SHELTER PRESS - Forced Exposure

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A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again. A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theater of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. "I don't write music, it's an assemblage of gestural memories", says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics... Gestures that are both very skillful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world. There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. "It's fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up. And so, the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories."

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LP version. A ritornello that awakens, unfolds, disappears, resurfaces, transforms, forgets itself, awakens again. A ritornello in folds and hollows, which gives us something to see as well as to listen, a theater of acoustic shadows where each timbre, each rhythm, each modulation, is born from a meticulously refined gesture. "I don't write music, it's an assemblage of gestural memories", says Thomas Bonvalet. Gestures found, accidentally or not, through long practice: such keyboard rubs on such guitar while preparing a concert, such tambourine vibrates in a singular way when placed on such amp, the duration and intensity of breath given to the flute so that the strings of the open piano decline and reverberate the harmonics... Gestures that are both very skillful and very simple, that sovereignly refuse the categories of modern and archaic, natural and cultural. Instead, they summon an entire genealogy, both intimate and collective, musical and technical, the memory of a thousand different pieces from a thousand different eras. There is no path, in fact, no path at all in this dismantled world. There are, however, these gestures that allow us to search for the human measure, that allow for a new attention to be given to bodies, objects, space. Gestures that invent new relationships between themselves and other ways of being alive, gestures to be worked on and shared endlessly. "It's fragile, it can always fall apart. I have to fight, to stay in tune with what is at stake in a piece, to breathe into it what will make it stand up. And so, the ritornello continues its mutations in the folds and hollows of our own memories."

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The expression "ghost in the machine" emerged within a particular context, namely as a critique of Cartesian dualism's separation of soul and body, and thus served to revive a certain mechanistic materialism. In simple terms, this critique denies the existence of an independent soul (the "ghost") contained in a corporeal organism (the "machine"). It asserts, on the contrary, that the "soul" is just a manifestation of the body -- that ultimately, they are one and the same. The artificial always brings with it the fantasy of emancipation and autonomy, and a break with a supposedly natural order of things. In a certain respect, the domain of musical creation constitutes a kind of front line, at once a terrain of exploration for possible applications of AI and a domain that boasts an already substantial history of the integration of machines and their calculative power into creative processes. From algorithmic composition to methods of resynthesis, from logical approaches to the creation of cybernetic systems, from the birth of computer music to neural networks, for more than half a century now music has been in continual dialogue with the binary universe of electron flows and the increasingly complex systems that control them. Each of the texts included here, in its own way, reveals a different facet of the strange prism formed by this alliance. Each projects its own particular spectrum -- or spectre; each reveals a ghost, evokes an apparition that is a composite of ideas, electricity, and operations. This book, then, does not set out to cut the Gordian knot constituted by the question of the possible mutations and becomings of binary logic, and in particular its most recent avatar, AI. On the contrary, it seeks to shed a diverse light upon the many possible ways of coming to grips with it today, and upon the dreams, promises, and doubts raised by these becomings, whether actualized in the creation of codes and programs to assemble sounds or infusing a whole compositional project. Above all, though, what is at stake here is to discover how these developments resonate together, and how this resonance manifests itself through all these approaches, all these reflections, all these modes of creation and of living. For the artificial, the artefact, is always the extro-human brainchild of a human, all too human dream. Authors: Keith Fullerton Whitman, Émilie Gillet, Steve Goodman, Florian Hecker, James Hoff, Roland Kayn, Ada Lovelace, Robin Mackay, Bill Orcutt, Matthias Puech, Akira Rabelais, Lucy Railton, Jean-Claude Risset, Sébastien Roux, Peter Zinovieff.

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When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.

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LP version. When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay's Everything Perfect Is Already Here, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as you trace rousay's collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. Everything Perfect... is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form. rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics, violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound's provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. Such details sound not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It's an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding. "The world unfolding," that's a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. Everything Is Perfect Is Already Here is loose and beautiful in surprising ways. The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire's music there is this marriage -- not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion -- of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is "the where you are now". There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is. These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive.

