Hong Chulki and Lee Hangjun to Perform in Chicago, NYC, and Boston

Since 2006, musician Hong Chulki and filmmaker Lee Hangjun have been collaborating together as Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph. In 2008, Balloon & Needle released a DVD featuring works from the duo. Starting next week, both artists will perform shows at Chicago, NYC, and Boston. The Chicago show will take place on January 23rd at The University of Chicago's Logan Center. The event is co-presented with Lampo and requires an RVSP (do so soon since space is limited). The NYC show will take place on January 25th at Issue Project Room while the Boston show will take place at Le Laboratoire Cambridge. The latter will also feature Youjin Moon and Retribution Body.

Hong Chulki and Lee Hangjun will be presenting two works at each show. Information for both pieces is as follows:

Film Walk
 

2012, 25 minutes

Film Walk replaces the perforations in the film stock with optical sound head. The perforations do not create images produced by the gate movement, but make ‘a hole a sound’ by the artist’s hand and his step speed with the numbers of sound coinciding with the length of time.

 

Phantom Schoolgirl Army
 

2013, 20 minutes

Phantom Schoolgirl Army is a powerful audiovisual performance based on a collection of military photographic portraits, and elaborates on the story of North Korean spies disguised as high school girls during the Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion of 1948. The South Korean government used this legend as anti-communist propaganda.

You can watch videos of both pieces being performed below. However, the Phantom Schoolgirl Army clip is of a show which featured Okkyung Lee and Giovanni Di Domenico instead of Hong Chulki. In related news, Hong Chulki and Will Guthrie are to appear on a future collaborative Erstwhile release.

Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phongraph tour:

Jan 23 - Chicago @ Logan Center
Jan 25 - NYC @ Issue Project Room
Jan 28 - Cambridge @ Le Laboratoire Cambridge

Gabi Losoncy Releases New 4-Disc Album

Gabi Losoncy has just released a new album simply titled 2015 and it's a 4 CD-r set that presumably continues her quotidian documentary-style of field recording. That's the album above housed in a mini manila folder. 2015 will be available to purchase from ErstDist shortly. (EDIT 3/31/2016 - All copies from ErstDist are now sold out). This album will be limited to 50 copies so reserve your order today. The tracklist for the album can be seen below. In other news, Gabi Losoncy is slated to appear on a future ErstAEU release with Matt Krefting. More news on that to follow as it develops.

2015 tracklist:

1-1. Kohl's 2
1-2. Outside June 22
1-3. Outside June 222
1-4. Sim Card
2-1. Test 1
2-2. 302,000,000
2-3. Newport Lot
2-4. Line 2
2-5. Line 3
3-1. Age 24 B
3-2. Filet Mignon
3-3. New Pressure Drop 2 Final
3-4. 100 New Garden
4-1. CCP Shooter

Download Voices, the New Album from Alice Hui-Sheng Chang & Jason Kahn Now

Jason Kahn released a lot of albums last year, both solo and collaborative, but most surprising was the release of Songline (Editions) and For Voice (Conront). Both releases found Kahn solely employing extended vocal techniques. The former was recorded in a former Swisscom telephone relay station while the latter featured live concert recordings that took place in Canberra and Tokyo. Interestingly, both albums were presented without any post-recording editing.

Today, Kahn continues his trek into the world of extended vocal technique with the aptly titled Voices released on the Pan y Rosas Discos netlabel. The album was recorded in Melbourne last year and is a collaboration between Kahn and Alice Hui-Sheng Chang. Chang has released a handful of albums within the past few years, including a collaboration with Kevin Parks on Homophoni and one with Jin Sangtae and Park Seungjun on Eh? You can stream the first track from the album above. More information on the album and a download link for the full release can be found here.

Johnny Chang Performs Peter Ablinger in New Album from Sacred Realism

Sacred Realism didn't release anything in 2015 but they're kicking off 2016 with a brand new album from Peter Ablinger. This album features a performance of "Augmented Study (2012)" for 16 violins by Wandelweiser affiliate Johnny Chang. The piece runs about an hour long and was mixed and mastered by Ablinger himself. "Augmented Study (2012)" is one of numerous pieces in Ablinger's Augmented Studies series. These compositions specifically focus on the "tension between redundancy of material and complexity of experience." You can hear a snippet from the album above. This specific performance by Chang is considered a 'study version' and was never intended to be performed live. The final version of the composition calls for only 7 violins and is 24 minutes in length. You can listen to one such recording of the finalized composition by Erik Carlson on his Bandcamp page.

