CELLULE 75 - Forced Exposure

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New recordings by Mouchoir Étanche (Marc Richter) aka Black To Comm. Edition of 300 copies. Le jazz homme is the second album of Black To Comm related entity Mouchoir Ètanche. This time heavily influenced by French jazz as well as the usual suspects: Nurse With Wound, Luc Ferrari, JG Ballard, Surrealism. The human entity has finally been replaced. "Program music, instrumental music that carries some extramusical meaning, some 'program' of literary idea, legend, scenic description, or personal drama. It is contrasted with so-called absolute, or abstract, music, in which artistic interest is supposedly confined to abstract constructions in sound. It has been stated that the concept of program music does not represent a genre in itself but rather is present in varying degrees in different works of music." (Encyclopedia Britannica). Prompt 1: Pascal Comelade's toy piano falling down the stairs , Hector Zazou pushing from behind, laughing. Prompt 2: Cool jazz played on antique mellotron, low in fidelity, and sad, Glenn Miller's grandma crying silently. Prompt 3: A hippie commune version of jazz as played by a cheap computer fed by Chat GPT with medieval cuisine fanfare information and samples, trained on the entire Amon Düül II history, heavily looped yet unsynchronized. Prompt: 4: Same, but flutes and synths and trance and chants. Prompt 5: French female artist philosophizes about Shirley Temple, mysterious atmosphere, insensitive homme laughing nervously, heavily looped, hypnotic 18th century morgue de salon underneath. Prompt 6: Cool jazz, Echoplex, strange rhythm, Blue Note daydreaming. Prompt 7: Hammond jazz with fake Cyro Baptista loop, Madagascar indri indri lemurs chanting fake sax solos in Malagasy language, electronic bells. Prompt 8: German jazz and artificial prayers, and Shirley Temple returning, with defect Publison recorded at GRM, destroying the voice recording. Prompt 9: Andrei Tarkovsky's moustache meets Johann Sebastian Bach's wig, a well gently lapping in the background, fifths, car crashing into a poor violent onsen geisha. Marc Richter records as Black To Comm and under the Mouchoir Ètanche and Jemh Circs monikers (and solo) for his own Cellule 75 imprint. He collaborated with visual artists such as Ho Tzu Nyen, Jan van Hasselt, and Mike Kelley. He also produces soundtracks and acousmatic multichannel installations for institutions such as INA GRM Paris, ZKM Karlsruhe and Kunstverein Hamburg.

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Vinyl reissue of Black to Comm's 2009 album originally on Type Recordings. Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. In 2009, the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson, and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP was greeted with universal praise in the underground publications as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork. The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era. Includes printed inner full-color printed inner sleeve.

From the original Type one-sheet: "The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of 'songs' for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking ten-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with homemade gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."

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Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023, he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. After releasing the critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 on the seminal Type label (Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Yellow Swans), Richter chose De Stijl for this 2012 album. Earth is a 2009 silent film by Ho Tzu Nyen, one of Singapore's foremost visual artists. After hearing Black To Comm's Alphabet 1968, Ho Tzu Nyen invited Richter to accompany the film at Berlin's Asian Film Festival, Unsound in Krakow and several other art biennials and music festivals around the world. Includes full color lyric sheet and poster.

From the original De Stijl one-sheet: "Richter's already formidable expressive power stretches over all of Earth. Reflecting the countless cyclical forces that make up, oh, more or less everything we know and are, the music on Earth is bracing, lovely, bustling and still, and at times bittersweet, a commingling of sensations and emotions that can't be neatly separated from one another. (Earth is complex, as you know.) Guests on Earth include David Aird, aka Vindicatrix, contributing startling vocal work; Renate Nikolaus on an array of instruments and noise devices; Rutger Zuydervelt (singing bowls); and Christopher Kline (singing saw). Earth is Black to Comm's seventh album and his debut for De Stijl, following the acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (on Type) and last year's vinyl-only collaboration with Mike Kelley of Destroy All Monsters (on the En/Of label)."

