remain in glitch terri…
Violence of discovery and calm of acceptance
This is his first album for touch. The highly evocative intricate and subtle guitar drones are captured in the beautiful photography of Heitor Alvelos, a Portuguese artist, and in the artwork of Jon Wozencroft. The background noise on track 10 is a recording of silence during a Space Shuttle mission real time webcast. All other sounds were released by electric guitars. The album was recorded between 1993 and 2000 and mastered at Noise Precision, Lisbon.
Soaked
This recording is taken from their live performance at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002. “There are grains of truth in the suggestion that, in moving, you may find yourself in or out of some one’s favour. But, listen to the slow, delicate, even introspective background: some breeze, some chimes, some distant thunder as each focal point remains a lament.”This blistering work was recorded live at the Moers Jazz Festival, Germany, in May 2002 and follows hot on the heels of Philip Jeck…
Stoke
Stoke was made using Bush, Fidelity and Philips record players, a Casio keyboard and an Alba portable CD player. This record mainly consists of edits of live performances from England, Japan and Vienna. The notion of turntablism may be associated with flashy, deck-hopping scratch gymnastics, but the use of the record player as an instrument harks back to a less ostentatious tradition of music making. John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer, and James Tenney recognized records and turn…
Surf
Surf is the second CD from the British experimenter whose sound manipulations begin with record players and tape machines. His work "Vinyl Requiem" (with Lol Sargent) for 120 Dansette record players was awarded Time Out magazine's 1993 Performance Award. On these seven pieces (many commissioned for theatre companies) orchestras, rhythms, voices and rhythms ("Surf Finger") are borrowed, manipulated or run backwards (the ethereal tones of "Box Of Lamb" and "1986 (Frank Was 70 Years Old)"). Jeck's …