chimescape (gong gong gone)

"Just Gong" by Antti Tolvi - from the excellent Longform Editions series - whose releases include works by Sun Araw, Lieven Martens, Matthewdavid's Mindflight, Yamaneko, Norm Chambers, Richard Youngs, Bitchin Bajas, Pan American, to name just a handful

release rationale:

Just Gong is recorded with one take on one sunny autumn morning in our home Kemiö Island Finland. Playing with gongs is maybe a bit different than playing some other instruments. You do something and then you listen and notice how it response. You literally follow the sound. Sound may vary pretty much depending a day, place, temperature and so on. So it’s a very alive instrument in a way. And gong is very total instrument because the whole instrument is just one piece. No interfaces. No boundaries. Just one.

I think gong might be the one of the oldest noise/drone instruments in the world. The first signs of gongs are around 3 000 years ago in China.

This piece is played with 44” Wind Gong Wuhan and recorded with Soundman Binaural Microphones to Zoom H5 recorder. Mastering made by my dear friend Pentti Dassum.

After more than decade of daily meditation, deep listening, or I like to call it just listening has become one of my main practices. In just listening I just listen. And not just sounds around me, but also my inner world. Feelings, thought, tensions, everything that arises to my consciousness. And idea is to just listen them, let them come and let them go. See the constant transformation. And to be able to see the transformation, you need to listen for a while. And what you will hear? Just life all around. One huge life. Just gong… 


artist bio: 

Antti Tolvi was born at the farm in Panelia, small village at west coast of Finland. Antti works as composer, performer and sound artist and has been one of the main figures in underground music scene in Finland since 2002. Antti has played over 300 shows around world in three continent. There is thirteen solo records under Antti´s name and Antti has been part of over fifty record as composer and/or musician. Last year Antti has made many sound art installations to galleries around Finland and worked with wide range of different arts; performance, dance, puppet theatre, light art, films… Antti has also organized sound art festival Kiilan Äänipäivät since 2014. Antti´s other profession is working as Qigong and mediation teacher. Antti has studied Taiji, Qigong and Zen meditation since 2002 with various teachers and has been teaching since 2010.

www.anttitolvi.com



more on Longform Editions

Longform Editions is an ongoing series creating a space of musical discovery for extended pieces of exploratory, expansive and immersive music pieces from around the world, looking to reclaim time and space in the fractured world we live in.


longformeditions.com

https://longformeditions.bandcamp.com/

bamboo music

"The basic recordings for this cassette were made by J. Derwort during the first months of 1987 in Lekkerkerk, using a Revox two-track recorder. each track has its own environment and (often) handmade acoustical instrument. Special sounds or environments were sometimes added during mastering"










Sakamoto-Sylvian still sounds phuture

Soundohm release-rationale for the J.Derwort, now vinylized  in rearranged form by Astral Industries

"Time, in the landscape of contemporary music, has collapsed. The past occupies the present, and the present easily becomes an unnoticed past. Yet, even with all flux, temporal boundaries tend to remain fixed - albums from then entering the now, albums from the now, becoming then - making active conversation between the two almost a forgone point. The London based imprint, Astral Industries’, latest release - ‘Bamboo Music, an interventionary celebration of the music of Dutch ambient music pioneer, Jacobus Derwort, turns these divisions on their head. An album entirely of this moment, built from the objects of the past, it’s a stunningly beautiful conceptual journey in sound. 

Jacobus Derwort, who sadly passed away earlier this year, was among the generation of all too overlooked ambient composers who emerged toward the end of the 80s and beginning of the 90s - rethinking the form beyond the permitters within which it had been previously known - often takin it into more markedly experimental realms. His most celebrated work, Bamboo, issued in 1987 as a cassette following a concentrated stint of recording on a Revox two-track recorder with mostly hand made instruments, remains an incredible, freestanding glimpse of this remarkable world, and forms the root of the album before us. Conceived with each track offered its own conceptual environment - gentle, breezy gestures paired with layers of subbass, bird calls, and trickling, fluid electronics, Bamboo Music - a subtle intervention with Derwort’s original works by his long time collaborator and bandmate, Hanyo van Oosterom, pushes these immersive depths one step further. 