Augmented Study (2012) can be purchased on the Sacred Realism website here.

Black Truffle Records Reissue AMM's Seminal AMMMusic

AMMMusic, the landmark debut album from AMM, is getting its first official vinyl reissue courtesy of Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle Records. The album was remastered and cut by Rashad Becker and is available for preorder right now at Forced Exposure (US) and Boomkat (UK). Copies will also be available in the future at Metamkine (FR) and Kompakt (DE). If you want to remind yourself what the album sounds like, stream the whole album (in low quality) via YouTube below. The press release for the reissue is as follows:

Black Truffle is honoured to present the first vinyl reissue of the classic debut album from AMM, AMMMusic. Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe’s beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label’s founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd‘s first manager Peter Jenner. (Pink Floyd paid tribute to AMM’s influence on their improvisational sensibility with the track ‘Flaming’ on their debut album, named after the piece that occupies AMMMusic’s first side, ‘Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset’).   

Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde – Keith Rowe and Lou Garehad played with the great progressive big band leaderMike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare – AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaf, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe’s prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies.

Evan Parker famously described the improvisational logic of AMM’s music as ‘laminal’, in contrast to the ‘atomistic’ approach more common among the generation of British improvisers (Bailey, Rutherford,Stevens and co.) to which he himself belonged. AMM improvised in layers: layers of sound subtly rising and falling or abruptly starting and stopping without being propelled by the implied pulse of free jazz improvisation. Rather than a pulse, AMM’s music began with the sound of the room in which it was played, the Cageian anarchy of silence. By embracing the non-synchronous simultaneity of layered sound, AMM was able to create a musical container into which nearly anything could be incorporated at any moment: on AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew’s purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music (and, on the LP’s second side, an extended fragment of ‘Mockingbird’).

AMM’s clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Where improvised music has tended to foster the development of idiosyncratic stylists who move freely from one group to another, AMM, initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic  the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices.

– Francis Plagne

INSUB. Release Three New Albums

Swiss record label INSUB. has just released three new albums. You can stream all three albums above courtesy of INSUB.'s bandcamp page. The first of these albums is entitled One and Seven and features a piece composed by Stefan Thut and performed by the Insub.8tet. The Insub.8tet includes Thut himself alongside artists like D'incise, Cyril Bondi, and Rodolphe Loubatière. One and Seven is 55 minutes long and finds various tones and voices weaving in and out of each other in a low-key, linear fashion. You can find more information about the album and purchase it here.

The second new album features an unedited live concert recording of Illogical Harmonies, the duo of Johnny Chang and Mike Majkowksi, performing with D'incise. The performance was one of two that took place in Switzerland and is 41 minutes in length. More information and purchasing information can be found here.

The third new album comes from Miguel A. Garcia and is entitled argiope. It features six tracks which span 48 minutes and includes contributions from Miguel Prado, Ainara LeGardon, Roberto Mallo, and more. You can purchase argiopre and read more information about the album here.

Regler (Mattin & Anders Bryngelsson) Actualize Manfred Werder in New Album on NUENI RECS.

The Bilbao-based NUENI RECS. has just released its newest album and it features Manfred Werder's 2015³ actualized by Regler, the collaborative duo between Mattin and Brainbombs' Anders Bryngelsson. The score for the piece can be seen above on the album's cover and is translated as such:

through excessive fatigue i had thrown myself on my bed in my clothes in the brightly-lit room, and had at once, for a few seconds, fallen asleep

(Walter Benjamin, One-way Street, Halt For Not More Than Three Cabs, 1928)

As with other scores from Werder, it's text based, short, and extremely open to interpretation. Werder specifically wrote the piece to be performed by Regler and it seems fitting considering what Mattin and Bryngelsson have conjured up in the past few years. In 2013, simple flowchart scores led to the two creating their take on dbeat and dub. In 2014, the straightforward "Play as hard and fast as possible for an hour" instruction led to free jazz and noisecore. And last year, the two took on harsh noise wall as the various black boxes adorning the packaging acted as scores.

Concept is always important when talking about Mattin and these projects as Regler have often felt like a critique on music (or perhaps more specifically, our relationship with it). Consider the weekly meetings that Mattin organized throughout November and December of last year and the questions he posed on the event page: "does music contain transformative qualities? Or is it just a soundtrack for our fucked up times? Are extreme actions, improvisational approaches and noise enough to dismantle our conditioned selves? Or do we need to radically reconsider the critical potential of these practices?" As noted on the cover for 2015³, the two are taking on classical music this time. Werder's scores often point performers and listeners to the world of sound around them. As a result, it'll be interesting to see how Regler take on this piece.

