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RVNG INTL.

Pauline Anna Strom

Echoes, Spaces, Lines

    Echoes, Spaces, Lines collects Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, the first three albums by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. Exploring all corners of the multiverse through transpersonal form and freedom, Strom’s first three albums share a singular sensibility, different streams flowing from the same oracular font. Echoes, Spaces, Lines establishes Strom’s rightful place in the canon of great synthesists.

    Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, newly remastered, and adding Oceans of Tears, a fully realized but previously unreleased album exclusive to this box set, these are the first official reissues and the definitive encapsulation of Pauline Anna Strom’s prolific and visionary early work.

    These four-disc LP and CD box sets include 12 and 16 page booklet containing liner notes, an unearthed interview with Strom, and unseen ephemera.

    TRACK LISTING

    Trans-Millenia Consort
    01. Emerald Pool
    02. The Unveilin
    03. Cult Of Isis
    04. Phantom Dancer
    05. Energies
    06. Century C
    07. Morning Splendor
    08. Gossamer Silk
    09. Untitled Track 1 (CD Only)

    Plot-Zero
    01. Mushroom Trip
    02. Freebasing
    03. Symphonic Industry
    04. Organized Confusion
    05. Plot Zero
    06. Untitled Track 2 (CD Only)

    Spectre
    01. Tenement Stairwell
    02. Spatial Spectre
    03. Blood Thirst
    04. Virgin Ice
    05. Blood Celebrants
    06. Freedom At The 45th Floor
    07. Alpine Flight
    08. Untitled Track 3 (CD Only)

    Oceans Of Tears
    01. Ancient Sea Ritual*
    02. Quiet Joy
    03. Domestic Peace
    04. Summer Rain
    05. Midnight Velvet*
    06. At The Water Stairs
    07. Timeless Grief*

    *Exclusive Extended Version On CD Only

    Wayne Phoenix

    Soaring Wayne Phoenix Story The Earth And Sky

      soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky is the debut album from multi-disciplinary British artist Wayne Phoenix. Originally conceived over a decade ago as one part of an elaborate project encompassing music, film, and performance, story the earth and sky is not only a profoundly personal and vulnerable expression unbound by Phoenix’s exploration of creative potential and mystery, but a bridge beyond the artificial boundaries that separate us all from an unfiltered voice within us all.

      The impetus of this album formed around a musical improvisation that occurred in 2009 between Phoenix and Richard, a man who he was working with as a support client. Richard suffered from severe autism, and had been labeled as non-verbal. But as Wayne sat down to play the piano one day with Richard in the room, he was met with some surprising behavior. Richard began uttering some simple phrases over Wayne’s piano, his speech interplaying with the melancholic chords.

      Moved, if not transformed, by the event, Phoenix began developing a vocal style in tune with our natural, unmanufactured voice as a means to accomplish boundless interconnectivity. He searched for “the voice of the child within, which has no concept of the world it inhabits, nor any means to navigate that world.”

      This realization spurred a deeply creative period for the artist, spanning nearly fourteen years to date. Originally conceived as one part of a multimedia project, soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky, communicates the core of the artist’s creative intentions. Phoenix says that “all these works to date are the by-product of something else, which has manifested as music and has been spread over various artistic formats, not limited to any one specific discipline.”

      Phoenix perpetuates this hazy aura of his work, stating “if it came to finding the converging principle that ties it all together, one could find oneself in a position similar to Rumi’s story of the elephant in the dark, in which each person felt a different part of the elephant and considered it to be the whole”

      Mirroring this theme of subjectivity, the first half of story the earth and sky starts in abstract, words and thoughts left hanging in the ether. Phoenix’s broken, spoken word obscures itself in melodic white noise and distortion. As we reach the middle of the record, the smoky sound of the opening pieces begins to clear, making space for a melancholic yet musical manifestation of Phoenix’s work, that while still somewhat disarming, soars to higher heights. soaring wayne phoenix story the earth and sky focuses on the artist’s internal search and dissolves in the surrounding ambiance before eventually, and undeniably, arriving outside and beyond itself. A powerful, intentional debut from an artist determined to find and define a new form of expression.