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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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Nighturns (deliberate spelling) finally introduces a new album by Bilal Dídac P. Lagarriga aka Un Caddie Renversé dans l'Herbe (lives in Barcelona, born in São Paulo, Brazil, 1976) after several years of silence. "Dídac was the first artist on my old Dekorder label back in 2003 so our relationship goes a long way back. He released one album (Like A Packed Cupboard But Quite...) and two 3" CD's on the label to wide critical acclaim. This new album on the Cellule 75 label continues and refines his explorations of African minimalist music played on mbira, kalimba, balaphon, vibraphone, melodica, and flute, combined with field recordings of African soundscapes and ritual chants, several collaborations, and electronic interventions. Always interested in reductionism (both in melody and rhythm) the music on Nighturns is finally condensed to its essential nucleus and spirituality, tranquil and deeply moving, seemingly at peace with itself, still always evocative. While previous releases have been compared to the likes of Pascal Comelade, Asa Chang, and Junray, early Penguin Café Orchestra and Steve Beresford on Nighturns the African influences are becoming more prominent and the whole album is even more singular, more personal and liberating, more intimate and inimitable." Nighturns (a transfolk journey)...: "I adore walking at night across West African sandy and barely illuminated streets. Nighturns is the title of these walks, Nighturns is the name of this album . . . The following tracks are also memory tracks: a lost and found piano tape recorded in 1995 (my first experiment with music); my wife, then in her late twenties, reciting Indonesian poet Haji Hasan Mustapa on kuring ('oneself, creature'), kurung ('cage, body') and kurang ('less, insufficiency'); several walks at night across Mbacke's Palene neighborhood, headquarter of Baye Fall Senegalese mystical brotherhood; the lecture of Joseph Campbell's explanation of Shiva myth and the drum as originator of universe; pupils of a Koranic school reciting devotional poetry before going to sleep; an Arabic radio broadcast recorded at night in my teenager room; the discovery of Filipino composer Jose Maceda in one of my so-often nonphysical trips (dis-travels); vinyl crackles of my grandpa's Afro-Brazilian records collection accompanying my child dance; the resisting sound of a broken and old friend mbira twenty years after its first vibration... Memory tracks also draw possible/future ways as dis-memory, where dis-time -- the unfitting time -- and imagination nourish the notion of 'dis' linked to trans. This album tries to encapsulate these memory tracks, but it is a dis-topy: music always seeps." Six-panel cardboard sleeve. Artwork and mastering by Marc Richter.

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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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This album presents music created by Vindicatrix for Ho Tzu Nyen's One or Several Tigers, a theatricalized installation using ancient and contemporary cinematic techniques including shadow puppetry, CGI, motion capture (taken from a suspended Vindicatrix's body and facial movements), and animatronics, exploring the histories, cosmologies and ecologies of Southeast Asia through the figure of the Malayan tiger. The work begins as a duet between two central figures in Road Surveying Interrupted in Singapore (c. 1865), a wood engraving by Heinrich Leutemann, depicting an encounter between a British survey mission headed by George Dromgoole Coleman and a Malayan tiger in a forest in Singapore in 1835. In the Pre-Colonial Malayan world, the tiger was a medium for ancestral spirits. It was sometimes feared as a harbinger of disease, death and destruction, and sometimes regarded as a guardian. Shamans, vagrants, and sometimes descendants of royal blood were believed to have the gift (or the curse) of turning into tigers. This symbiotic relationship between humans and tigers was broken in the 19th Century with British colonialism, a period of ecological upheaval in which Malayan tigers were massacred. But the tiger is a master of metamorphosis, and its physical death only called forth its resurrection in new forms, with which it continued haunting the British colonialists during the Pacific War and its aftermath. One or Several Tigers condenses this complex weave of history, ecology, anthropology, and mythology into an operatic duet sung by a pair of digitally created figures. On one side, there is Coleman, Irish servant of the British empire, official surveyor and Superintendent of Public Works and Convicts in Singapore -- an agent of reason, order, imperialism and capitalism. On the other side, there is the Malayan tiger -- an embodiment of chaos and nature unbound, and a conduit of ancestral and magical forces. In their fateful encounter in the forested heart of Singapore in 1835, the tiger spared the humans. Vindicatrix plays the parts of both colonial surveyor and (were)tiger, singing and speaking from various points of transformation and dialogue between animal, surveyor and narrator, within a sound world that evokes images from the "seasonless tropical Hell" of the jungle, to the Javanese courts of Mataram -- clattering polyrhythms, contorted 19th century Orientalisms, nightmarish caterwauls, and fragmentary vocal treatments. The lines between human and animal, reason and magic, and history and folklore begin to blur. Includes book; 24-page art book (130x190mm).

