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Marc Richter records as Black To Comm for Thrill Jockey, Type, and Dekorder and under the Mouchoir Ètanche and Jemh Circs monikers for his own Cellule 75 imprint. He collaborated with visual artists such as Ho Tzu Nyen, Jan van Hasselt, and Mike Kelley. Under his own name he is composing for film and installations.
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LP
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CELL 011LP
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This new album compiles several songs made in the years following Black To Comm's classic Alphabet 1968 album. Originally released on the seminal Type label in 2009, Alphabet 1968 combined the sound of vintage shellac and vinyl loops with broken electronics and field recordings, the press release mentioning disparate influences "ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann". Now titled Coh Bâle (inspired by a strange dream) these recordings were supposed to become a follow-up to said album but for reasons unknown it never materialized and the album seemed forever lost. At the time Marc Richter started to dive deeper into several strains of (so-called) world music aka the folk music of Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe as well as liturgical and medieval music, the kraut-electronica of Harmonia and several certain Mediterranean experimentalists from the 1980s who started to merge their mostly electronic and field recording based compositions with traditional musics from all over the world by way of new sampling technology. Many of the songs for the album were recorded while travelling and at various residencies around Europe: a detuned piano in a Thessaloniki basement (Richter played at a children's birthday party there), vintage synthesizers in the GRM studios in Paris, decaying acoustic instruments found in an old Black Forest mansion, childrens' voices at a workshop in Karlsruhe's ZKM Institute; then mixed on headphones in the ICE trains running between these places and his hometown Hamburg. Coh Bâle is taking inspirations from old Nonesuch Explorer and Ocora LPs, Crammed Records, '80s Mediterranean ambient (Nuno Canavarro, Roberto Musci) combined with the DIY spirit of Deux Filles and Flaming Tunes and the playfulness of Asa Chang & Junray. The songs are both mysterious and transparent, intricate and frugal, vibrant and patient. One of the album's unexpected climaxes is a gorgeous (artificial) berimbau version of the Welsh traditional "Iechyd o Gylch". No two songs feature the same instrumentation and many acoustic sources (pianos, flutes, wood percussion, viola, tablas, autoharp) were disassembled and later coalesced into new configurations or used as virtual instruments; later combined with samples, field recordings, electronics and (on a few tracks) autotuned vocals reminding of recent works by the likes of Claire Rousay or More Eaze. This is the second release from his archives after the Diode, Triode LP which presented musique concrète/acousmatic recordings made at INA/GRM and ZKM. Edition of 300.
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2CD
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CELL 008CD
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MM∞XX is a virtual orchestra Marc Richter initiated during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Isolated at his Hamburg studio he started to reach out to former collaborators and old friends, picking up on previous conversations as well as asking people to post short previously unused sound recordings for a collaborative piece of music. He then assembled, transformed, and mixed these generous offerings (by 33 artists) into perpetually evolving compositions to be published and performed in different constellations, formats, versions, and mixes over the course of 2021. Not only did he get these lovely sonic gifts from his many collaborators -- he received messages about childbirth and death, marriage and divorce, building houses, buying houses, happiness, and depression, everyday life. The resulting pieces were premiered at the lockdown editions of Rewire and Papiripar Festival in 2021 and are now compiled into this double-CD set. The music is as unpredictable as the guest list yet it all gels in unexpected ways. Some of the pieces are surprisingly beautiful while others are deliberately comic and ridiculous. Richter often piles up five or more unrelated samples on top of each other with unforeseeable results; Andrew Pekler's psychedelic ambient loops combined with a discreet noise guitar and subtle field recordings by Luke Fowler and others, Paul Regimbeau's doom metal guitar colliding with Roger Tellier-Craig's musique concrète recordings and Brian Pyle's artificial church organ, sounding like a long lost Melvins/Luc Ferrari combo, Lucio Capece's reed noises screeching on top of Felix Kubin's voice/MS-20 mobile phone recordings. Almost every track features at least one surprise element that would never happen on a non-collaborative album: the Guido Möbius slide guitar, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh's wonderful buzuk playing, Jan van Hasselt's singing robots, Eric Chenaux's recurring voice memo loops. Collaborators were free to send any kind of sonic material. Among the sound files Richter received were pure field recordings (cats, children, toilets), dictaphone sketches (people singing/whistling/whispering their song ideas), found sounds, accidental sounds, sample loops, tape loops, voice recordings, improvisations on buzuk, clarinet, guitar, piano, no-input mixer, Buchla Music Easel, MS-20, and modular synthesizers in varying fidelity and tunings. Richter is an idiosyncratic and autodidactic expert in sampling and audio collage for almost 20 years now so it's no surprise that nothing here sounds forced or hyperbolic and even the strangest combinations always make sense. And fortunately, he knows when to withdraw from the setting and when to simplify the proceedings. Mastering by Rashad Becker. Artwork by Bora Başkan.
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LP
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CELL 006LP
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First release under Black To Comm's real name: Marc Richter. This album presents two multichannel works recorded at the seminal INA GRM Studio in Paris and ZKM Institute in Karlsruhe respectively, mixed to stereo at the composer's Cellule 75 Studio in Hamburg with excellent mastering by Rashad Becker. While his releases under the Black To Comm moniker often touched the fringes of acousmatic techniques and musique concrete this is Richter's first foray into a more abstract spatial music. Recorded in the week leading up to the Paris terror attacks at the GRM studio, "Diode, Triode" is loosely based on a reading of (and, in parts, a failure to understand) "Le Parasite" (1980) by Michel Serres, a philosophic metaphor about human interaction and communication (which can also be interpreted as a lyrical essay on capitalism; part confusion, part enlightenment). As core elements Richter is using speech synthesis and the transformation and distortion of concrete sounds, instruments, voices, and breathing. Abstract incognizable sounds are combined with strings, reeds, and percussion while dismembered musical fragments emerge and vanish rapidly. Chunks of interfering noise are followed by long periods of silence; chaos and order are alternating. Choirs of synthetic and processed human voices are recounting stock market values, seemingly random sequences of numbers and inscrutable lyrics while parasitic sounds are trying to crack, collapse and fractionize the compositional stream and sonic interactions. Finally, a haunting piano chord is wrestling with a broken Publison machine. Like the book, it's part confusing, part enlightening -- and a radical piece of sonic art. "Diode, Triode" was premiered on the Acousmonium at INA GRM's Akousma Festival in Paris, January 22, 2016 alongside new works by François Bayle, Robert Hampson, Leo Kupper, and Ragnar Grippe. The second piece "Spiral Organ of Corti" has been composed in 2014 for the 47-speaker Klangdom concert hall at ZKM Karlsruhe at the foot of the Black Forest (where Richter was born and raised). How does one listen with closed ears? Sine tones, alienated human voices and breathing noises build a labyrinthine puzzle alternating between the natural and the artificial. Human sounds merge with winds and strings, sine tones morph into metal sounds. Acoustic illusions confuse the listener, and dense noise-clouds slowly emerge from deceptive silence. "Spiral Organ of Corti" is yet another extended composition that proves Richter is on a path of his very own. "Spiral Organ of Corti" is dedicated to the late Gary Todd. Edition of 300.
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