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Over the last five years, the duo of Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma have intertwined sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, Un Hiver En Plein Été ("A winter in the middle of summer") -- the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space -- distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms. Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them -- each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways -- prior to their first recorded outing in 2016 (SHELTER 070LP), Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Francisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, Comme Un Seul Narcisse, followed two years later by 2018's Limpid As The Solitudes (SHELTER 101LP). Both recorded remotely, these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked. Un Hiver En Plein Été culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 -- a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe -- its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album's two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground. Atkinson likens the recording of Un Hiver En Plein Été to have been akin to "a playground", each artist "hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard's Bande à part", to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had "a mind of its own", with both "along for the ride". This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm -- a joyous exploration of the unknown -- guides the momentum of the album's evolving arc. Un Hiver En Plein Été is crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones -- laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz -- searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions.

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Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi -- collaborators for the better part of a decade -- reemerge with Palimpsests, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album's two sides distill six years of work into nine splintered, airy re-imaginings of minimalism -- each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful -- that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète. Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, Holiday For Sampler (PLANAM 024LP), issued by Planam.

Palimpsests, the duo's second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations -- cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza -- before culminating, like the album's title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; "an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form." With each of the album's compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, Palimpsests constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts -- traces of memory, image, and action -- cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms. Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album's two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions -- reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality -- into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic -- reducing their sources to a series of unknowns -- recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms. Printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

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Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves is the debut full-length by PDP III, who fell into alignment in December of 2018 amid a handful of immersive and improvisatory recording sessions held at Gary's Electric Studio in Brooklyn, New York. The trio is a collaboration between composer/producer Britton Powell and two Berlin-based artists, the British composer/cellist Lucy Railton and the electronic artist Brian Leeds (Huerco S). At the outset of these sessions Powell presented a series of compositional sketches anchored around multi-tracked electronics and acoustic percussion. These concepts were then used as the framework for collective improvisation, with the musicians working on instinct and layering as many as eight separate takes across a track. A portion of the record also reflects moments that are purely spontaneous -- in-the-moment invention with Railton on electronics and cello and Powell and Leeds working on laptop computers. The composition process involved little in the way of overt instruction, instead favoring discussion on more abstract notions of feel and energy. As a result, the final product was a bit surprising to all involved. "I don't think the three of us had any idea how heavy and physical this thing was going to feel," reflects Powell. Subsequently reduced, edited, and collaged by Powell over the next two years, Pilled Up on a Couple of Doves presents a succession of alien moods. Gauzy textures are buoyed by extreme low-end pressure. Serene industrial hum illuminates the rhythmic beating of waveforms. The sounds frequently evoke opposing emotions -- tenderness and anxiety, claustrophobia and transcendence. The record culminates in 20-minute closer "49 Days," where gradually unfurling textures for cello and electronics mirror the overtones of a ringing gong. It's unsettling, but deeply meditative. A map of liminal space. Music to get lost to. "One thing that's important in relation to my work with music is to access a place outside of physical space," says Powell. "To pursue music as a tool to reach a place outside of physical existence. There's something really simple, innocent, and timeless about working with acoustic percussion instruments," explains Powell. "I think that they allow for a very true examination of sound. It feels vulnerable and really powerful at the same time."

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Lake From The Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin, and Klaus Lang. Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque Artist Residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record's title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by "the passing of shadow through a fixed space." The movement of light across these two flat surfaces, lake and window, finds its sonic equivalent in these eleven pieces, in which fragments and particles of sound -- highly amplified crunches, synthesized squawks and pings, harp notes -- ripple across the length of each track. Fixed sets of elements define each piece, often molded into ephemeral ensembles in which individual voices consistently fade away and reappear. Rushford's performances on various keyboards provide the unstable, wavering foundations of many of these pieces, with microtonal tunings adding a woozy, seasick edge to his stately, often stunningly beautiful playing. Each side of the LP ends with an extended keyboard work: the first for groaning, sighing church organ, the second for a psychedelic cloud of detuned synthesizer tones in which harmonic fragments sink into their own melancholic recollection. Elsewhere the record makes use of elements as varied as microtonal harp, skittering drum machines and synthetic marimba, establishing a sound palette remarkable for its breadth, as well as its sparkling, glittering quality. Where many of Rushford's solo projects have taken the form of long works with a somber cast, Lake From The Louvers is strikingly bright and accessible, a series of sonic glimpses in which, like a late Monet, the shimmer of light undoes the distinction between image and reflection, foreground and background, surface and depth.

