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Baskaru is a French independent label that promotes music / sound, where the emphasis is on the electronic. Incorporating musique concrete, sonic exploration, acoustic / electric hybridisation and acous-matic sound, Baskaru limits it’s output to a select few per year.
Symbiosis Orchestra - Live Journeys
The Symbiosis Orchestra has a constant core which is augmented by artists from varying fields of music and experimentation. It’s oeuvre combines the sound of anything and everything: from it’s contrasting digital / electronic and acoustic instrumentation and use of natural non-instruments to their composition and improvisation techniques. Live Journeys is a collection of short performances which sometimes seemingly uses open mic recording techniques to include the surroundings of the performance into the work itself. “Live at PEAM2005, Ecoteca, Pescara” reveals itself as a glorious strings and manipulated, operatic vocal tones drone-a-thon. “See How It Goes” sees carefully selected guitar notes and flute mixed in pots and pans. “Live at GAM, Gallarate 2” is drum ‘n’ bass which takes an excursion passed the sawing and hammering of the workshop, hears the dog panting on the park whilst surrounding itself in the flickering of minute laptronic samples. “Live at FABBRICA EUROPA, Florence 1” timpani drum and static. “Jam at Joy's House, Pescara” and “Live Lullabie” draw Jazz inflections for their ambience. Engaging, imaginative and peaceful (but often hectic at the same time!!).
Ethan Rose - Oaks
The story surrounding Ethan Rose’s Oaks is as poetic as it’s high art product. A 1926 Wurlitzer Theatre Organ that once accompanied silent films in Portland, Oregon was moved to the Oaks Park Roller Rink, where it has been ever since. Rose, whilst helping out with repairs and restoration, started to explore its possibilities, and reinterpreted its functions and potential within a modern electronic work. The Wurlitzer provides the source for the entire work; where each pipe, instrument and sound effect of the organ has been sampled, manipulated and reformulated with computers and electronics. The CD sleeve meticulously reveals each of these tones by way of short inventory, reiterating the obsessive focus of the project. Oaks’ ethereal compositions continue the hereditary line, maintaining the essences of enjoyment, entertainment and majesty from the parental Wurlitzer through to it’s futuristic, imaginary offspring.
Francisco Lopez and Lawrence English - HB
The concept of HB could only arrive at the obscure and unsettling place that it did. Francisco Lopez and Lawrence English set themselves the task of composing a new work based on a field recording piece of the other’s. Lopez’s “Untitled 175” immerses itself into nature, amplifying and making familiar sounds strange. English splinters, fractures and industrialises the piece to become ”Pattern Review by Motion”. Then English’s “Wire Fence Upon Opening” - a stuttered amalgamation of crickets and birdcall - mutates into “Untitled 204”. Lopez’s paints it with his own brand of macro sound exploration. A very demanding listening experience.
Michael Santos - The Happy Error
Santos uses guitar or sine wave as melodic starting points which are then worked with software manipulation. The album is named after the “accidents” that emanate from digital treatments, which Santos incorporates into his own work. The pieces are sometimes allowed space to flow and swathe (“Swing Deluxe” and “Bamboo Scaffolding”), sometimes they are lush and dreamlike (“Returning Champion”) and sometimes abominably overloaded (“Local”). Whichever the emphasis “The Happy Error” is brimming with computer code.
Willsk
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