Browse by Label: 23FIVE

Artist:	GENDREAU, MICHAEL
Title:	55 pas de la ligne au no3
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	23FIVE 002CD

"Long-time San Francisco based sound artist, internationally known from his extensive discography as Crawling With Tarts, releases his first full length solo work. 55 pas de la ligne au n o 3 is a microscopic study of dense sonic landscapes buried within antiquated turntable motors. Gendreau, an acoustician by profession, utilizes high sensitivity accelerometers to map detailed frequencies from a variety of old turntable motors and mechanics. This is a rare exhibition of the creative potential within this kind of technology."

Artist:	GUM
Title:	Vinyl Anthology
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	2CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 005CD

"In 1986, an Australian fellow by the name of Andrew Curtis posted an advertisement in a couple of record shops around Melbourne expressing a desire to start a band with somebody who shared his interests in Industrial music. The only person who answered the ad was Philip Samartzis, who has since gone on to international acclaim for his pristine electro-acoustic compositions published through Staalplaat, Synaesthesia, and Dorobo. Back in the late '80s, the Curtis and Samartzis collaboration resulted in the aurally volatile project simply called Gum. With little expertise or training, the two gathered up what objects they were familiar with, in particular thrift store turntables and soiled records. Eschewing their original attraction to the giants of Industrial Culture, Gum quickly developed an aesthetic privileging the caustic rupture of skipping records and smoldering surface noise, predating the current avant-turntablist aficionados like Philip Jeck, Janek Schaefer, and Otomo Yoshihide. Within a handful of recordings made during the brief span between 1986 and 1990, Gum piled thick layers of electrically charged static channeled from their locked grooves. These spiraling repetitions and arrhythmic palpitations were suspended in the instant moment of ecstatic release as an infinite crash of overstimulation. Thanks to RRR and Korm Plastics who had published Gum tracks on a couple of 7" compilations, Gum received a considerable amount of notoriety during the last gasps of pre-digital cassette culture. Since then, the two parted ways with Curtis turning his passions to photography and Samartzis infecting his students at RMIT with his cravings for immersive and tactile experiences through sound. Yet, Gum's Frankensteinian grooves had remained a secret history within the prolific oeuvre of Australian sound art. With the publication of Gum's Vinyl Anthology, 23five, Inc uncovers the bulk of Gum's work, including all of the material from their self-published albums Vinyl and 20 Years in Blue Movies and Yet to Fake an Orgasm as well as those aforementioned compilation tracks and plenty of unreleased material."

Artist:	LOPEZ, FRANCISCO
Title:	Live in San Francisco
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	23FIVE 007CD

"With his ongoing pursuit of an 'absolute concrčte music,' Francisco López has recontextualized the sounds of the world around us by pushing these sounds to their polar extremes. At times, he has imposed gaping silences and eradicated all but the slightest traces of musicality; at others, he has turned the placid wash of rainforest insect chatter into mechanically toxic drones and twisted a gentle breeze into a hurricane force blast of raw sound. The ambient din of the urban environment, human voices, the run-out grooves of vinyl, and even propulsive death metal blast beats count as some of the choicest source material with the imposing López catalogue, which includes well over 130 published works. Over his illustrious career, López has traveled extensively both recording his source material and giving acousmatic performances for which he insists the audience members wear blindfolds. Over the years, the sound-arts organization 23five Incorporated has sponsored numerous López performances in and around San Francisco; and it is only fitting that 23five should publish this document of live recordings from San Francisco, with one track culled from the infamous Hexaphonic show at The Lab in August 2000, and the other from an intimate performance at 3feetofftheground in July 2001. The spectral timbres and ominous somatic fluctuations of those performances inspired some audience members to gush: 'It was just amazing how he layered the tracks together into massive lump of sonic force. Totally different from what can be heard on many of his releases which tend to be minimal and silent. I was craving for more. López rocks!'. As with the previous Live in 'S-Hertogenbosch document, Live in San Francisco comes with a blindfold to enhance the phenomonological experience of López's dramatic compositions."

