Lucretia Dalt – Edge (2018)
Thematically departing from her work as a former geotechnical engineer, Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines fuses several overlapping narratives into a composite work where “geological & astronomical timescales are compressed into intimate sound experiments” (The Wire). In structural geology, anticlines are arch-shaped rock formations created by compression of layers and stratified rock. Similarly, on Anticlines, Dalt bends disparate elements into delicate shapes that highlight careful pace, breath, and complex texture. Using traditional South American rhythms to support her contemporary electronic compositions, the album features lyrics describing everything from the Colombian myth of El Boraro, an “Amazonian monster who turns its victims insides to pulp before sucking them dry” to ruminations on “human dependence on earth at the boundary of the heliopause.”
Hildegard Westwerkamp – Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989)
Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk challenges us as listeners to re-evaluate our acoustic soundscape. Juxtaposing the sounds of barnacles with the noise of the city, Westerkamp reveals an unbalanced world in which individual voices are silenced. Kits Beach Soundwalk allows Westerkamp to help rectify that imbalance. It provides her with the opportunity to create a place in which a listener can take pleasure in simply being. She reveals the metaphors, the hidden entrances, within sounds that take us into other spaces. – David Kolber
Kepla & DeForrest Brown Jr – Tender is the Touch of White Liberal Complicity (2018)
The Wages of Being Black is Death’ is an exhausted and defeated audio documentation of the alienation – and eventual distillation – of the Black Body as a subject and content of the social sphere by Kepla & DeForrest Brown, Jr. Written and recorded in a week’s time between file-sharing and overnight home studio binges, the mixtape is framed as a deadpan comedy that follows a slothful and downtrodden Black Body as it drifts amongst the ambient commons of the Whites. Artist Ryan Kuo states that, “Whiteness acts by dictating the terms and categories that describe everything in the universe except itself.” ‘The Wages of Being Black is Death’ in turn serves as a reversal of the nominal gaze of categorization, a paranoid disavowal of an uneven and silent social contract as well as an intimate encounter with the daily, incessant slights and traumas felt by the Black Body in everyday life.
Trevor Wishart – Red Bird
“Red Bird” (1977) is a 45-minute piece of musique concrète in four movements. Made for the most part of bird sounds, body sounds, and selected mouthed words, it weaves an intricate network of symbols. Completed in 1977, it was made with traditional electro-acoustic techniques. It has a crude tape splicing aspect that aged surprisingly well. Often brutal in its contrasts, it presents interesting sound transformations, but most of all a dense, relentless abstract drama that compares very well to Pierre Henry‘s best works from the ’60s and ’70s. The result of four years of work, “Red Bird” is a significant work and conveys ideas of imprisonment and freedom that are beautifully expressed.
John Cage & David Tudor – Indeteminacy 1 (1959)
The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple and audaciously original. Cage read 90 stories, his speed determined by the story’s length. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, David Tudor, pianist and veteran Cage collaborator, performed miscellaneous selections from Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and played pre-recorded tape from Cage’s Fontana Mix. The resulting collaboration is an astounding piece of “music,” and a fine introduction to the innovations of John Cage. “A wonderfully curious way to hear stories.” —Stereophile
AGF – Diamantenstimmen (The Birds, Solveig von Schoultz, 1963) (2013)
AGF (Antye Graie) is vocalist, digital songwriter, producer, performer, e-poet, calligrapher, digital media artist and curator
The Swedish Finnish writer Solveig von Schoultz (1907–1996) is mainly a novelist, but she also wrote convincing poetry. AGF transfers her poem “The Birds” into the sound poem “Diamantenstimmen” which refers to the most important thing, the weaving of love and issues crystallized into the hardiest stone, a diamond.
Gosheven – Do you think we can escape? (2018)
Gosheven is the solo project of Balint Szabo who is one half of the Budapest based experimental band @12z
Dixie Treichel — Southern Skies
Listen to the voice of Penny Yon from Zimbabwe talking about her experiences in the dark African night. I mixed it with original electronic music. It was originally created for Claudia Wegener’s Radio Continental Drift, “The Women of the Great River” (voices of women from Binga, a town and district on the Zimbabwe shore of the Zambezi). It was a response to a request to create a sound art remix with provided voice clips for a digital CD, VOX, as part of CIRCE The Black Cut by Anna Stereopoulou of Athens, Greece. The digital release is by 7MNS Music (Sevenmoons Music) on bandcamp.
Dixie Treichel is a composer, sound artist, sound designer, experimental instrument maker and broadcaster on KFAI in Minneapolis, MN.
Language Removal Services — The 60 Second Anthology of American Poetry
Chris Kubick is an artist, composer and sound designer who works under a variety of pseudonyms, including Language Removal Services, an institute and laboratory founded by one Dr. Raymond Chronic that may or may not exist solely as the Web site www.languageremoval.com. Kubick frequently collaborates with Anne Walsh, and together they have created ARCHIVE, whose best-known project ‚ Art After Death‘ consists of interviews with artists who have died conducted through spirit mediums. Together their work has appeared in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Royal College of Art, London. Kubick’s work has been heard on public radio in the U.S., Canada and Great Britain.
The 60 Second Anthology of American Poetry
Joan Schuman – Heard, not seen
A goat moved into the neighborhood. He was heard, but never seen. Someone entered her dreams, both needing and ignoring her. Of all the John Berger texts about looking at the world, there’s an essay that beckons us to understand our metaphoric and literal relationships with animals. They commit, as promises; or they are sent, as messengers. This murmured text across consciousness is a segment of a longer piece, Flesh has turned itself to stone or dust, which features ambient narrative and documentary stories of two farmers, vegetarian and carnivore, who question how they raise animals for slaughter.
Pamela Z – And to your left
Pamela Z is an American composer, performer, and media artist who is best known for her solo works for voice with electronic processing.
This track is part of a compilation of artists working with language called Playing with Words, available for download at Archive.org