      TRACK LISTING

      A1. Mood
      A2. Alone
      A3. Place
      A4. Home
      A5. ...and Sleepless Skies
      A6. Burn False Messages
      A7. I Gave You Power
      A8. Reserve
      A9. Death Is Pure Objectivity
      B1. Latika’s Grace (it’s Not What You Go Through, It’s How You Go Through It)
      B2. Gate
      B3. Nightswim Feat. Run Rivers
      B4. Cygnet
      B5. The Light The Lamb
      B6. One Man Island Feat. CrystalXulu

      Suzanne Ciani & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

      FRKWYS Vol. 13 - Sunergy (Expanded)

        Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational collaboration series. Revisited and expanded for a radiant, radical 2023 edition, the Pacific Coast’s panorama provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of the ocean’s life-giving form, vast and volatile with change.

        Fortuitously (as is the freaky way), Smith and Ciani were discovered to be neighbors in their small coastal community in Northern California. The two had become close friends, bonding over their experience as women musicians and, more unusually, their shared passion for the Buchla synthesizer. The music of Sunergy embraces this kinship, with Ciani and Smith respectively performing on the Buchla 200 E and the Buchla Music Easel, two modern configurations of the innovative instrument developed in the ‘60s by Don Buchla.

        Sunergy was recorded in 2015 in the home where Ciani has now lived for the last three decades. Her living room overlooks the Pacific Ocean from a cliffside perch, creating an idyllic, inspired setting for music making. Setting up their synthesizers side-by- side, Ciani and Smith took turns keeping time and freely improvising for the album sessions. As a complete piece, Sunergy is shaped by slow, pulsing forms and sinuous, melodic sequences that conjure both an oceanic world and the unlimited sound made possible by modular processing. Eight years on from their meeting and recording, these sublime, expansive synergies still retain their potent transportative power.

        Since its initial release in 2016, Sunergy has become a touchstone in both artist’s catalogs, marking a return to Buchla form for Ciani (who at the time had not released a new synthesizer recording in forty years), and a transformative moment for Smith, whose breakthrough instrumental album Ears was released the same year. Ciani has since toured globally, dazzling audiences with live Buchla improvisations in the vein of those heard on these recordings, and Smith has solidified her place on the vanguard of electronic pop.

        This expanded LP, contains the previously CD and digital only bonus track “Retrograde.”


        TRACK LISTING

        A1. A New Day
        B1. Closed Circuit
        B2. Retrograde (Vinyl Edit) 

        Kate NV

        Wow

          Kate NV’s WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life.

          WOW is Kate Shilonosova’s fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for RVNG Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments.

          It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova’s voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect’s perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as “funny tiny sounds.”


          TRACK LISTING

          1. Oni (They)
          2. Confessions At The Dinner Table
          3. Slon (Elephant)
          4. Asleep
          5. Nochnoi Zvonok (Night Call)
          6. Mi (We)
          7. D D Don't
          8. Early Bird
          9. Razmishlenie (Thinking)
          10. Flu
          11. Meow Chat 

          Dialect

          Advanced Myth

            Advanced Myth is the lucid debut album from Dialect, the long standing project of British composer, multi-instrumentalist, and field recordist Andrew PM Hunt. An enchanted exploration of unusual source synthesis, electroacoustic arrangements, and sound found in foreign environments, Advanced Myth is its own cosmos expanding and contracting in real time. Advanced Myth coincided with the creation of the Liverpool-based musician’s Dialect moniker, marking a more permanent uncoupling from the “frontman” dynamic Hunt wrestled with as part of Sophisti-pop band, Outfit. Happily unmoored ever since, Hunt has built a broad oeuvre with a quiet confidence across several album, including Gowanus Drifts (2015), Loose Blooms (2017), and Under ~ Between (2021), his debut for RVNG Intl., and its companion piece, Keep Going…Under.

            “Doing something as abstract as Advanced Myth was a real change for me at the time and turned out to be something of a new start,” Hunt explains. “The band had a studio set up in a disused block of flats just across from the big, shared house we all lived in, and I started to record there by myself a lot. At some point in 2013, I realized I’d amassed a huge collection of miniatures and a few larger pieces which had nothing to do with what the band was doing. Dialect became a way to gather these ideas together and find my own voice.”