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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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"I am sitting in a garden, I haven't left the property in weeks, someone is dropping off food once a week. I haven't seen a human being in ages, I feel like a reverse Schroedinger cat -- do I exist when nobody sees me? I must be somewhere in France but I don't remember. I have lost my consciousness again. When I wake up I hear a broken record looping somewhere in the mansion. A washed-out opera. Behind the trees I see the dilapidated hermaphrodite sculpture in a field of verdant nettles and fern. I hear gunshots far afield, aeroplanes in the sky, sirens on the main road. When unconscious I dreamt of sitting on the Concorde observing the scarab blue ocean and iridescent clouds from above, an erstwhile receding memory. Sometimes I hear the organ of the nearby Renaissance Cathedral merging with the Russian Church bells. I am hallucinating again. Someone's humming in the kitchen? Singing? A radio? I overhear two young women talking about art galleries in the neighbour's garden. Bees attack, again? Again and again. The hairspray finally intoxicates them. An amphoric Japanese voice is whispering in my head saying I will die soon. Someone (something?) bangs on the vases. The fountain's water turns dark red. Fleur calls and says mum died. The funeral will be televised on Tuesday. We opt for the synthetic choir for the service. The call is suddenly interrupted. Mold is slowly taking over the house. I go back inside."

Une Fille Pétrifiée is the debut album of new Black To Comm related entity Mouchoir Ètanche. Combining real and fake acoustic instrumentation, sampling, field recordings, and excessive yet inaudible post production this is another sublime and ethereal statement. Influences are ranging from (French) classical and opera to the anecdotical compositions of Luc Ferrari, Chinese opera, chanson, sacred music/church music, JG Ballard, and surrealism. Marc Richter records as Black To Comm for Thrill Jockey, Type, and Dekorder and as Jemh Circs for his own Cellule 75 imprint. He also produces soundtracks and acousmatic multichannel installations for institutions such as INA GRM Paris, ZKM Karlsruhe, and Kunstverein Hamburg. Mouchoir Étanche is a new project by Marc Richter, aka Black To Comm (Thrill Jockey, Type Rec). Includes download code; edition of 300.

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Double LP version. Includes printed inner sleeves; Includes download code. Black To Comm's Marc Richter returns under his Jemh Circs guise for a second album of sonic abstractions. In contrast to Black To Comm's analog tape- and vinyl-based sound, in Jemh Circs he works with digital sources by primarily sampling modern pop music (and various other oddities) on YouTube (et al.) and sending chunks of it through a variety of arcane transformations and mutations. Using similar esoteric methods as on his 2016 self-titled debut album (CELL 001LP) but with very different results the record deconstructs the hypermodern sound of pop music with a post punk attitude, energy, and primitivism. Richter's combining disparate elements that shouldn't really work together but somehow all the chaos is making strange sense creating a collection of oddly diverging sonic vignettes with a surreal and anarchic spirit. This is music deeply rooted in the present but still difficult to pinpoint to a certain year or style. (Untitled) Kingdom converts a seemingly one-dimensional concept into a complex puzzle of ideas, sounds, and narratives; completely assimilating the original sources and transforming them into novel entities with an unexpected melodic and rhythmic quality.