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Shelter Press release of Perceptual Geography, Thomas Ankersmit's latest record. The music was created as a loosely structured piece for live performance in 2018-2019, commissioned by CTM in Berlin and Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, and premiered there on the GRM Acousmonium. The music is inspired by -- and dedicated to -- the pioneering research of American composer and installation artist Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), and created entirely on the Serge Modular analog synthesizer. Ankersmit and Amacher first met in New York in 2000, and kept in touch over the following years. Her concerts and installations left a deep impression on him. Amacher, being close to the Tcherepnin family, also first introduced Ankersmit to the Serge synthesizer, developed by Serge Tcherepnin in the 1970s. In the piece, Ankersmit explores different "modes" of listening: not just which sounds are heard and when, but also how and where sounds are experienced (in the room, in the body, inside the head, far away, nearby). So-called otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a prominent role. When turned up lou material moves beyond the loudspeakers and starts to trigger additional tones inside the listener's head; tones that are not present in the recorded music. Cupping the ears with the hands and slight movements of the head also help to bring these tones to life. Maryanne Amacher was the first artist to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena, often referring to them as "ear tones". The title is a reference to Amacher's essay "Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: Some Features of a Perceptual Geography", and despite the all-electronic instrumentation, a dramatic sense of landscape and environment often emerges. There are sparks of fire, howling wind, distant thunder, a swarm of bats disappearing into the distance. Ghostly, floating tones are contrasted with highly dynamic sounds darting around the listener, and large, heavy waves rolling in slowly. "Ear tone" stimuli weave in and out of these textures, emerging from them. Once or twice, the music seems to completely freeze in time, but a slight movement of the listener's head reveals changes. For each live performance, Ankersmit tunes his instrument to the resonant characteristics of the performance space, so that the sounds activate the structure, traveling through the architecture and setting it in motion. The record is accompanied by an extensive conversation between Ankersmit and Serge Tcherepnin, creator of the Serge Modular and friend and collaborator of Amacher.

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Since 2017, Deathstar has been a project about the microphone -- in Marina Rosenfeld's hands, a void, a mirror, an unruly instrument of transformation and mediation. This music is heard in traces, through thickly amplified silences punctuated by momentary eruptions of noise or a voice at the threshold of intelligibility. The sculpture at the center of the action -- a plexiglas orb housing a seven-microphone array originally installed as part of an exhibition the artist mounted at Portikus, in Frankfurt Germany -- performs a recursive operation, listening to and recirculating sounds continuously morphed by feedback and reflection. This machine music repeats itself in seemingly endless versions, abstractly and in an evolving relationship to the grammars of reproduction and performance, presence, absence, and accumulation. Later, recorded traces of this installation rendered as musical notation produce a series of events -- concerts that explore the outcomes of the acts of amplifying, writing, and listening. The four sides of the album Deathstar follow four such events: first, the installation of the Deathstar in exhibition space; then, a piano performance, also within the Deathstar's machinic environment, of a recording of the installation that Rosenfeld notated on paper; then, her re-notation of these recorded traces in the form of a concerto for piano and chamber orchestra, all aggressively amplified through a wall of guitar amps; and finally, the orchestration's reduction to something like chamber music, with acoustic instruments tasked with the representation of an ever more attenuated body of traces. Throughout, the extraordinary virtuoso pianist Marino Formenti and ensembles MusikFabrik (Cologne) and Yarn/Wire (New York) extract a dazzling variety of sounds from their readings of the work's written and acoustic forms. Deathstar is a complex and monumental work from a composer who has long explored the limits of form as an artist and as a listener.

