The first release in our Counterhistory series, from the band that would go on to become the legendary Live Jimi Presley. Limited to 30 copies and packaged with liner notes written by the band, as well as a lyric sheet, button badges and a reproduction of an old gig flier.

Artist's statement:

"In my second year, the Feltham cousins held me down and cut off my long hair; they ridiculed my hippie sandals, made me wear boots. We dressed in long black jackets and trendy shades, listened to Gun Club and Nick Cave and Jesus and the Mary Chain, got into fights with “rugger buggers”. It was more of a lifestyle than a music choice.

The band formed in Grahamstown in 1986, just after PW Botha’s State of Emergency. The Eastern Cape was particularly hard-hit by apartheid repression; at Rhodes our friends were being arrested and detained; there were marches on campus, and the Cradock Four had just been murdered near Port Elizabeth. Vader Jakob is the South African version of Frère Jacques, a traditional song about a monk who has overslept and is being urged to wake and sound the bells for early morning prayers. We chose the name because we wanted people to awake from their apartheid-induced apathy and ignorance; one of our songs had the lyrics “Slaap jy Nog?” (Are you still sleeping?)

When we started, we had very few musical instruments (I was allowed to join the band as I had a bass guitar and an AMP), very little musical ability and nowhere to practice. We compensated by bashing on car springs that Chris Lebert had stolen from a scrapyard, and on whatever else we could find, practising in student digs, campus basements and hotels. 

Frontman Marc Feltham, who began with just two strings on his guitar, made up for what he lacked in proficiency by “screaming and spitting out the words, daring the audience to take umbrage and get up and leave,” as songwriter Graeme Feltham put it. Often, large sections of our audience would leave, or attempt to get us offstage. But we did win some fans, among them Carl Johnson of established band Not Even The TV, who took us to the TV’s farm outside East London to record a handful of songs in two day-long sessions. It was terrifying.

Sadly band member Bruce Nicholl did not attend the recordings, as he had by that stage lost his grip on the generally shared version of “reality”. We dedicate this single to him and his wonderful, carefree spirit." — Derek Davey
 

Sound by Justin Allart.

lipcreem.bandcamp.com

All tracks written, produced, recorded and performed by Healer Oran.

Credits
Andrei van Wyk: Vocals, field recordings, guitar, keyboards, programming, noise, bass.

facebook.com/healeroranza/
healeroran.bandcamp.com/

A glimpse into the world of improv/free jazz/experimental collective As Is on side A, followed by a dramatic spoken word piece set to a dark soundscape of voice, cello, drums, guitar and more on side B.

As Is
Andrea Dico
Lliezel Ellick
Garth Erasmus
Niklas Zimmer
Manfred Zylla

Side B Credits
Rosemary Lombard
Roxanne de Frietas
Bethany Reiveich
Gregory Penfold
Jon James Case
Andrea Dico
Niklas Zimmer
Mandisi Nkomo

Algorithmically composed by Aragorn23 in memory of Mika Vainio.

www.further.co.za/asqus

The gestural piano in this track overlays a radio play by Antonin Artaud, To Be Done with the Judgment of God. This radio play was produced towards the end of 1947 and is characterised by its powerful and raw expressiveness which eludes strict linguistic and theatrical structures.

Chantelle uses gestural composition for her pieces by mapping the movements of her body using 3D motion sensors and translating them into sonic data.

Field recordings through clay sculpted sound chambers.

Artist's statement:

About three years ago, knocking upon a piece of stoneware I had fired, I became interested in the sound of clay. I'd already worked in high-end loudspeaker design for a number of years and had been using various tone woods in my designs, echoing an ethic of a loudspeaker as a very specific type of musical instrument, rather than the somewhat untenable canon of it being a more or less perfectible transducer that recreates a coded musical event. I set about building a number of basic musical objects from black stoneware, with the object of contact miking them and using them in a musical context. When it turned out that Belinda Blignaut wanted to explore audio with her ceramic art works, about three years later, we started discussing the possibility of me creating an audio counterpart to her “Working from the Inside” series of ceramic art pieces.

Not long after that I was told by Belinda that Edge of Wrong had asked whether we'd be interested in creating a sound performance around her constructing a ceramic work from the inside, which would make use of the sounds of constructing an object from clay. Since I'd been working with the ways that loudspeakers modify sounds for almost two decades and had, more recently, discovered the amazing sounds that could be obtained from resonating fired and unfired clay, I knew that this was an opportunity not to pass by.