You can hear a sample of 2015³ above and you can purchase the album from the NUENI RECS. website here.

Arek Gulbenkoglu Releases End-music

Last year, Australian musician Arek Gulbenkoglu released the incredible (but sadly overlooked) The Reoccurrence. It was an album I was particularly enamored with due to Gulbenkoglu's ability to remove himself from his material, allowing the various sounds and spaces he recorded to exist in a 'pure' state. He's just released a new album and it's entitled End-music. The press release for the album is as follows:

In the follow-up to The Reoccurrence (2015), Arek Gulbenkoglu presents End-music: a series of insular sonic imprints via use of tape deteritus, voice and abused electronics.

End-music continues Gulbenkoglu's fascination with sound at its most elemental level and comprises three sculptural pieces in which textures are examined from different angles, and threads are pulled bare. This is a transparent and tactile music that accumulates, shifts and contorts.

End-music spans a total of 42 minutes and, as with The Reoccurrence, is self-released and limited to a small run of 77 copies.  Copies of the album will also be available from ErstDist and Penultimate Press within the next couple weeks. The tracklist for the album is below.

End-music tracklist:

1. Cheap Talk
2. The Fodder
3. Interesting Rot

Vote Now in the 2015 Tone Glow Readers' Poll & Win up to Three Albums

The poll is now closed.
Thank you for voting, winners will be notified shortly.

○ ○ ○

Tone Glow has been inactive for quite some time due to the holiday season and my sudden intense interest in all things fragrance (my most visited website of the past month? Fragrantica of course). I'm happy to announce, though, that I'm not finished with 2015 quite yet. Some time in the next couple weeks, I'll be posting lists of my favorite albums and tracks of the past twelve months. However, I want all of you to join me in the awesome/terrible year-end tradition of list-making as well.

As an added bonus, participating in the readers' poll will enter you into a raffle to win one (or two! or three!) of various experimental albums from 2015. I've become mostly disenchanted with physical media over the past few years so this is great opportunity for me to clean out my CD collection. There are some fantastic albums in this lot, many of which will appear in my year end list, so don't miss out. The only catch is that you'll have to enter your name (first name and last initial is sufficient) and e-mail in the form. You can be sure that all information will be kept confidential.

Voting will cease on January 8th at 11:59 PM CST. All entries submitted afterwards will not be counted. There will be three (3) winners. The first prize winner will be able to choose up to three (3) albums from the list below. The second prize winner will be able to choose two (2) albums from the remaining lot and the third prize winner will be able to choose one (1) album. Winners will be decided via a random number generator shortly after polling closes and will be notified the following week. This giveaway is open to participants worldwide. However, I cannot guarantee delivery to addresses in Italy or Brazil.

You can vote in the Tone Glow readers' poll and enter the raffle here.

Albums up for raffle:

Jeph Jerman/Tim Barnes - Matterings (Erstwhile)
Graham Lambkin/Michael Pisaro - Schwarze Riesenfalter (Erstwhile)
Eric La Casa/Taku Unami - Parazoan Mapping (Erstwhile)
Kevin Parks/Vanessa Rossetto - Severe Liberties (ErstAEU)
Devin DiSanto/Nick Hoffman - Three Exercises (ErstAEU)
Takahiro Kawaguchi/Utah Kawasaki - Amorphous Spores (Erstwhile)
Kevin Drumm/Jason Lescalleet - Busman's Holiday (Erstwhile)
Jürg Frey - String Quartet No. 3 / Unhörbare Zeit (EWR)
Kevin Drumm, Choi Joonyong, Hong Chulki - Normal (Balloon & Needle)
Various Artists - Experimental Music Concert (Slub)
The Set Ensemble - stopcock (Consumer Waste)
Various Artists - Nice Weather for War (Kye)
Taku Sugimoto - Septet (Meenna)
Stilllife - Archipelago (Ftarri)

Jin Sangtae Releases shadow boxer

Korean improviser Jin Sangtae has just released a new album entitled shadow boxer on his label popmusic25. The album was recorded at Dotolim and features thirty tracks which span a total of sixty minutes. As per usual, the album features Jin Sangtae working with acoustic hard drives and other materials. shadow boxer is limited to 100 copies on CDR. You can find more information about the album here.