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The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concrète threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions, and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date. Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to "elevate the everyday," transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition. Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone. But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, "Champagne Smoke." A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house. 14 Gestures associated with this album will be performed in experimental film and online viewing room of graphic notation from July 29th to October 29th, 2020. Designed by Bartolomé Sanson with art by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, housed in reverse-board inner and outersleeve. Includes a 16-page limited edition score book. Mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering.

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Limited restock. To resonate: re-sonare. To sound again -- with the immediate implication of a doubling. Sound and its double: sent back to us, reflected by surfaces, diffracted by edges and corners. Sound amplified, swathed in an acoustics that transforms it. Sound enhanced by its passing through a certain site, a certain milieu. Sound propagated, reaching out into the distance. But to resonate is also to vibrate with sound, in unison, in synchronous oscillation. To marry with its shape, amplifying a common destiny. To join forces with it. And then again, to resonate is to remember, to evoke the past and to bring it back. Or to plunge into the spectrum of sound, to shape it around a certain frequency, to bring out sonic or electric peaks from the becoming of signals. Resonance embraces a multitude of different meanings. Or rather, remaining always identical, it is actualized in a wide range of different phenomena and circumstances. Such is the multitude of resonances evoked in the pages below: a multitude of occurrences, events, sensations, and feelings that intertwine and welcome one other. Everyone may have their own history, everyone may resonate in their own way, and yet we must all, in order to experience resonance at a given moment, be ready to welcome it. The welcoming of what is other, whether an abstract outside or on the contrary an incarnate otherness ready to resonate in turn, is a condition of resonance. This idea of the welcome is found throughout the texts that follow, opening up the human dimension of resonance, a dimension essential to all creativity and to any exchange, any community of mind. Which means that resonance here is also understood as being, already, an act of paying attention, i.e. a listening, an exchange. Addressing one or other of the forms that this idea of resonating can take on (extending -- evoking -- reverberating -- revealing -- transmitting), each of the contributions brought together in this volume reveals to us a personal aspect, a fragment of the enthralling territory of sonic and musical experimentation, a territory upon which resonance may unfold. The book has been designed as a prism and as a manual. May it in turn find a unique and profound resonance in each and every reader. Features writings by: Jean-Luc Nancy, Tomoko Sauvage, Christian Zanési, Maryanne Amacher, Christina Kubisch, Okkyung Lee, David Toop, Pali Meursault, David Rosenboom, Chris Corsano, Ellen Fullman, and The Caretaker. Editors: François J. Bonnet, Bartolomé Sanson. Binding: thread-sewn metallic softcover; Size: 135 x 200 cm; Page count: 196 pp.; First edition: 2500 copies; Language(s): French/English. Published by Shelter Press with the support of INA GRM.

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This is not a study. It is a manifesto for a peculiar conviction: that music remains to be discovered, that it is still hidden. That, nonetheless, it does sometimes appear, but most often incompletely and unevenly. And that what we have hitherto referred to as "music" is in fact only a preliminary, a prodrome. That all musics produced up until now have been nothing but simulacra, rituals to call music forth. This may sound crazy, and indeed unwelcome. But the sole concern of the following text will be to make this statement legible, understandable, and perhaps even to some extent acceptable. Its hope is that, setting out from a few intuitions, the possibility of a music to come can be formulated. That this obscure becoming will emerge, one trait at a time; that the shape of this music to come will reveal itself, gradually, by way of a cluster of assumptions, the reading of a multiple history, and the examination of damaging paradigms that have taken music far from itself. That the subjectivity of a writing, with all of its beliefs, its errors, its biases, its injustices and its shaky certainties, may yet manage to cast a singular and inspiring light upon the idea of music -- this, ultimately, is the ambition of the lines to come. 56 pp; cover thread sewn silkscreened softcover; 11x16 cm.