The loudspeaker, in my chosen context of “generalised music”, which tentatively leans on the mathematical concept of “distributions” or “generalised functions”, is the actual object giving rise to the kinds of air vibrations that we refer to as 'music'. Unamplified musical events, today, are rare to the point of extinction, especially as far as performances are concerned; 'home music' is practically non-existent without the loudspeaker. With size requirements and the glut for having large collections of recorded music, the loudspeaker has become increasingly 'present' in reproduction technology, in the sense of it being 'less than perfect'. The logic follows that if the speaker is the musical instrument, the musical ground (or set of musical objects, if you will) that corresponds with the traditional notion of notes (tone, duration, timbre) would be the recorded audio object; and the musician, in turn, would be whoever operates the instrument that uses these objects, which is usually the listener.

A large, ceramic, tube-like object is almost exactly a loudspeaker enclosure, and its geometrical proportions, coupled with the fact that it is occupied by its constructor, who not only generates some of the sounds of its construction, but also acts as an interesting and variable modifier of the internal dimensions and damping of the loudspeaker-instrument, potentially details a very interesting sound exploration, not only investigating the notion of speaker as instrument, but also the notion of recorded event as basic audio element.

By simultaneously recording the sounds of construction, both through the medium of construction (wet clay), and through the tuned internal environment (the inside of the speaker-instrument), as well as pre-recorded and re-composed, minimally effected, sounds of finding, collecting, and processing clay to ceramic, and feeding back various parts of this sound world into the amplifying circuitry, both outside events to the inside and inside events to the outside, a very rich and interesting, self-referencing and origin-investigating layering of sound is generated.
 

Side A: Part of an installation consisting of 12 tracks, each played froma speaker placed in a box stacked as the title describes. The sound orginates fromold tape recordings found in the former opera house in Oslo.

Side B: Field recordings froman installation in the Oslo Utmark forest (2016). A home-made busker organ played a composition based on a common Norwegian knitting pattern and was recoded into braille.

Field recordings from India by multifaceted musician and installation artist Daniel W J Mackenzie.

Dolly Dollycore may be Dolly Turing and a multi-everything process, transformation instigator, sound explorer, poet, collection of entities, magician and improvisor, currently based in Brighton, UK.

soundcloud.com/dolly-dollycore
outsideinroads.wordpress.com/
3eye.space

Sample credits
Surrender: Suicide (Martin Rev)
Do It All: Bloom/Hove Space Programme

Electronics, text, and vocals by Norwegian experimental/noise artist Thomas Holme.

DATSROK: Kenneth Korstad Langås

MONOMORT: Morten Minothi Kristiansen

Recorded live at Deichmanske Bibliotek in Oslo, 03 April 2017

Mixed and mastered by Morten Minothi Kristiansen

PLAY LOUD!
 

Two pieces of experimental poetry by artist Hanan Benammar.

Note: Each 12" contains a unique, algorithmically generated version of the Factory Farm Studies EP and is housed in a unique print.

It is hard to comprehend the full scale of the horror of factory farms, where every second innumerable creatures of land and sea are cruelly slaughtered after living lives of unspeakable misery. When I view footage of factory farms, what affects me more than the images are the sounds: the cries of loneliness, fear, pain and madness. In these algorithmic piano pieces I want to respond to these sounds, to call back even if my voice cannot be heard. 

Using publicly available research data I have mapped the sonic environments of cows, sheep, pigs and chickens and transformed them from soundscapes of suffering and death into something else. Analysing the acoustic dynamics of the distress calls of each animal, I have located the musical keys within which they speak. I have also captured the aural density of their environments - the decibel levels and amounts of variation - and used this to control various dynamics within each piece. Finally, I have calculated how many cows, sheep, pigs and chickens are killed every second worldwide and used this to control the tempo of the compositions. Every note you hear for the pieces Sheep and Cow indicates five deaths; for Pig it is ten deaths; for Chicken it is a hundred. 

These pieces are for my friends of fur, feather and scale. Until all of us are free, none of us are.

Note: each copy of this 12" contains a unique variation of the composition, algorithmically generated in a random key.

The golden ratio (1.618033988, represented by the Greek letter φ) is used to determine the relative timing of the notes in this algorithmic piece.

You can listen to one variation of this track on bandcamp.

Each copy of this record contains a unique, algorithmically generated composition.

As an artist, I enjoy composing music that is singular, unrepeatable and unpredictable. Because of this, I employ algorithmic processes for much of my work, writing software that transforms data and movement into sonic parameters. 

For sound of the eye I wanted to push this one step further by allowing listeners to algorithmically compose their own music using images of their eyes. As each human eye is unique, differing in colour, patterning, brightness and so on, each composition is also different, varying in key, tempo, time signature, volume and various other aspects. Once a composition has been generated, it is lathe cut onto a one-off 7" vinyl single. 

In the age of digital media and mass surveillance, where retina scans and mp3s are the order of the day, I offer this small work as a provocation, using personal data for creativity instead of control and eschewing the digital in favour of the analogue. 

You can read more about this release and hear excerpts at www.soundoftheeye.co.za.