News

Red Dream (For Gunnar Ekelöf) is part of the 150th anniversary of the Swedish Palace in Istanbul.

readymag.com/u38655292/1412991/

For the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf, Istanbul and Turkey was, as it is for many Swedes, a very special place. Ekelöf visited Turkey in 1965 and inspired by the historical districts of Istanbul spent sixteen intense hours at the Istanbul Hilton hotel writing his most famous collection of poems: “Dīwān on the Prince of Emgion“. He has described the process of writing this work as if it was written by someone else; as if his being was possessed by a spirit. In fact when the book was originally published in Sweden it declared that the text was interpreted by Gunnar Ekelöf – not written by him, and when reading it one clearly experiences something dreamlike. Ekelöf was also the first person to translate the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud into Swedish, another author who experienced the voice of the other. In one of Rimbaud’s famous letters to a friend he states that he considers his writing experience as “Je est un autre” – the self is another.

20+ new and exclusive tracks recorded by Touch artists. A photographic counterpoint,
the view from Hampstead Heath during the London lockdown. Touch: Isolation is a subscription project that will evolve over the coming weeks. Click here to subscribe.

A time to support independent music while it still exists!

“Please keep your distance, the trail leads from here…”

The cancellation of gigs and festivals has already severely impacted our artists creatively and financially. In addition it has denied you, our audience, the opportunity to see them play and support them. The notion of ‘independent music’ might, in effect, be pushed deeper into the self-isolation mode it is already struggling to break free from. We don’t need studios to the same extent, but we do need a stage, a physical reference and if not, a mental space with which to question the drive to online existence.

We set out to respond to these challenging times in a creative and helpful way. The idea is to present Touch: Isolation whereby a new exclusive track from one of our artists, each with a bespoke photograph/cover image, is presented on a regular basis over the coming weeks. All the income received is collected from your subscriptions and put in a kitty, the proceeds of which are then divided up between the contributing artists.

These new and exclusive interventions will include works by Oren Ambarchi, Richard Chartier, ELEH, farmersmanual, Fennesz, fennesz sakamoto, Bana Haffar, Howlround, Philip Jeck, Bethan Kellough, Daniel Menche, Anthony Moore, Yann Novak, Zachary Paul, Claire M Singer, Geneva Skeen, UnicaZürn, Mark Van Hoen, CM von Hausswolff, Chris Watson, Jana Winderen and others to be confirmed – all expertly mastered by Denis Blackham.

We invite you to take this unique opportunity to support the artists, without whom there would be no alternative to corporate art… support the industries which realise the artists’ creation – the uncredited producers, designers, software developers, distributors, vinyl cutters, mastering engineers, friends and family etc., who all symbiotically depend on the other to bring their works to fruition…

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The subscription costs £20 for 20 (or more) tracks – please support the artists by investing in the Touch: Isolation project, and expect surprises – good ones for a change.

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Social distancing. Actual space. If you can get out, you have to get out. Escape velocity – from Brexit, then somehow prevent institutional meltdown? The UK shows the way, in a method that beggars belief.

The photographs were taken on Hampstead Heath during the early days of the UK/London lockdown, 25 March 2020, primarily in West Heath and the area around Golders Hill whose open space minimises the problems of social distancing. The weather, being superb after weeks of high winds and heavy rain, seemed a metaphor for regeneration and recovery, with the trees coming into bloom – in defiance of the scene we witnessed 33 years earlier after the Great Storm of October 1987 when, in the days that followed, the Heath looked like an arboreal graveyard.

The objective is to find a sense of quiet celebration, to look at the balance between the detail and the scaling force of open spaces. Let’s hope they can remain open.

To make 20 (or more) record covers in less than a week for sound and music we had yet to hear, and to then match the photography to each artist’s contribution… If this seems somewhat in the style of the children’s game, ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’, then perhaps that’s more apt than pretending we know how everything fits together at this juncture.

This might also be seen an opportunity to give an early documentation to the mental state of 2020, remembering the year 2000 and the threat of the ‘millennium bug’, this may well become known as the year when x melted into y, to avoid z.

Roughly a dozen years ago, life went broadband. Today we see our reliance on digital systems like never before.

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‘As a dwindling member of the generation that lived through and served in the Second World War I think in some ways this is much worse. It was possible to live in a country area and apart from rationing see little of the war. Bombing was spasmodic and haphazard, and our defences were really good. After a year, there was very little chance of an invasion and much of life – sport, theatres and radio, continued as before. Restaurants and hotels remained largely open, rationed according to turnover.’ David John Harding, b. 1925.