François J. Bonnet is a Franco-Swiss composer, writer and theorist based in Paris. He's the Director of INA GRM and also produces radio shows for national radio France Musique. His music, often released under the Kassel Jaeger project name, has been presented worldwide.

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Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer/theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. Jaeger's work across numerous fields, be it in text, action, or sound presents a crucial bridge between the optimistic, philosophical origins of electronic and electroacoustic music, the present and where they have yet to delve. With his first solo LP with Shelter Press, Swamps / Things, Kassel Jaeger wades into this foggy, conceptual realm. From memory and metaphor -- sliding fluidly through the imagistic and emotive -- emerges an immersive, cavernous world that rethinks electroacoustic music on organic terms. Swamps / Things was conceived as an opera without distinct characters or text. It draws Kassel Jaeger into his own history, experiences, and the unlikely double of the swamp, a landscape that has held literal and metaphorical sway over him since childhood. Merging eight works as a total environment, abstaining from distinct shape or discrete articulation, across the album's breadth, sound becomes a shifting mirror for the bubbling, ordered chaos of organic life. Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena, Swamps / Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc. Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world -- memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought. From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures -- captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms -- moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth. Swamp / Things features contributions from Jim O'Rourke and Lucy Railton. Jaeger has previously collaborated with Stephen O'Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, James Rushford, and others. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi, cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Printed artwork by Cameron Jamie on inner and outer reverse-board jackets.

$23.00 IN STOCK

2022 restock. Springing from body of work spanning decades, defined by a rigorously singular and adventurous approach to sound, cellist, composer, and improvisor, Okkyung Lee, returns with Yeo-Neun. Her first outing with Shelter Press, and arguably her most ground-breaking and unexpected album to date. A vital force in the contemporary global landscape of experimental music, Okkyung Lee is widely regarded for her solo and collaborative improvisations and compositions, weaving a continuously evolving network of sonority and event, notable for its profound depth of instrumental sensitivity, exacting intellect, and visceral emotiveness. Yeo-Neun, recorded by Yeo-Neun Quartet -- an experimental chamber music ensemble founded in 2106 and led by Lee on cello, featuring harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Eivynd Opsvik -- represents the culmination of one of longest and most intimate arcs in her remarkable career. A radical departure from much of the experimental language for which she has become widely known, it is equally a fearless return. Yeo-Neun loosely translates to the gesture of an opening in Korean, presenting a window into the poetic multiplicity that rests at the album's core. Balanced at the outer reaches of Lee's radically forward-thinking creative process, its ten discrete works are born of the ambient displacement of musician's life; intimate melodic constructions and deconstructions that traces their roots across the last 30 years, from her early days spent away from home studying the cello in Seoul and Boston, to her subsequent move to New York and the nomadism of a near endless routine of tours. At its foundation, lay glimpses of a once melancholic teen, traces of the sentimentality and sensitivity (감성 / Gahmsung) that underpins the Korean popular music of Lee's youth, and an artist for whom the notions of time, place, and home have become increasingly complex. Elegantly binding modern classical composition and freely improvised music with the emotive drama of Korean traditional music and popular ballads, the expanse of Yeo-Neun pushes toward the palpably unknown, as radical for what it is and does, as it for its approachability. Meandering melodies, from the deceptively simple to the tonally and structurally complex, slowly evolve and fall from view, the harp, piano, and bass forming an airy, liminal non-place, through which Lee's cello and unplaceable memories freely drift. Printed inner and outer sleeve with artwork by American photographer Ron Jude. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.