Artist:	DUNCAN & CARL MICHAEL VON HAUSSWOLFF, JOHN
Title:	Our Telluric Conversation
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$21.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 008CD

"The second collaborative album from John Duncan and Carl Michael von Hausswolff. This is an album which Duncan describes as having been galvanized by magnetism. In a semantic sleight of hand, Duncan and Hausswolff reveal magnetism through a duality of meanings. One on hand, they speak of the physical phenomenon of charged objects that exert an attraction or repulsion upon other objects; yet on the other, magnetism can be defined as the psychological influence wielded by charismatic individuals. Our Telluric Conversation maps out the complexities that emerged through the collaborative pursuits of these venerated sound artists. The tools that the two employed for Our Telluric Conversation are common to their respective catalogues of recordings, with Duncan bringing his shortwave, data streams, and uncanny use of the human voice while Hausswolff employed oscillators, sonar, and wire tapping microphones. The album opens with the mechanical rotation of modulated sonar, providing a hypnotic pulse which slowly submits to an obstinate surge of rumbling noise, that in turn collapses into focused white-noise turbulence and tone-bent SSB transmissions. All of this abruptly detours with a protracted spoken narrative from Hausswolff who whispers a Pynchonesque text about a maggot-infested individual who seeks to remedy his affliction by communing with cobras and geckoes. Afterwards, Duncan and Hausswolff entertain the seduction of the long-form drone constructions; however, their sublime minimalism is so brilliant in its beauty as to be piercingly acute through the purity of honed sinewaves. The final entry from their Conversation is the perfect marriage of the established Duncan and Hausswolff aesthetics, with a spare low-frequency hum deadening the sonic architecture before a static charge of crackled ether supplements the auditory smoldering. Our Telluric Conversation stands as a bold, expressive piece of sound art, confident in its multiplicity of perspectives caught in a constant flux of attraction and repulsion. The recording comes with a 40-page booklet with an interview between Duncan and Hausswolff about their histories, ideas, and methodologies; furthermore, the packaging is completed by a curiously tactile O-card, which has been embossed with braille and covered with a rubbery coating."

Artist:	LAPORTE, JEAN-FRANCOIS
Title:	Soundmatters
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 009CD

"The compositions of French-Canadian sound artist Jean-Francois Laporte have rarely emerged beyond the context of international electro-acoustic competitions and festivals. His only widely distributed piece has been 'Mantra,' which Metamkine published in 1997 through their 'Cinéma pour l'oreille' series. This exceptional work of acoustic minimalism drew considerable notoriety thanks in part to a public misidentification that Laporte sourced the composition on the resonant frequencies of a zamboni, the ice-resurfacing vehicle used exclusively in ice rinks. With its luminous sounds gracefully shifting between the gentle mechanized purr and excited metal vibration, we can easily forgive those who wanted to assign authorship to an eccentric machine. Yet, Laporte reports that the source to 'Mantra' is an air compressor, albeit one that resides in an ice rink. With the original publication of 'Mantra' long out of print, 23five Incorporated is delighted to present Soundmatters, an anthology of Jean-Francois Laporte compositions including the aforementioned 25-minute masterpiece 'Mantra.' The four accompanying compositions on Soundmatters all share the unique sensibility found on 'Mantra' which balances formal precision and intuitive expressionism, resulting a series of visceral compositions that build upon the traditions of minimalism, graphical composition, and phonography. Here on Soundmatters, Laporte reveals his colossal talents for experiential composition through deftly processed recordings of tumultuous windstorms that would make Chris Watson proud, spiraling drones that he's polished to a Haflerian sheen, the majestic bellowing of sustained horns in the empty cargo hull of a decommissioned ship, and of course, the metallic growl of his immaculate 'Mantra.' Given the numerous parallels to Xenakis' smoldering electro-acoustics and Tony Conrad's delirious harmonics, Laporte's work demands the attention as an under-recognized genius in the realm of avant-garde composition."