Previous press for Jemh Circs:
"The overall effect is quite remarkable. Each track is like a hologram of pop music itself, a tiny part that reflects the whole. You almost feel that you could open them out and re-create entire popular music cultures. We'll be grateful for that when the next solar storm fries all of our hard drives." --Ian Sherred, The Sound Projector

"In that way Jemh Circs is a record about process -- not just how Richter loops and distorts and mutates his samples, but how the sounds of pop music create a particular sonic signature, one that gets more interesting the farther they're pulled from their original context." --Marc Masters, The Out Door

"Recycling random audio off YouTube, Jemh Circs' process couldn't be less sentimental, but the results turn out to be sneakily emotive." --Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork

$14.50 IN STOCK

Black To Comm's Marc Richter returns under his Jemh Circs guise for a second album of sonic abstractions. In contrast to Black To Comm's analog tape- and vinyl-based sound, in Jemh Circs he works with digital sources by primarily sampling modern pop music (and various other oddities) on YouTube (et al.) and sending chunks of it through a variety of arcane transformations and mutations. Using similar esoteric methods as on his 2016 self-titled debut album (CELL 001LP) but with very different results the record deconstructs the hypermodern sound of pop music with a post punk attitude, energy, and primitivism. Richter's combining disparate elements that shouldn't really work together but somehow all the chaos is making strange sense creating a collection of oddly diverging sonic vignettes with a surreal and anarchic spirit. This is music deeply rooted in the present but still difficult to pinpoint to a certain year or style. (Untitled) Kingdom converts a seemingly one-dimensional concept into a complex puzzle of ideas, sounds, and narratives; completely assimilating the original sources and transforming them into novel entities with an unexpected melodic and rhythmic quality.

Previous press for Jemh Circs:
"The overall effect is quite remarkable. Each track is like a hologram of pop music itself, a tiny part that reflects the whole. You almost feel that you could open them out and re-create entire popular music cultures. We'll be grateful for that when the next solar storm fries all of our hard drives." --Ian Sherred, The Sound Projector

"In that way Jemh Circs is a record about process -- not just how Richter loops and distorts and mutates his samples, but how the sounds of pop music create a particular sonic signature, one that gets more interesting the farther they're pulled from their original context." --Marc Masters, The Out Door

"Recycling random audio off YouTube, Jemh Circs' process couldn't be less sentimental, but the results turn out to be sneakily emotive." --Philip Sherburne, Pitchfork

$20.00 IN STOCK

Cellule 75 is a new label set up by Black To Comm's Marc Richter to release Black To Comm related music and a few select retrospective issues. The first release is the debut LP by Richter's somewhat arcane Jemh Circs alias, primarily working with voice samples culled from YouTube videos of modern-day pop music and the odd avant-garde curiosity, crafting seemingly simple loops and samples into minimal yet haunting songs, tunes, miniatures. Compared to his previous outings, Jemh Circles is a more digital and artificial sounding affair (even when working with the human voice) while still retaining the spectral melodic quality he is known for. Since 2003, Marc Richter has released eight full-length albums under the Black To Comm alias, including 2009's critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (TYPE 053CD) on Type Records and 2011's vinyl-only collaboration with the late visual artist Mike Kelley, Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage, on the En/Of label. His soundtrack for the film Earth by Singapore artist Ho Tzu Nyen came out on De Stijl in March 2012. A massive self-titled double album released in December 2014 marked his return to Type Recordings (TYPE 120LP). In November 2014, Richter's first multi-channel piece was premiered in the 47-speaker Kubus Hall at ZKM Karlsruhe. In 2015, he received a commission from INA-GRM to compose a new multi-channel piece for the acousmonium premiered in Paris in January 2016 alongside new works by François Bayle and Robert Hampson. Richter composed the soundtrack for Jan van Hasselt's 2016 film Der Weiße Elefant. Edition of 300.