$27.50 IN STOCK

Speaking And Listening is a book conceived by the artists Yann Sérandour, Félicia Atkinson, Julien Bismuth, and the curator Sophie Kaplan, revolving around questions of narrative, listening and improvisation. It is the last episode in the cycle While I was also listening [...], developed in 2017 and 2018 at La Criée contemporary art center in Rennes, which included in-house and off-site events in the form of exhibitions, events, and residencies. At the art center, five group and solo exhibitions with their associated events succeeded and dialogued with one another, providing both specific and general perspectives onto different forms of narration. The cycle was accompanied by an extra muros program that unfolded at different times and in different locations: concomitant residencies in Bretagne and the US, a project of research/action at the Kandinsky Library of the Musée national d'art Moderne in Paris, a period of research at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a series of events in Los Angeles and New York (Human Resources, County Museum of Art, Hammer Museum Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Artist's Institute and Emily Harvey Foundation, New York). In the continuum of these experiences, the book has been designed to be a distinct voice, generating new contents appropriate to the medium. The book is centered around a long unpublished transcript of a talk poem by the American poet and performance artist David Antin, entitled framing and being framed. Adding to the corpus of Antin's works, this typically autobiographical text reveals Antin's eloquent use of quotidian events to philosophical ends. The contributions that respond to Antin's text are themselves innovative, composed by poets, thinkers and artists from different generations and nationalities, linked by their common interest in investigating questions of orality, listening, narrative, transmission, improvisation, translation, utterance and enunciation. speaking and listening thus defines the contours of a transatlantic and intergenerational scene, for whom the work of art -- in dialogue with its viewers, readers, and listeners -- is an object to be redefined, retold and replayed again and again. Features: David Antin, François J. Bonnet, David Horvitz, Julien Bismuth, Yann Sérandour, Hanne Lippard, Christian Xatrec, Félicia Atkinson, Christine Sun Kim, Charles Bernstein, and Sophie Kaplan. 240 pp. thread-sewn softcover with flaps; Size: 170x227mm; Language(s): English.

$29.00 IN STOCK

Double LP version. Printed artwork on inner and outer reverse-board jackets. French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.

$15.50 IN STOCK

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.

$21.00 IN STOCK

The latest liminal low-end odyssey from French shape-shifter Maxime Primault's Black Zone Magick Chant entity swaps the screwed alien dancehall of past outings in favor of miasmic subterranean ritual, with compelling results. Born of "a few very intense sessions, in altered states of consciousness," the three sprawling compositions comprising Voyage Sacrifice ooze in slow, smoke-choked darkness, awash with dungeon groans, insectoid noise, reverbed bells, molten bass, and distant demonic mumblings. Primault speaks of recent creative strategies attempting to "delete time, or escape time," at which these pieces certainly succeed, entrancing the listener in their spiral sinkhole infinity: beatless, lightless, limitless. Occasionally a rusted, lurching metronome emerges, infusing a drugged sense of forward motion, but the essence of Voyage Sacrifice is textural and tantric -- "almost like some kind of prayer." Chants are chanted; the zone is black. The specter of dub still looms in the disorienting fog of FX and negative space but ultimately these sides exist outside (and deep beneath) any recognizable sonic lineage. This is cultic, questing music, deprivation chamber hallucinations "beyond good and evil, beyond sense and non-sense." This Rorschach enigma dimension is foundational, as Primault admits: "It's a mental journey. I handled the sacrifice; the voyage is yours."

$25.50 IN STOCK

Restocked, last copies. French music, art, and publishing imprint Shelter Press release another chapter of its on-going documentation of the work of Gisèle Vienne. The Pyre: Versions Distilled To Stereo is the score composed and recorded by KTL (Stephen O'Malley and Peter Rehberg) for the dance piece "The Pyre", written and directed by Gisèle Vienne. The music created by KTL incorporates invisible and absent elements -- ghosts, one might say. It proceeds from simulated diegetic sounds (which are part of the action) interwoven with real sounds -- a musical creation that makes up an extra-diegetic sound score. This composition dizzyingly sculpts the space on stage and generates an impression of great spatial depth, which activates light-sculptures that in turn evoke the illusion of a tunnel, whose depth also results in a play of reflections. Through these different media, the aim is to develop and shatter -- without looking to resolve -- the exceptional intensity that can arise from the dialectical tension between presence and absence, as well as from the characters that are seeking flight. The music, originally performed on a multi-channel spatialized soundsystem has been distilled to this stereo version for home use, half-speed mastered and cut by Matt Colton. This record announces -- and is one chapter -- in the forthcoming release of the first monograph dedicated to the work of French choreographer Gisèle Vienne and documented by French photographer Estelle Hanania. This book -- is one of Shelter Press' most ambitious to date, catalog number 100 -- will be released in Spring 2019. Text and voice by Dennis Cooper. Photographs by Estelle Hanania; Design by Bartolomé Sanson. Printed innersleeves; Includes download card; First edition of 700 on clear green wax.