Artist:	TARAB
Title:	Wind Keeps Even Dust Away
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 010CD

"Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab) professes a romantic attachment to the notion that the world is falling apart, a terminal process only enhanced by the intrinsic obsolescence from the output of consumer culture. Yet, this Australian sound artist is not one to wallow in the nihilism of such poetics, rather he counterpoints these thoughts with the allegorical implications of his nom de plume. Tarab is an Arabic word that doesn't readily translate into English, but it might be best defined as the ecstatic surrender one can experience when listening to music. Through installation, performance, and composition, Sprod reinterprets the physical detritus of the landscape within a hypothetical topography where dirt, soot, and smog emerge as privileged materials, in to which he has grafted the potential for a transcendent response. Field recordings are fundamental to this creative process, bolstered by sympathetic sounds activated by Sprod's own hands rummaging through crumbling leaves, rusted bits of metal, broken concrete, and shattered glass, just to name some of the more obvious sources. Wind Keeps Even Dust Away is only the second documentation of Sprod's compositions; yet, it is an accomplished work on par with the best of contemporary sound ecologists (e.g. Chris Watson, Eric La Casa, Toshiya Tsunoda, etc.). On this album, Sprod presents an intertwining series of compacted collages that tease aquatic references from abandoned and overlooked sites of the arid Australian landscape. Every sound of a pipe gurgling with water is but a mirage of sand, rust, and dirt cleverly tricking the audience's collective ear. With its subtle transitions and evolving sound structures, Wind Keeps Even Dust Away figures into the models of psycho-geographical wandering, as Sprod explores sets of roughly cut textures, resonant frequencies, and atmospheric vibrations that are intrinsic to an imagined space and then shifts into another with its particular idiosyncrasies. While the ecstasy that the word tarab implies may not be an immediate reaction to this album, wonder and discovery certainly are as experienced through this exemplary album of re-engineered sonic dislocation."

Artist:	CATLIN, TIM
Title:	Radio Ghosts
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 011CD

"The name Tim Catlin may not be terribly well known amongst the avant-guitarist circles; but his recorded output clearly stands amongst the best that Glenn Branca, Keith Rowe, and Jim O'Rourke have mustered from their six strings hard wired into the histories of electroacoustics, minimalism, and post-punk experimentation. Based out of Melbourne, Catlin is a guitarist who incessantly tinkers with the mechanics of his instrument, envisioning it as alternately as a mimetic sculptural object and a pure sound generator. Through his experiments with alternative tunings, atypical string gauges, and Rube Goldberg contraptions of interconnected motors, speakers, and radios, he seeks out the rasping textures of strings vibrating against each other, the acoustic phase patterns of two microtonally tuned strings, and the electrical purity of circuits feeding back upon themselves, essentially creating a polyglot drone symphony cast in smoldering monochrome. Radio Ghosts arrives nearly five years after his debut album Slow Twitch and showcases Catlin's unassuming expertise with the finer aspects of the mechanically prepared guitar. For all of its dynamic frequencies and crosshatched vibrations, Radio Ghosts is devoid of Marshall stacks, Sunn amps, and stomp boxes, as Catlin captures the acoustic phenomenon of the guitar's transient vibrations and steers clear of any tricked out sonic demolition. Instead, Radio Ghosts focuses upon the minutiae of the guitar: wood, strings, and amplifier. Through his refined, tabletop guitar techniques, Catlin prefers to set his guitar in motion, allowing the process dictate the course of action with minor edits and sleights of hand from the composer himself. Catlin's drone guitar work is simultaneously capable of expressionistic illusions (e.g. cicada choruses, industrial grind, uncanny ephemera from the radio waves, etc.) and a sonic transcendence of pure sonic introspection. Given that the final piece on Radio Ghosts replaces the guitar with a crash cymbal that Catlin agitates through similar processes, Catlin's work shows that Organum does not have exclusivity on the bowed cymbal for creating epic, tactile sound fields."

Artist:	CHOP SHOP
Title:	Oxide
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 012CD

"Chop Shop is the moniker of New York-based sound artist Scott Konzelmann, whose activities have comprised installations featuring his speaker construction assemblages and sonic compositions since 1987. There have been plenty of micro-edition CD-R releases, 2 noted 3" CDs for the prestigious V2 label, several old school cassettes, a handful of singles, and two legendary 10" vinyl productions. One of which was a double 10" bound in roofing tar strapped to a plate of steel. The other was a split 10" with Small Cruel Party, which was literally chopped in half and assembled on the listener's turntable at their needle's peril. 23five Incorporated is delighted to present Oxide, the long overdue full-length CD from Chop Shop. Konzelmann's sound and noise are intrinsically connected to his sculptural objects. Forged from re-purposed junkyard fragments fitted with functional loudspeakers, these objects compress and articulate particular frequencies into hissing static, jet-engine drones, and noxious rumbles, all of which retain a metallurgist residue. Such were the sounds on the original analogue tapes of Oxide; unfortunately, those tapes had endured what Konzelmann merely qualifies as 'an unhappy accident,' which caused extensive and prolonged moisture damage to the tapes. In revisiting these tapes, Konzelmann discovered drop-outs and print-throughs, as ghostly noises shadowed his muscular drone music. The tape itself had also begun to crumble during playback, making an eerily similar parallel to William Basinski's Disintegration Loops. However, Chop Shop does not share Basinski's melancholy theatrics, and Oxide dials in a proper dose of distilled contemporary sonic dead-tech mantra through a leaden stream paralleling the Hafler Trio's Intoutof."