            Steering towards lesser-explored musical terrains wasn’t new to Hunt even then; he’d toured the UK and Europe underground in various projects since his teenage days, and contributed to large ensemble performances of work by the likes of Terry Riley and John Cage. However, Advanced Myth was made amidst a correlation of events that set him on a fresh trajectory, including a new relationship (with his now-wife), the winding down of Outfit, and time spent living in New York City. Hunt says that he hears “a lot of beauty and excitement, but also the sadness and struggle” of NYC in Advanced Myth. Having left Liverpool to rent an apartment there in the fall of 2014, he immersed himself in the library of critical theory and art history books that its owners had amassed, alongside reading materials like the diary of Hercule Barbin and satirical short stories like The Nose by Nikolai Gogol. This almost academic absorption of ideas contrasted with the time Hunt spent volunteering at a homeless shelter, where hardship was on full display and privilege checked at the door.

            It’s perhaps no surprise then, that although a largely meditative listen, Advanced Myth oscillates between moments of shimmering lucidity and corrosive washes of noise. Take the improvisational zither session he recorded one morning, sections of which appear on the almost folk-like “Hung Rose” and “Unanswered Prayers.” On the former, this chiming instrument twists unbridled until submerged by a discordant hiss, the sound of traffic, and the elevated ambience of a sporting event. On the latter, though, its delicacy and poise is bolstered further with the addition of strings and clarinet. Advanced Myth is a coil of both reflective and reactive composition.

            In the absence of conventional structure, it’s these shifts in spirit that provide Advanced Myth’s emotive signposting, inspired in part by the likes of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe and Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, European kosmische, but also purely textural sonic ideas from ‘70s and ‘80s GRM through to contemporary ASMR. In truth, though, Advanced Myth is to be received as its own, and as a whole. Tracks, as they are, don’t start or stop, instead bleeding into each other, in support or rebuttal, gently persuading the mood into the shadows. It’s a record from which you can sonically draw lines to everything Dialect has gone on to, yet it also stands alone as a document that’s relative tranquility doesn’t mask the sense of excitement from an artist standing at the precipice of new creative boundaries.

            Originally released digitally by tasty morsels in 2015, Advanced Myth has been newly mastered by Stephan Mathieu from definitive mixes, and is available for the first time on vinyl and cassette from RVNG Intl. and Warm Winters, Ltd. on September 30, 2022. On behalf of Dialect, RVNG, and Warm Winters, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit The Whitechapel Centre, an independent local charity working to see an end to homelessness, social exclusion and housing poverty in Liverpool’s communities.

            TRACK LISTING

            A1. Developers
            A2. Hung Rose
            A3. Teams
            A4. The Youniverse
            A5. Shatters
            B1. Chroma
            B2. Strange Grave
            B3. Unanswered Prayers
            B4. Watermarks
            B5. Jabba
            B6. First Breath
            B7. Waterfall End Sequence

            Isik Kural

            In February

              Isik Kural works like a photographer of sound, documenting the passing and returning of time as if material snapshots of life’s temporality. Across the album’s twelve songs, each composed from chance loops and cocooned within the soft container of Isik’s memorable voice and melody play, time is held on to hopefully, impossibly, eternally.

              Born in Istanbul, Isik studied music engineering at the University of Miami, alighted in New York City, and eventually settled in Glasgow, immersing in a sound design masters and audiovisual practice. While these paths guided him between different projects and cities, a voice was simultaneously growing inside the artist, informed by a vision of the world in its everyday luminosity. This voice was expressed in the lyrical and instrumental waves of 2019's As Flurries, a cassette collection for Italian label Almost Halloween Records.

              It was during a brief trip home to Istanbul in 2019 that the invisible details of in february were first exposed. While assisting on a session at his old haunt Babajim Recording Studios, Isik happened upon a beautiful piano, the kind “in which you hear a melody with the touch of a single note.” A looped segment from a recording of improvised tinkering on the instrument formed the basis “pillow of a thought,” which christens Isik’s new album. A bed for a passing notion, image, moment.