$21.00 IN STOCK

In 2018, John Also Bennett appeared on three collaborative full-length releases -- the CV & JAB album Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface for Shelter Press (SHELTER 092LP), a fourth Forma album Semblance for Kranky, and Outside The Disc, a new album for his Seabat project with Forest Christenson. He also appeared on Christina Vantzou's solo album No. 4. Whilst work continues on these long running collaborations (as well as other projects with artists such as noted minimalist composer/performer Jon Gibson), 2019 will start for John with his first full-length solo release -- Erg Herbe. JAB says the record was gestated for nearly a decade while he worked out how to fully express his own sound and ideas. Erg Herbe began to emerge during 2017 and 2018, recorded alone during spare moments between collaborative projects. JAB uses a mixture of synthetic and organic instruments throughout the album, including modified Aphex Twin DX7 presets played using a just intonation tuning system, Eurorack oscillators "tuned according to intuitive structures using intervals of 30 hz," and a number of flutes including a Chinese "dizi" flute borrowed from his father, noted avant-garde poet and mail-artist John M. Bennett (a contemporary of New York underground poets Richard Kostelanetz and Steve Dalachinsky). Erg Herbe taps into the rich history of New York loft music. He also cites Takehisa Kosugi, Dominique Lawalrée, Jon Gibson, and Pauline Anna Strom as important influences. Beyond the cuts recorded in Brooklyn, there's also "Chanterai Por Mon Coraige" derived from the 13th century French troubadour song by Guiot de Dijon, on which two flute improvisations upon a theme were recorded blind from each other and then combined afterwards. Appropriately "Chanterai Por Mon Coraige" was recorded inside a decrepit mill in the French countryside at night. The title cut "Erg Herbe" features flute recorded inside Tilapia, a reverberant sculpture by Katsuhito Nishikawa at the Museum Insel Hombroich in Germany, which was then processed and overlaid with synthesizer in New York. "Distant Patterns" juxtaposes dry, pulsating oscillators with pillowy, occasionally dissonant pads, while a raga-like alto flute melody glides and dances over top. "Erg Herbe" in an invented turn of phrase -- "erg" being the term for a sea of desert sand dunes, and "herbe" being French for grass -- summoning the dreamlike image of a green, rolling dunescape. Artwork by Zin Taylor. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. 140 gram vinyl; printed inner and outer reverse-board jacket.

$20.00 IN STOCK

Restocked, third printing. Published with the support of INA GRM. Composing Listening features texts by: Félicia Atkinson, François Bayle, François J. Bonnet, Drew Daniel, Brunhild Ferrari, Beatriz Ferreyra, Stephen O'Malley, Jim O'Rourke, Eliane Radigue, Régis Renouard Larivière, Espen Sommer Eide, Daniel Teruggi, Chris Watson. This book has been conceived as both a prism and a manual. Following the "traditional" arc of electroacoustic composition (listen-record-compose-deploy-feel), each of the contributions collected together here focuses in on a personal aspect, a fragment of that thrilling territory that is sonic and musical experimentation. Although the term "experimental music" may now have be understood as referring to a genre, or even a particular style, we ought to hold on to the original use of this term, which was based more on an approach than on any particular aesthetic line to be followed. The experimental is first and foremost a spirit, the spirit of the exploration of unknown territories, a spirit of invention which sees musical composition more as a voyage into uncertain territories than as a self-assured approach working safe within the bosom of fully mapped out and recognized lands. 228 pp; thread-sewn softcover; one color offset; Size: 135x200cm; Language(s): French, English.