Artist:	MURRAY, BRENDAN
Title:	Commonwealth
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 013CD

"In recent years, Brendan Murray has become a central figure in Boston's sound art vanguard through a reputation of exceptional live performances and a growing catalogue of slow-shifting compositions for rarified drones. He sets himself apart from the conventional wisdom that drone-based music is an open-ended exercise into the 'realm of the infinite.' Murray specifically shapes his repetitions and sinewy tonalities within the rigors of compositional frameworks and temporal restraints. This process does not lend itself to speed, as previous albums required up to four years to complete and Commonwealth endured over fifteen drafts before Murray perfected the album. A single crescendo terminating at the end of 49 minutes, Commonwealth is an epic investigation into subtle harmonics and overtones expressed through layered slippages of pure sound. Conceived through guitar, analog synthesis, and plenty of digital manipulation, Commonwealth expresses a rare confidence in Murray's finely tuned detailing of sinewy tonalities and sculpted megalithic surfaces. Murray himself has qualified this album as a 'sincere bow to 'classic' minimalism,' and Commonwealth is a worthy parallel to the work of Phill Niblock, Eliane Radigue, and Iannis Xenakis."

Artist:	TARAB
Title:	Take All The Ships From The Harbour, And Sail Them..
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 014CD

...Straight Into Hell. "The title to this album from Tarab (nee Eamon Sprod) is striking enough in its allusions of damnation, with a watery grave a potential outcome from human activity impacting the earth. So, it may be stating the obvious that the corroded locations where mankind has scarred the surface of the earth feature prominently in the work of this Melbourne-based sound artist. The residual elements of these sites become the agents for metaphor and allegory in Tarab's work, documented through field recording and sympathetic actions with found objects from those sites. One such location that features prominently in Take All of the Ships... is Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay. Once the home of an immigration station at the turn of the 20th Century and later a Nike Missile site for the US military, Angel Island now rests in the hands of the US National Park Service, which has left some of the buildings to succumb to the forces of decay. From the sounds culled from this site and others closer to his antepodean home, Tarab diligently overlays and stiches together a highly tactile composition with very little digital treatments to speak of. Take All of the Ships... opens with an ominous rumble whose frequencies appear to emerge from the center of the Earth and liquefying the surface upon impact. As these tones ebb and flow, Tarab unveils as revolving series of exaggerated details from a hyperbolic gash of two heavy pieces of metal grinding against themselves to a toxic chorale of nighttime insects to sand, wind, and surf detourned into sedimentary white noise. Tarab's compositional sensibility shifts throughout the album, at first sparsely situating these sounds into shadowy vignettes. Gradually, Tarab coalesces this sublime opus into an arcing crescendo which exhibits sustained harmonics rarely heard in the best of the contemporary dronemusik technicians much less from the realm of sound ecology."

Artist:	KAHN, JASON
Title:	Vanishing Point
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 015CD