Creating an extended, almost total environment, Bamboo Music is a seamless suite which stitches together fragments from the Derwort’s ‘Bamboo, his 2000 release of ‘Bamboo Music’, and with further works commissioned for commercial use, creating an entirely reality which exists outside time. Stunning beautiful and and immersive, sounds rise as yet another vibrant rethinking of minimalism and the very notions of the experimental and the avant-garde. Wondrous, thrilling, and elegant from start to finish, this one is not to be missed. An essential entry into the contemporary sonic landscape which challenges how we manage the past in the present day, with hits at the territories of Mike Cooper, Coil, and David Toop lingering within. Incredible work by Astral Industries. 

 
Chi, aka  The Chi Factory -  a group Derwort, was in (also reissued by Astral Industries)

Knud-ism

release rationale

"The lost masterpiece Les Éphémères by the self labeled ‘sound painter’ Knud Viktor (1924-2013) now sees its first ever release by Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology – 40 years after it was conceived. Viktor’s pioneering work – his Images Sonores – are composed of field recordings of insects, animals and the his surroundings.

A finished master tape and even a complete cover layout for Les Éphémères was found in Viktor’s archives after he passed away in 2013. The phenomenal piece was originally commissioned by the French radio station France Musique in 1977. The twenty short ‘sound images’ of Les Éphémères were originally broadcast as vignettes in-between other radio programs.

From the middle of the 1970’s Viktor began composing almost exclusively for four channels. He invented his own intuitive quadraphonic mixer – the Tetramix – to realise his spatial visions for his Image VI – The Lubéron Symphony, and from then on worked with quadraphonic sound, thus making the release of his works difficult. Les Éphémères is close in time and also holds close ties to The Lubéron Symphony, which Viktor considered his magnum opus. Perhaps most strikingly is the shift in the way he uses the recordings of insects, birds and animals in both The Lubéron Symphony and Les Éphémères: Often untreated and clearly recognizable, the field recordings leave the inherent melody and rhythm of the animal sounds to sing for themselves, layering recordings to create simple and elegant sound images. In two of the twenty pieces Viktor’s own voice blends with the animals, as he recites two poems. One about the singing vineyard populated by musical crickets, the other painting an autumn picture with wine bubbling in the barrels as we hear the wine flies humming.

Viktor’s work emanates with a tremendous love and fascination with his companion species and the landscape and geology that surrounded him. His works are devoted to depicting the life on the mountain where he lived for fifty years. Hearing how the ecology of the landscape changed as commercial farming and pesticides took effect, a larger perspective in his work became clear to him:

"As it turns out, my work has actually set many things in motion; it touches upon something universal that I feel I have a duty to convey to others. A duty that I feel as a citizen of the earth. Not as a human citizen, but as a citizen of the earth. It may sound pretentious, but this is a question of generations to come." – Knud Viktor

The world has seen dramatic ecological change since Viktor recorded his sounds. Not only have the individual insects and animals that he recorded vanished from Lubéron, so too have entire species. Like fossils, their imprints now exist only in his works, in the recordings stored on tape. In the midst of our planet’s sixth mass-extinction event, the growing silence that Viktor heard in his immediate surrounding is now global: scientists estimate that half of the planet’s animal life has already disappeared. Viktor’s sound works allow us to borrow his ears. They convey his love for the animal worlds that surrounded him and perhaps we too can see our companion species differently through his works. 

credits

releases January 17, 2019 "

YouTube poster says: "This recording (real name of the recording unknown if any) has been made by Knud Viktor and given to accompany the pregnancy of my mother. The sounds were used to discover my reaction to them in her belly.

Knud Viktor, Un artiste sonore (Patrick Montant) from nightowlechoes on Vimeo.

unwinding