Further reading:

furtherdot blog
igloo magazine
ambient blog
Broadcasting House, BBC Radio 4
Xenographica

76pp full colour book + CD
33 tracks – 78:59
Limited edition of 1000

Release date: 11th December 2017

Track listing:

Into the Open
Mika Vainio – Behind the Radiators
AER – Just Before Dawn
Bethan Kellough – Twelve
Wire – A Year A Second [For BCG]
London in a Week
Carl Michael Von Hausswolff – Sine Missing One
Chris Watson – Deepcar
Jana Winderen – Bronx Tunnel
The Magical Land of the North
Claire M Singer – Storr
Hildur Gudnadottir – Death 200AD
Three 20 – Four Twelve
Philip Jeck – Deed of Gift
Walking on Water
Simon Scott – Storm of the Fens
Eleh – Overt One
The Love Train
Russell Haswell – Demons
Heitor Alvelos – Expectant
I’m a Schoolteacher on Holiday
Johann Johannsson – Mingyun
Mark Van Hoen – Prescient
Fennesz – Paint It Black (remastered)
Sohrab – JV Dream
It’s Enough to Make You Weep
Strafe FR – Virgin
Before The Sea @ Falasarna
Jim O’Rourke – Despite The Water Supply
Situation Stabilised / BJ Nilsen – Atom Mother
Peter Rehberg – Cinecom
Gateway to the Garden
Oren Ambarchi – Testify
The Sound of Eleven

In a 24/7 world there is no greater challenge than “to be in command of one’s own time”. Is it true that the ability to download anything, at any moment, constitutes freedom? Has the ‘value’ of music, art and design been stripped bare? “I Google, therefore I am”…

Touch MOVEMENTS has been compiled over the course of 3 years. It is a response to many requests for Touch to publish a fuller account of Jon Wozencroft’s photography for the cover art of the project. The book follows the music, which was compiled step-by-step, like a jigsaw – there was not an “open call” to the artists, rather a sequential development which gives the CD a special narrative quality. And since our last Touch 30 compilation in 2012, the accuracy of the music has grown and rises to the challenge of what sound can do to transform perceptions about the immediate emotion of musical work and its more difficult, longer term evolution.

Following Touch Folio 001 in 2015, this series is a dedication to finding new ways of audiovisual publishing, somewhere between the twin peaks of a jewel-cased CD and a lavish box-set. The two elements of sound and the visual work in parallel to create the idea of an “Ear-book”, whose interdependency reveals itself over time, and allows the richest of listening and viewing experiences. The music and the photography is fully annotated, alongside a rarely-seen manifesto by the Surrealist film-maker Jan Švankmajer which celebrates the spirit of the creative act.

<a href=”http://touchshop.org/product_info.php?cPath=15&amp;products_id=833″>Pre-order FOLIO 002 | Various Artists/Jon Wozencroft – “Touch Movements” [76pp Book + CD] in the TouchShop</a>

Vinyl LP
Limited Edition 500

Release date: 20th October 2017

Written & recorded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff
Artwork & photography by Jon Wozencroft & Carl Michael von Hausswolff
Mastered by Jason at Transition

Conceptualised (2010–2013), composed and produced (2014–2017) by Carl Michael von Hausswolff in Palma (Majorca) and Stockholm. This musical piece consists only of sounds emitted and extracted from physical matter using emission spectroscopy as the sole basic technology. Acknowledgements to Linköping University (IFM), Sweden.

‘Still Life – Requiem’ consists of one piece with the same title and is divided up into two to fit the LP format. The piece is, as the title suggests, a requiem and it’s contents are solely composed by sounds captured from a specific physical solid state material. The composer has used a technique called ’emission spectroscopy’ whereby the frequencies generated from the material was analysed and transferred into, for humans, a listenable pitch (between 15 and 14000Hz). This captured organic sound material has been stretched, looped, equalised and composed to produce the recording.

A requiem is a piece of music dedicated to certain sole or several restless souls that wander our worlds looking for a place to call home. A requiem radiates calm, peace and perhaps comfort for tormented spiritual beings – it’s a piece dedicated to promote and insert tranquility and transcendence.

This requiem also provides the listener with a certain feeling of connection – perhaps a connection with the unknown and with the energy field clusters and mental abilities of post-mortem life forms that would be the incorporeal essence of a living being.

CMvH (born 1956 in Linköping , Sweden) has a long history within the communities of contemporary music and visual art. His first records was released in early 80s while the most recent saw the light just a few years ago (‘Squared’ [CD – Auf Abwegen, 2015]). In recent years he has been collaborating with Leslie Winer (‘1’ [LP – Monotype 2016]) and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (‘Nordlicht’ [LP – Curious Music, 2017]).

He has also instigated and curated the collective sound-installation ‘freq_out’ during 2003 – 2017, which includes artists such as Jana Winderen, JG Thirlwell, Finnbogi Petursson, Christine Ödlund and others.