"The American sound-artist Jason Kahn is an exacting technician when it comes to the principles of noise. However, his application of noise in composition is not that of Merzbow or Masonna, with teeth-gnashing explosions of distortion, feedback, and volume; rather, Kahn's psychoacoustic techniques employ the specific frequencies of white, pink, brown, and blue noise in works that reflect the ideals of minimalism. These are sounds that regularly occur through the constant vibration of machinery; and Kahn is more than happy to appropriate such events through field recording. He also generates complementary noises through systems that involve the rattling architecture of a drum kit or through his trusted analog synthesizer. Vanishing Point is a 47 minute composition, which Kahn has dedicated to his daughter who died shortly before Kahn began working on this piece in 2007. For all of the phenomenological studies and stoic mesmerism attributed to much of his catalogue, Vanishing Point is a subtle and hypnotic elegy for rattling metals, timbral vibration, gossamer static, hissing field recordings, and those aforementioned colored noises. Soon into the piece, Kahn introduces a flickered ghost of melody whose luminous tones manifest ever so slightly against his contrails of noise. The upper register hiss and statics of these layered noises slowly drop in pitch and frequency over the duration of the piece, revealing subharmonic rumblings and an oceanic current that tugs at the agitated textures of Kahn's surface noises. This glacial, minimalist shift renders Vanishing Point elegant and meditative. In Kahn's own words, 'At first I thought of the title in reference to Louise's passing, that point where she vanished from our lives, but on further reflection I came to see the composition as dealing with other vanishing points. I address the idea of one's sense of time vanishing, being immersed in sound and entering a place of timelessness. There is also the idea of boundaries between electronic and acoustic sound vanishing, as in this piece I draw on both sources. And finally, in the sense of aural perspective extending to the point where we imagine it ending, as the composition stretches on towards its vista, slowly vanishing.'"

Artist:	GARET, RICHARD
Title:	Areal
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 016CD

"In working with sound, video, and installation, Richard Garet has made an artform of interference. In previous work, he's employed photosensors to control a particular audio signal through the erratic nature of a violently pulsing abstract film. He's flooded a performance space with fog to disperse multi-channel video work into an ephemeral yet sculptural mass, accompanied by an equally diffused sound design. And here on Areal, Garet continues his ongoing research with electromagnetic disturbances through radio. Garet treats the radio process of transmission and reception as a routing system for the audio signal, all the while deliberately agitating and distressing the nodes that direct the course of that signal. For example, an electrical motor might be situated near a radio's antenna disrupting its ability to properly receive a transmission that Garet is broadcasting from nearby. Through the controlled use of electro-acoustic techniques (some rough and volatile, some refined and delicate), he organizes the signal distortion, the crackling static, and the ever-present tendencies for feedback into swarms of chiming resonance, electrically sourced harmonics, tactile bricolage, and impressionist din. As much as Garet's process pushes the interaction of sound and electricity to the brink of self-immolation, Areal balances his crunched textures with extended passages of radiant blooms of blurry noise and drone, finding common ground between the glassine density from Rhys Chatham and the splintered excursions of Kevin Drumm."

Artist:	SCHAFER, HELMUT
Title:	Thought Provoking III
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	23FIVE 017CD

"Thought Provoking III is the final document from the electro-acoustic composer Helmut Schafer who died in 2007. The Austrian artist spoke of his work as 'characterized by the use of very intense and direct musical language which powerfully describes his personal experience and reflections on society structures, the blindness of modern and informed masses and everyday functionalism in between civilization.' That intensity of expression manifested itself through performances and collaborations that took Schafer around the globe, including presentations at Documenta X and ARS Electronica both in 1997. For all of his tireless work, Schafer's recording output is relatively small, focusing mostly on his collaborative work with noted musical extremist Zbigniew Karkowski. Schafer posited Thought Provoking as a radical shift from his brutalist electronic engineering to a spatialized, open-ended composition based on the muffled tones from an ad hoc instrument he built from salvaged church organ pipes and hair dryers. The first presentation of this work took place in his home town of Graz, Austria in 2003; the second was a collaboration with violinist Elisabeth Gmeiner in Vienna two years later; and the third & final performance occurred in 2006 with percussionist Will Guthrie and Gmiener at the St. Andre Church where he first presented it in Graz. After Schafer's death, Guthrie reconstituted the rehearsal takes from that performance for this recording of Thought Provoking III, attempting to re-imagine the controlled energy of those sessions with Schafer's aesthetic framework at the forefront. The bellowing hums from Schafer's organ pipe and hair dryer contraction ebb and flow amidst intermittent percussive flourishes, subtle gong overtones, sustained violin trills, and fizzling electronic mark-making. On the second track of this disc, long-time friend Zbigniew Karkowski presents a smoldering electro-acoustic remix of Thought Provoking III as a fitting tribute to Schafer."

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Artist:	FURUDATE & ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI, TETSUO
Title:	World As Will II
Label:	23FIVE
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	23FIVE 003CD