KFW STS 2CD

Pre-orders of the "STS" 2CD set are (finally) shipping today! The first 100 orders via Bandcamp come with a bonus poster, plus (of course) instant digital delivery of the 24/96 masters & a 4-hour transcription of the piece's premiere at Remote Viewing.

As this is the first non-home-brew release I’ve done in about 6 years it’s something of a momentous occasion, and in fact my original idea of making this a simple low-run edition via the Creel Pone manufacturing apparatus was slowly shelved due to the steady, high volume pre-order activity. It’s now a proper, glass-mastered & replicated 300-copy edition, offering a two-hour stereo reduction assembled, mixed, and mastered at the GRM in February 2019 across two discs for semi-unbroken listening.

I will have copies of during all of the festival dates this Fall which include vouchers for downloading the full high-res digital versions, so please check your merch tables accordingly. These will also be hitting Alpha State NYC, Discogs, and other fine retail portals, in time. Interested retail partners please get in touch.

“STS (2019) is an 8-channel installation work comprised of recordings made over a 15-year period on differing Serge Modular systems recorded at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Columbia Computer Music Center, Elektron Musik Studion, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Harvard University Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition, and Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio convolved with fragments of speech, recitation, and extra-textual verbal communication.

Partly an homage to formative speech-transformation works such as Herbert Eimert’s “Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1960-1962)”, the mapping of the frequency spectra of time-aligned formants to a catalog of full-range synthesizer signals yields a warm, attenuated field of sustained sound that ebbs through each space at a modest volume, inviting the listener to dwell on individual timbres, phrases, and conversations while assessing the overall sound-field.

Utilizing a sliding, modular structure to diffuse linked stereo pairs of convolutions into 4 discrete chambers, the individual parts become groups of voices heard distinctly, overheard from the next room, or made subliminally aware of via bleed-through from each adjoining space.”

This stereo reduction is one of an endless number of possible outcomes & was composed & finalized at the GRM, February 2019. In addition to the 24/96 masters of the GRM session (broken into 6 evenly-spaced access points, mainly to be compatible with Bandcamp) is an unbroken, 4-hour 16/44 stereo room recording of the debut staging of the piece at Remote Viewing, Philadelphia, PA on April 28th, 2019.

Thanks to Ean White, Patti Schmidt, François Bonnet, John Chantler, Robin Fox, Byron Scullin, Seth Cluett, Geoff Mullen, Eric Laska, and Serge Tcherepnin. ”

Alpha State, NYC

Since moving back to the greater New York City area late last year, I’ve consistently been asked whether or not I would resume the mail-order & micro-label operations that have been my co-profession during most of my adulthood (see: Reckankomplex Shop, Mimaroglu Music/Sales, Broken-Music, plus Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge, Entschuldigen, New England Electric Music Company, Creel Pone, no, Protracted View, Traveloglog, Industrial Abbotsford, etc.) While yes, I had been Selling Records again, my activities until now have been limited to flogging a small assortment of wares that I had brought over from Melbourne late last year.

Upon the news that a 1-3 year exclusion period had gone into effect (surprise!) moments after leaving Commonwealth soil to head to Japan for Labyrinth back in September, and the sinking realization that I could no longer legally come back into Australia to continue to live in Melbourne w/ my family, I scrambled to first get them set up again here in Brooklyn, then organize an absurdly complex, remotely-administrated move back across the equator. This took a long time both to sort out, then to wait out while the freight container circumnavigated the globe over a 6-month period. While I’m definitely not going to say this was the most stress-free or even financially sound transition in my life, I’m happy to report that everyone & everything is now finally present & accounted for & that I once again have access to all* of the inventory & infrastructure to get all of this back up & running.

To fund this whole absurdly expensive trans-hemispheric emergency-relocation endeavor, I have begun the draconian process of listing an unwieldy collection of essentially NOS archival LPs up for sale on Discogs, acquired in bulk from separate sources just prior to & then during my tenure down under. All said & done, if I keep my 200-listings-a-week stride (unlikely) I should have everything up for sale by the end of the summer, which means about 4,000 really, really great records will all be ripe for the plucking. If you’re at all interested in original pressings of (specifically) Early Electronic & Avant-Garde music, Sound Art & “Artists Records”, Modern & Contemporary Classical, regional & genre Electronic Music, and every conceivable & neighboring strand within these areas, you’ll want to check the Alpha State NYC Discogs pages on the regular.

In addition to this: after much deliberation I have decided to reactivate the Broken-Music site & have re-launched a tweaked, domestically-compatible version of it over at alphastate.nyc. For now, it’s a matter of getting the existing inventory catalogued & accessible, although this will (hopefully) sprout into another retail enterprise around new release & reissue activities. Everyone I’ve talked to has been generously enthusiastic about the idea of this (in private at least) & obviously I am regularly & consistently nostalgic for the days when this worked (and worked well). Like all things, time will tell.

* one casualty of this forced relocation was the consistent double-digit back-stock of Creel Pone titles I had slowly been amassing during my down-time in Brunswick; some of you will likely chalk this up to karma (fair enough) but of the three sizable boxes that were mailed directly from the Rathdowne PO to the Fort Greene compound containing so many meticulously hand-assembled replica-editions, only a single chaotically re-wrapped, half-filled one arrived, draped in the dreaded USPS “WE CARE” plastic. RIP to easily the most misconstrued, well-meaning project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with haha.

Summer... in The City.

Finally settling in to life back in The States, & everything has been beautiful. As a break from my normal seasonal back & forth between home & Europe, I’m taking a hiatus from the summer festival circuit this year to work on recorded music, performance, domesticities, laughter, and light retail at home.

