Moving Furniture Records super sale
2.20
Inspired explicitly by Eliane Radigue's Vice Versa..., Orphax records two source pieces in AudioMulch using nearly identical virtual modular settings, varying only a single parameter, and then sculpts the resulting material in Reaper into two strict twenty-minute compositions. The two pieces are conceived to be played independently or simultaneously, the listener encouraged to build their own mix; the album includes a download with both tracks plus a guide mix made with Jos Smolders.
Interventions In A Landscape
Cinema Perdu is Martijn Pieck's solo vehicle for what he calls 'soundtracks without movies': field recording as compositional starting point, layered with synthesizers, contact-microphone material and other electronic sources to reconstitute the feeling of a place at a moment. Interventions in a Landscape unfolds across four pieces drawn from coastal sites where human modification of the terrain sharpens existing contrasts. Place-based composition on the musique concrète-ambient threshold.
Trübhand
Recorded in Bad Zwischenahn in early 2016 as two live performances captured to a Zoom H4 - small Eurorack case, mixer, a couple of guitar pedals - Trübhand is built around long, slow modulations and resonant structures that rise and fall trying to find definition within the flat north-German landscape Fyans was living in. The methodology is patient sculptural patching, allowing time to do the structural work; the affect runs to the muted, modular drone shaped by its making.
Koura
Two pieces of multitrack composition built from sustained tones on solo acoustic instruments - a 'Jubel Töne' zither in the first, a 'Hohner Organetta' chord organ in the second - each extended through real-time electronic processing (feedback looping, downsampling, pitch-shifting, reverberation, oscillator interaction) and extended playing techniques. Part of an ongoing series on layered acoustic-tone composition. The title refers to a sheep-shearing ceremony still observed in rural Crete.
Divergence
A four-movement work probing the reciprocal interference of sound and space. The source material is reduced to elementary sonic primitives - sine waves, white noise - then physically degraded through tape manipulation to generate pulses, beats and emergent waveforms. From this collision between idealised digital signal and the analogue artefacts of magnetic media, van den Broek builds a heightened spatial perception where pure tone and altered source act on the listening field simultaneously.
Tria Atoma
Recorded in Athens in July 2014, the second album by 300 Basses extends the trio's move from free improvisation toward fixed composition. The investigation here turns on minimal but precisely framed actions: the beating patterns generated by long tones at slightly detuned pitches, the unstable timbre that emerges when reed sustains are layered with bowed cymbal, the slow permutation of a reduced interval set. A sound world built from infinitesimal elements, dense in vibration and microvariation.
Four Squared Wheel
Frans de Waard's first full CD under the Modelbau alias, a project built around a deliberate constraint: cassettes, small synthesizers, guitar effects, microphone and amplifier, with little or no computer involvement. Four Squared Wheel was captured in an extended studio session around a Philicordia organ routed through guitar effects and amplifier, signals mixed on the fly into a near hour-long single piece. Live electronic drone with the unmistakable grain of analogue circuitry.
Time Waves
Orphax's second proper CD, built from a live performance at the Bimhuis in Amsterdam (a STEIM evening shared with Yannick Franck and Thomas Köner) mixed and edited together with a parallel home recording into one continuous work. Sietse van Erve draws his frame from geological time scales: long, slow-floating sonic strata that emerge and recede without telegraphing what comes next, only the occasional rupture breaking the tranquil pace. Drone as an exercise in geomorphic listening.