$21.00 IN STOCK

Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Limpid As The Solitudes cuts through sound-making techniques to enter a new zone of sonic revelations. The record recalls the turn-of-the-century Mille Plateaux glitch era, the warmth of La Monte Young's drones, acousmatic non-space recordings made by GRM artists, 4AD's floor-gazing guitar sound, and blissfully diverse field recordings. But, one could equally equate it with entirely different recording sources. Limpid As The Solitudes has a widescreen sound that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Warm, comforting and also unsettling in unpredictable ways. Deliberate yet exploratory, it's a record composed of opposites and contrasts, following historical guidelines yet also throwing them out of the window. To describe the album as ambient would indicate passive engagement with the sound; leave it to play in the background and one could miss a lot of the joy. Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma describe the record as a series of postcards - things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams. In this collaborative recording, there is a feeling of "becoming" - a concrete sound turns into a electronic sound that turns into a spiral-like melody which then furls/unfurls at the same time. The album title as well as track titles, are all verses stolen from Sylvia Plath's poems, Atkinson notes, "like dropped pearls from a lost collar." Trying further to capture the record's poetic impulses, it reflects "Empathy to objects and nature's elements, meteorological states, seasons that answer to your heart, granular etchings carved and sustained to create a blurred sentimental landscape. The finale is more optimistic than Plath's poetry. Love and lyricism win, the music soaring from deep water to interstellar galaxies." The cover is another key, an image by Julien Carreyn of a young woman wearing destroyed jeans, playing with bubble wrap. The image is intended to give the viewer an eerie 1990's feeling that echoes the recording and films by Hal Hartley or Wong Kar Wai. Be sure to come back to this record more than once; it's then that it's power will work. Recall the sound of a lover, a garden once walked through, an echo of a record once loved. To be appreciated, "Limpid As The Solitudes" requires immersion as if in a hot spring, letting the sounds float and alter perceptions and memories. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at D+M. Printed photographs by Julien Carreyn on glossy inner and outer sleeve.

$27.50 NOT IN STOCK

2021 repress. Double LP version, in reverse board-printed inners and double-width spine jacket. New York-based artist Eli Keszler is at the apex of his career. This year alone he's had a solo exhibition in the UK, performed with Laurel Halo, collaborated with author László Krasznahorkai, taught experimental composition and performance in the Pyrenees, and toured with Oneohtrix Point Never. Stadium is his new album for Shelter Press. As his ninth solo record, Stadium reflects his move from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where he produced the album. The constant motion and ever-changing landscapes of the island helped him modify and shape his sound into a new kind of film noir. There is a startling amount of expression at play on each track, where intersections of melody, restraint and rhythm are used to challenge the idea of memory, impression and space. Keszler is often mistaken for an electronic musician, but in fact his sounds are raw and natural, produced by hand. His performance with drumset and acoustic percussion are central to his work. He produces almost impossible textures through self-realized methodologies: cascading melodies, a shadow of voices, and a unique pointillist materiality. Although playing with the intensity of digitally-created music, his communications are done live with no processing; this is what gives Stadium its depth and warmth. On Stadium, Keszler uses lived experience to realize the most wide-ranging sound he's created to date, drawing out textures from overlapping geographies and transforming these recordings into starting points for composition. He then builds on these environments to create subliminal spaces for his music, which is pushed to new levels with string and brass arrangements. Is this the "stadium" referred to in the title: a larger network of sound and bodies moving continually, oscillating and turning in on itself? Keszler has explored these ideas before with notable projects such as his Manhattan Bridge installation Archway (2015) Stadium takes these long-running ideas to new depths. Keszler states: "The recordings on Stadium are inverted. They are landscapes scaled for the singular, like a mass collecting in one arena, this music compresses city spaces, genre and instrumentalism into an amorphous form. On the record, there are ruptures of information and happenstance. Like a game, it could go any number of ways."