              Adopting this novel way of working, Isik produced another twelve passages made from loops of unexpected recordings, nothing over three minutes. Eschewing both compositional plans and live performance proclivities, which had informed previous creative explorations, Isik sought a more instantaneous effect. Minute nylon string refrains, lilting synthesizer hums, and a scrap of a chamber recital are collaged with sympathetic verse and synesthetic details captured around Glasgow and activated at Green Door Studios.

              Literary images also accompany the sensory of in february, weaving wanderlust symbolism through these spiraling studio and field documents. At the center of the album, “lo si aspetta” and “che si aspetta,” are titled after a telling line from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Long Road of Sand. Other word works are yoked to this promise. A verse by Turkish poet Gulten Akin, which connects the weather to lost friendship, meets a translation of Sophokles by Anne Carson in “yeniden,” one of three collaborations with vocalist Stephanie Roxanne Ward, pka spefy, on in February.

              Isik treads lightly between the streams of poetry, sound and photography across in february, together impressing an imagistic lightness and immediacy. Although quick as the blink of a camera’s eye or the brush of two hands in passing, the brevity of these works should not be taken for granted: they whisper into each other with elaborate detail, intuitively papered over old and new stories of love and longing.



              TRACK LISTING

              01. Pillow Of A Thought
              02. Simdi Iki
              03. Paperhat
              04. Pineapples And Lime
              05. Hopefullyhopefully
              06. Coral Gables (feat. Spefy)
              07. Lo Si Aspetta
              08. Che Si Aspetta
              09. Sevdiklerine
              10. Yeniden (feat. Spefy)
              11. Berceuse (feat. Spefy)
              12. Slippin
              13. Film Festival

              Mikael Seifu’s 'Zelalem' is an ode to - and a fearless break from - the storied lineage of Ethiopian music. The literal Amharic translation of Zelalem is “eternity,” and through Seifu’s conceptual frame it becomes a “vector of light.” Seifu shines this light on the music of his home country while guiding us through an uncharted “Ethiopiyawi Electronic” - a coinage Seifu uses to describe the music he and his peers are producing in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis-Ababa.

              Illuminating the rich sounds of Addis-Ababa’s azmaris, Seifu’s music becomes a “dream brew” in which these traditional musicians collaborate and contribute vocals and lead voicings from folk instruments such as the Masenko and the Krar. Seifu was educated at the Lycée Guebre-Mariam in Addis-Ababa. The French academy’s international group of students was Seifu’s first exposure to a world outside Ethiopia; his second was at Ramapo College in suburban New Jersey.

              Here Seifu met a mentor in Ben Neill, the composer and music technologist who trained with La Monte Young. Seifu was inspired by Neil to take serious his calling in music. A calling of a different, spiritual nature brought Mikael back to Ethiopia. As a repatriated young man in Addis-Ababa, Seifu felt a renewed sense of allegiance to his home country and allowed its ubiquitous music to guide his creations. Seifu’s early work was shared across a string of EPs for stalwart Washington DC imprint 1432 R, demonstrating an interplay of regional folk music and international electronic music. Mikael’s music does not westernize or electronicize extant Ethiopian music. Instead, Seifu uses Ethio-jazz’s spirit of brewing estranged styles for his own musical tincturing. Seifu’s passion above all else is to create something befitting of its time, yet “eternally Ethiopian.” The latter phrase was the mantra guiding Seifu through the creation of Zelalem, and a source of inspiration for the cover artwork. Zelalem spotlights the music of Ethiopia’s past as well its future. Mikael Seifu illustrates the potential for reinterpreting sacred and proud sources through energized palettes. His latest effort heralds the future of this new music and signals the genesis of Ethiopian Electronic, where the known and unknown commune.


              TRACK LISTING

              1.The Protectors
              2.The Solipsist
              3. Soul Manifest (Mikael Seifu Feat. LA)
              4. How To Save A Life (Vector Of Eternity)
              5. ዘላለም (Vector Of Light)


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