Tag: San Francisco

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Review – Untitled 10, The black album – by Textura

VA: Untitled 10 (The Black Album)
Untitled & After
The material on Untitled & After’s tenth release is rooted in techno but spreads its wings far beyond a strict minimal template. The inclusion of field recordings, ambient-dub textures, and a generally expansive approach gives the compilation a wide-screen character that extends its sights beyond the confines of the club. Two focal points emerge in virtually every case: the first a rhythm dimension; the second colourful ambient-electronic scene-painting. Untitled 10 (The Black Album) lists some stellar names as contributors, with Morgan Packard, Andrew Duke, Bizz Circuits, and Leyland Kirby amongst the better-known. Repeated exposure to the album brings into clear focus an interesting trajectory, as the material gradually distances itself from a rhythm-based approach until beats vanish entirely during the recording’s second half.
The album opener “Apple Pie” suggests Morgan Packard’s been soaking up the music of Robert Henke in recent times, a suspicion bolstered when a number of Monolake-like signifiers surface during its five-minute time in the spotlight: sleek and polished surfaces, atmospheric bass rumble, and a forward-thrusting minimal techno pulse. “Hovercraft,” a collaboration between Andrew Duke and i8u, rolls along with a breezy, lighter-than-air techno bump that conveys the movement of its titular transport, while an accompanying Chaircrusher remix infuses the original with a heavier industrial quality and cloaks it in a multi-layered cloud of hazy melodies and noxious atmosphere. Some tracks opt for a more purely ambient textural approach that excludes beats, as confirmed by lovely meditations by sublamp (“andamurmur”) and Robert Crouch and Yann Novak (“Santa Fe”). And sometimes there is truth in advertising, as “Big Air (Ambient Mix),” a cloudy collaborative piece by Jondi & Spesh with Brian Stillwater illustrates. Leyland Kirby takes the project out on a characteristically distinctive note when the stately “Ready To Go Down Together” evokes a mutant processional where fuzz-toned guitars serenade angelic choirs amidst billowing synthetic flourishes.
April 2010

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Album – Comp – Untitled 10 – Various Artists on Untitled & After (2010)

| CD | UntitledandAfter | compilation

Various artists – Untitled 10

03.23.2010
Tracks:

Morgan Packard – Apple Pie
Robert Crouch – 5th of July
Andrew Duke + i8u – Hovercraft
Andrew Duke + i8u – Hovercraft (Chaircrusher Remix)
Birdcage – When Dream and Day Unite
Bizz Circuits – mouvement aérien
sublamp – andamurmur
Jondi & Spesh with Brian Stillwater – Big Air (Ambient Mix)
Robert Crouch / Yann Novak – Santa Fe
Leyland Kirby – Ready To Go Down Together
Artwork by Marc Kate

About:

For its tenth release, Untitled & After issues a compilation of music that seeks solace in the outer reaches of electronic music. Akin to Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series, Untitled 10 (The Black Album) pulls away from the structures of techno into more expansive terrain.
Collected from artists as diverse as Bizz Circuits and Morgan Packard, from locations as distant as Sapporo, Los Angeles and Berlin, Untitled 10 (The Black Album) is a meditation on the tension between force and fragility. An extension of the beat driven roots of Untitled & After, this compilation revels in the paranoid spaciousness of dub, the personal documents of field recordings and the otherworldliness of soft synthesis. Here, ambient is not a genre, but a timeless, spaceless moment. Untitled 10 (The Black Album) attempts the impossible by documenting something so fleeting.

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San Francisco 03.21.2008 – Listen/Vision

March 21, 2008
If you’re going to be in the SF Bay Area this month, we’d love to see you there…

Overlap.org and VOLUME present

LISTEN/VISION 02
Friday, March 21st, 2008, 7-9pm
San Francisco Art Institute Lecture Hall
800 Chestnut St.
San Francisco, CA 94133

LISTEN/VISION is a unique series exploring the art of perception. It is a place and time for a shared experience of sound and light and space. VOLUME and Overlap.org have partnered to commission new and unreleased sound and video works from an international pool of acclaimed contemporary artists. These exclusive pieces, not to be found anywhere on the web or a CD, are presented in a collective listening environment. LISTEN/VISION will also host occasional live performances and multichannel sound installations.

For more information, visit volumeprojects.org and overlap.org.

The second installment of this series, LISTEN/VISION 02 will present ew work by Gregg Kowalsky, David Kwan , i8u and CHiKA, and Sawako.

Gregg Kowalsky
Rosebud for Red Magus, 2006 (18:17 min)
Kowalsky’s compositions range from drone and noise pieces to the psychedelic, which are highly influenced by the thick, humid air of South Florida where Gregg lived for most of his life. He is interested in filling the spaces his music occupies through dense, live mixes. He has composed for film, dance, acoustic ensembles and sound installations. Gregg’s debut full-length album, Through The Cardial Window was released on the Kranky label in Spring 2006. Gregg Kowalsky resides in Oakland, California where he completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in Electronic Music and Recording Media at Mills College.
http://ossobucco.net

David Kwan
Solaris, 2006 (10:07 min)
Sound-generated video projections; dimensions and running time variable; video projection with sound. David Kwan composes soundscapes using live radio signals and feeds them into a customized video imaging system to reveal visual patterning and to electromagnetically alter their dimensions. The end result is an electronic form of painting that is constructed from sound but manifested as light.

Kwan has presented work at the Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive, Headlands Center for the Arts, Artist Television Access, The Lab, and Mission 17 in San Francisco; Jack Straw New Media Gallery in Seattle; Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart; and Baracke am Deustchen Theater in Berlin. He received a BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley and an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College, where he has been teaching in music, art and intermedia.
http://www.meridiangallery.org/davidkwan2003.htm

i8u and CHiKA
Infinity02, 2008 (30:38 min)
Unlimited or unmeasurable in extent of space, duration of time: the infinite nature of the fabric of space. CHiKA uses minimal objects in two-dimensional space to create a video work invoking the feeling of the unlimited possibilities, approaching the unmeasureable nature of the infinite. I8u’s soundscapes inspired by the concept of string theory mirror our limited understanding and imagination of these strings as they slip in and out of the dimensions we are aware of. The audio and visual moves from a closed world with perspective as its corresponding symbolic form.

France Jobin aka i8u is a sound/installation/web artist residing in Montreal, Canada. i8u’s audio art can be qualified as “sound-sculpture.” It reveals powerful, opaque and complex sound environments where analog and digital meet. Her installation/web art can be said to follow a parallel path, incorporating both musical and visual elements.
http://www.i8u.com

Chika Iijima is a live computer visuals artist working within New York’s expanded cinema community and VJ scene. Her videos implement geometric minimalist patterns and original graphics in unique, repetitive combinations. Chika has performed at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The Mapping Festival (Geneva), the Bushwick Art Project (Brooklyn, NY), and the clubs Galapagos and Tonic, both in New York.
http://www.imagima.com

Sawako
Untitled, 2006 (15:18 min)
Sawako is a Tokyo/NYC-based sound sculptor who understands the value of dynamics and the power of silence. After beginning in video art, Sawako shifted her focus from the video camera to sound. Once through the processor named Sawako, sounds in everyday life – field recordings, instruments, voice and electronic sounds – float in space vividly with a digital yet organic texture. Her unique sonic world has been called “post romantic sound” by Boston’s Weekly Dig.
http://www.troncolon.com

LISTEN/VISION 02 is $5 for the general public and free for S.F.A.I. students and faculty.