The first of two events surrounding Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within - a week-long residency at Kurimanzutto’s Madison Avenue cabinet space (above) capped by the premiere performance of a commissioned piece for it - went beautifully, and now I get to look forward to playing the piece again (albeit in concatenated form) in an ensemble setting at the Rotunda of the Guggenheim on the 27th of June… but long before then, I’ll be realizing a “Playthrough” as part of fantastic show at the newly re-opened Schoolhouse (i.e. the venue in the living room of the home of Forma’s Mark Dwinell & John Also Bennett; can’t recommend JAB’s Shelter Press LP enough, easily one of my favorite records in recent times) on May 18th with a twin-Buchla Music Easel performance by Marcia Bassett & Ted Gordon (featuring real-time video projections by none other than Jeffrey Perkins & Barry Weisblat) and the duo of Cecilia Lopez on synth & Sandy Ewen on guitar. Then, a few weeks later, I’ll be proffering a “Shredding” Generator as part of a great bill at my favorite local metal bar St. Vitus on June 3rd alongside Nuclear Death Wish, Bob Bellerue, & Chris LiButti. Things are just warming up & I’m looking forward to playing a bunch in the city before summer’s end.

On the recorded-music front, a few big, mass-market tangible-music-product things are afoot for the Fall; after being in record-label limbo for the last 7 years it feels good to work at this scale again. Until the time is right to announce these projects, I’ll be continuing the Bandcamp monthly “Private Release” program, which will continue unabated through the end of the summer. May’s installment (consisting of the music I composed & performed in Athens for Documenta 14) is now live, and the pre-order for the June release (a stereo reduction of the “STS” installation piece composed & mixed/mastered at the GRM earlier this year) is now live; you get to choose a download of the 24/96 master broken into 6 “episodes” along with an unbroken 4-hour transcription of the piece’s public debut at Remote Viewing back in April, or a “Private” Double-CD Set with said stereo version cut in two hour-long segments, along with all of the aforementioned “digital assets” at your disposal:

Organ Within

Along with a superb team of artists organized by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe including C. Lavender, C. Spencer Yeh, Chuck Bettis, & Victoria Shen, I will be in residence at Kurimazutto’s new NYC space working on a piece for Tarek Atoui’s Organ Within.

I will be working in the gallery from 9am-3pm on May 7th-11th, and there will be a performance at 3pm on the 11th. Then, on the 27th of June, we will all be presenting, performing, and speaking at the Rotunda of the Guggenheim as a unit. Very excited for the promise & prospects of this project; Tarek’s performance at Bar.Laika a few night back was among my favorite listening experiences of the year thus far & I can’t wait to see, hear, and compose for the new instruments in person.

“kurimanzutto presents Tarek Atoui’s project Organ Within at its cabinet space in New York City. Operating as an open sound laboratory, and instrumentarium, Atoui will debut a new hybrid sculptural object that engages numerous technologies in order to re-envision the spatialization, perception and performativity of the traditional organ. The Organ Within is the result of his ongoing collaboration with instrument-makers Léo Maurel and Vincent Martial, and their research into historical church pipe organs, modular synthesizers, and the sonic experiences of deaf people.

For this presentation, Atoui partners with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe from CONTROL, Brooklyn’s leading synthesizer shop. As host and activator of the project, CONTROL has invited a diverse group of sound artists and musicians from New York’s experimental music community to venture and play the organ at kurimanzutto in New York. This group of collaborators will occupy the cabinet space one week at a time, to work with the instrument for research and recording purposes. These residencies will be open to the public, with a weekly performance held every Saturday at 3 pm..

Out of this continuous improvisation, Atoui and CONTROL will curate a final performance in the Rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on June 27, 2019 at 7 pm. To mark the closing of the two month project all resident artists will gather together to perform a simultaneous session. A moderated conversation with Atoui and his collaborators will precede the performance.

Organ Within is an itinerant exhibition organized in different movements. Beginning at kurimanzutto, New York and culminating at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the project will later travel in successive movements to The Hepworth Wakefield, England during Yorkshire Sculpture International (June 22 –September 29, 2019) and will extend to the Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates, in March 2020.

Residency program curated in collaboration with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe:
May 7 – 11: Keith Fullerton Whitman
May 14 – 18: C. Lavender
May 28 – June 1: C. Spencer Yeh
June 4 – 8: Chuck Bettis
June 18 – 22: Victoria Shen”

Lifetime Achievement

Woke up this morning to see my ugly mug (hovering over a 64-channel Midas in Amsterdam’s Paradiso last month) staring back from the BandCamp homepage, which was a nice surprise. Thanks to Daniel Dylan Wray for the thorough (thorough!) rundown of my recorded oeuvre, which has been just thriving on their ecosystem for the last year. For as much as I’m at odds with the ca. now reality of music retail (after fighting in the trenches, the front line, and finally in the war room of it all for a good two decades) I do feel that BandCamp offers the best blend of user optimization & customization and a fee & payment structure that actually benefits the musician first & foremost.

To commemorate, I have resumed placing recent music for sale up on their platform in native, often high-resolution formats (generally 24-bit, 96khz uncompressed) including a 10-year anniversary set of ca. now “Generators” (up for pre-order now for a 4/1 release), a pair of recent “Playthroughs” (ditto, 5/1) and even a slight 80s General MIDI “Table Music” read of the “Imaginary Film Score” spec (endlessly indebted to the genius of not just the Bands, but Brenda Hutchinson & Slava Tsukerman, Brad Fiedel, Kinuyo “James Banana” Yamashita, Jay Chattaway, etc.)

This is perhaps an opportune moment to point out that the Yearly Subscription is now a clean $60 ($5 a month!) which grants you full streaming AND download access to everything already up, plus all new releases as they’re posted & even cut rates on physical releases. I highly recommend the free iOS / Android BandCamp app; it’s stellar & even allows for offline listening if you so choose.