From June through to August we released a series of albums that were unconnected other by the hash tag #SummerOfSynth (the product of a undirected mind).
In this news missive we revisit those releases with the hope that they are discovered by some folks who may have missed them the first time round.
We hope you enjoy them.
WORMWOOD by A. D. Luck
Harkening back to his earlier work of beat and rhythm-driven electronic music, Dibben creates a jittery, distorted, even wonderfully annoying experience across Wormwood.
The album was composed entirely with the Koala Sampler from Elf Audio, using a variety of recorded sounds as the basic of its tracks. Samples used include a friend’s baby, knives banging in a sink, whistles, drum taps on a car hood, a shrieking cat, pipes, baby toys, and more. The result is glitchy, drunk, and wobbled tunes animated by a cartoonish logic with echoes of 80/90’s European synth pop.
Dibben is a music-maker, writer, and photographer living in Lawrence, Kansas, USA. For the past five years he has been making music as SELVEDGE, a mix of drone, noise, and ambient.
Wormwood is a part of the #SummerOfSynth sequence (albeit tenuous).
A. D. Luck – KOALA app, concept & creation.
Beings From The Origins by Nicolas Picciotto
About this project:
Being passionate about Ancient History, Sciences & Knowledge spreading over the full range of All the Cultures to be Acknowledged and Honored across the World, ‘Beings From The Origins’ is a Journey throughout Time/Space & Space/Time Densities of Recollections and Manifestations.
The aim to mix and blend old but operational electronic gears together with the nowadays technology is to participate to the support in favor to the Collective Consciousness Communion of Collectivities Improvement and Education from People, Cultures, Civilizations moreover independent from any judgment and polarization.
As understood and studied for the past decades, within the Past History lie the Solutions of our Future, and the trillions of mistakes we all make or participate to once acknowledged and understood help us to not replicate them, therefore paving the way to a Global Upgrade in Human Consciousness.
As innumerable scientific, archaeological artefacts &materials tend to prove and demonstrate with credible authenticity the strong possibility that we as Humans are not alone and never were, ‘Beings From The Origins’ is a food for thought. Tribute to both the Entire Creation of Creators, as well as to the timeless Souls we All are, experiencing throughout an ever expanding field of Consciousness and Knowledge the non sizable Power of the One Infinite Creator.
Interregnum MMXXII by Dominique Cyprès
“In 2021 I put together three albums this way, working largely in moments when our infant second child was napping. The first was born out of the peculiar moment before most of us even in the US could be vaccinated against COVID-19, a moment when I had been at once inspired by many individual acts of kindness and self-sacrifice, and deeply embittered by what I saw as higher-level failures to prioritize human life and prevent mass death and mass suffering—musically influenced at times by 1970s “classitronic” pioneers like Tomita and Wendy Carlos, and incorporating some of my favourite western classical passages from childhood in a novel context. In a second album I took a more relaxed approach of exploring ambient soundscapes often inspired by physical places I had visited. And the third album was a concept piece meditating upon a fringe, but culturally significant American religious/political movement called Peoples Temple that ended in the notorious “revolutionary suicide” of their Guyanese agricultural settlement Jonestown in 1978. “Alienation” on Interregnum MMXXII is an alternate instrumental take of a track from this last album.
With Interregnum MMXXII I am once again regrettably channeling the anxieties of this historical moment. A sense that the weight of history is more unbearable than ever. That the United States exists in a state of slow imperial collapse, but also that the whole world rests on shaky ground, caught unprepared to face the challenges of a pandemic and of anthropogenic climate change. To that end it’s a largely brooding album, following from the ambient sounds of previous work but with more dissonance and harsh timbres, inspired by the troubled history of our current world order. But I have also tried to leave space for the potential of a constructive common struggle to imagine and build a better world, evidenced in the titles “Direct Action” and “Seize the Means.” I felt that a cold and thunderous arrangement of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony provided an excellent sonic centre for this album that otherwise comprises my own far-less-expert compositions. In my imagination the composition captures a moment of tumult that may help us maintain some perspective on the present, a moment of war engulfing the European continent just as its thinkers reached for humanistic and democratic horizons, and a confrontation with the great betrayal of Beethoven’s one-time political saviour Napoleon.”
Composed and performed by Dominic Cyprès
The track Beethoven Symphony No 7- Allegretto uses a MIDI file created by Petr Cvikl. It is used here with kind permission. The track is released under a Creative Commons license.
The Drunken Fisherman (and other stories) by Schall und Stille
For over 20 years, multi-instrumentalist and producer Stephan Kleinert (born 1972) had been mastermind and driving force of pop-wave-triphop-outfit Botany Bay, once billed as one of Germany’s most important free music projects. Four years after Botany Bay’s breakup, Stephan is now back with his solo debut “The Drunken Fisherman And Other Stories” – a title that hints to a concept album. And indeed there is an overarching theme.
Says Stephan: “It started out with an instrumental expressing my feelings about the Ukrainian war and then quickly became a meditation on the current state of the world. One day I was looking for additional sonic textures for one song and stumbled upon these amateur shortwave radio transmissions from a drunken fisherman. Having him in the mix suddenly it struck me what a good metaphor for mankind he is – sailing out into a storm, happily fishing the seas, both vulnerable and threatening in his stupor, and oblivious to the danger around him and to his own mortality. So in the end it’s about these times we’re living in, and about how we got there, about these traits that make us self destruct – populism, greed, toxic masculinity; but it’s also about hope and love, about seizing the moment and not to wait until everything is right again, because that won’t happen anytime soon.”
Having used real acoustic instruments almost exclusively in the last Botany Bay releases, for his solo debut Stephan went back to electronics. In fact, heaps of electronics, both analogue and digital. “After we moved in 2020, I was finally able to build a studio with enough space for all the keyboards, synthesizers and sound modules that I had gathered in the last 30 years. Suddenly they all stood there, blinking and buzzing, begging me to do something with them again. And so I did.”
For Stephan, releasing his debut under the moniker of “Schall und Stille” (which translates to “Sound and Silence”) is both a return to his roots as well as the beginning of a new journey. One can be curious to see where it will lead.
All proceeds from this album go to “Tara Tierhilfe e.V.”, an animal sanctuary near Cologne, Germany, which is home to more than 70 horses, goats, sheep, donkeys and pigs.
For those interested, here’s who we are and what we do: www.tara-tierhilfe.de (German only, sorry)
Personnel:
Stephan Kleinert – instruments, vocals, programming, production
Nicole Schmidt – lead vocals on „Me Without You“ and „Little Glitch“, backing vocals on „So Wrong“
Mylofy – acoustic guitars on „Me Without You“
Anna Simon – narration on „Ukas“
Special not-so-honorary appearance by Scott Morrison
Recorded at the gallery, Erl, and at Nicole’s place, Bonn, February – June 2022
Mastering by Samuel Aubert @ openmastering.studio
All tracks written by Stephan Kleinert
cc attribution: contains sounds by tomlija, cc-by, freesound.org/people/Tomlija/sounds/106553/ (“car engine revving up to 7000 rpm (Rover 216 GSi)”), iwiploppenisse, cc-by, freesound.org/people/Iwiploppenisse/sounds/156031/ (“explosion”)
Submarine Broadcasting Company 