Order Carl Michael von Hausswolff – “Still Life – Requiem” [VINYL LP] in the TouchShop
www.cmvonhausswolff.net

This release comes in a limited issue of 500 copies on 180-gram clear vinyl in a matte varnish sleeve. Included is a high resolution, numbered art print and download card.

The four pieces on the record were originally intended as informal creative exercises born from a shared curiosity and mutual interest in collaboration. Instruments include piano, sine wave generators, synthesizer, EVP vocals, and on “At The Island,” a field recording of the nocturnal sounds on the shore of the Spanish island of Lanzarote.

Released by Curious Music ‎[curio 8]
Photography by Finnbogi Pétursson

Tracklist:

A Let Her Go 17′ 40″
B1 These Are the Keys 5′ 02″
B2 At the Island 5′ 04″
B3 Find the Way

7 September–3 November 2013
Lunds konsthall
Mårtenstorget 3
SE-22351 Lund, Sweden
T +4646355295
lundskonsthall@lund.se
www.lundskonsthall.se

Lunds konsthall presents one of Sweden’s most outstanding artists, born in Linköping in 1956 and based in Stockholm and Palma de Mallorca. He is also active as a composer, filmmaker and curator. All of this is evident in the exhibition, titled I Am the Others. It is, at the same time, a solo exhibition by the artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff and a group exhibition organised by the curator Carl Michael von Hausswolff.

The exhibition contains work by a number of persons, most of whom are well known, but not as artists. They have caught von Hausswolff’s attention because of their exceptional actions and stances, which for different reasons could be characterised as art. Seen together, their lives and characters also form a self-portrait of von Hausswolff, in the sense that all of them have done something with which he can identify or sympathise.

Those portrayed in the exhibition are Corazón Amurao (The Philippines), Laura Lee Burroughs (US),Clint Eastwood (US), Olga Eriksson (Sweden), James B Irwin (US), Friedrich Jürgenson(Russia/Estonia/Sweden), Salvatore Lucania (Italy/US), Selmer Nilsen (Norway), Hiroo Onoda(Japan/Brazil) and Wu Ping (China), as well as the members of ‘The Military Gang’ (Sweden) and the ‘meta-scientists’ behind the Spiricom instrument (US).

I Am the Others offers an indirect retrospective view of von Hausswolff’s many-faceted activities from the late 1970s until today, for which his interest in society and the human condition was always the sounding board. But the exhibition doesn’t try to capture his entire register as a sound and light artist clearly rooted in performance art. In installations, performances and concerts von Hausswolff has articulated space and time, memories of the past and inexplicable messages from ‘the other side,’ often using various kinds of recording and measuring equipment: tape recorders, cameras, radar, sonars… Music has always been a second home to him. He helped found and run two record companies. Radium 226.05 was created in 1986; Anckarström four years later.

Just as characteristic of von Hausswolff’s practice are his many collaborative projects. Two of these are featured at Lunds konsthall. Under the name PHAUSS he and Erik Pauser carried out a range of projects while they were both living in Gothenburg in the 1980s. Their travelogues Alger–Lagos 1983and Zürich–Zürich 1986 are included in the exhibition, along with Al Qasr, Baharyia Oasis, Egypt 2005, one of the films from von Hausswolff’s ongoing collaboration with Thomas Nordanstad.

Among von Hausswolff’s other collaboration partners are the artists Leif Elggren, Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena and Jan Håfström, the EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) researcher Michael Esposito, the ex-model and poet Leslie Winer and the musicians John Duncan, Jean-Louis Huhta, Graham Lewis (Wire) and Martin Rössel.

He has participated in many international group exhibitions, such as Manifesta 1 in Rotterdam (1996), documenta X in Kassel, the biennials in Istanbul (1997), Johannesburg (1997), Santa Fe (1999) and Liverpool (2004) and the Venice Biennial (2001, 2003, 2005). He has also had numerous solo exhibitions, for instance at Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2000), ICC in Tokyo (2000), CCA in Kitakyushu (2001) and Portikus in Frankfurt am Main (2004).

In 2003 von Hausswolff curated the Gothenburg Biennial, under the title Against All Evens. In recent years he has organised sound art events such as freq_out, with manifestations in institutions such as Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Henie-Onstad Center in Oslo, Sonambiente in Berlin and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Our warm thanks go first of all to Carl Michael von Hausswolff for the enjoyable collaboration and the impressive results. We also thank the lenders—Per Forsberg, Staffan Lamm, Marianne Lindberg von Baumgarten and the gallerist Niklas Belenius—for their kind assistance. Special thanks go to Thomas Nordanstad and Erik Pauser for their participation and help.

Finally we also wish to thank Anna von Hausswolff, who gives a concert in Lund Cathedral in connection with the exhibition opening.