Articles
2009 Top 10s and 20s
King Midas Sound
Starke

Albums
36
Aardvarck
Matias Aguayo
Anaphoria
Anduin
Arbol + Fibla
Aufgang
Beneva vs. Clark Nova
Black to Comm
Bvdub
Cornstar
Dinky
Enola
Fieldhead
FOURM / Shinkei / Turra
Billy Gomberg
The Green Kingdom
Chihei Hatakeyama
Ian Hawgood
Marek Hemmann
Khate
King Midas Sound
Marcel Knopf
Robot Koch
Lambent
Shinobu Nemoto
Olekranon
Laurent Perrier
Piano Magic
Porzellan
Pylône
Ryonkt
Shadyzane
Slow
Small Color
Solomun
The Sound of Lucrecia
Stray Ghost
The Use of Ashes
Sylvie Walder

Compilations / Mixes
Sebo K
Will Saul
Tama Sumo
VOLTT Amsterdam Vol. 1

EPs
Blindhæð
Roberto Bosco
Franco Cangelli
Dieb
dub KULT
Abe Duque/Blake Baxter
Gemmy
Christopher Hobbs
Duncan Ó Ceallaigh
Christopher Roberts
The Sight Below
Two Fourteen
Van Der Papen
Andy Vaz
Vetrix
Eddie Zarook

DVD
Optofonica

FOURM / Shinkei / Luigi Turra: Clean Forms
Dragon's Eye Recordings

FOURM, Shinkei, and Luigi Turra—minimalist sound artists all—would seem to be perfect choices for a project designed to pay tribute to the 1960s visual art movement also known as minimalism. In both aural and visual contexts, the minimalist artist reduces the material in question to its purified essence and strives to remove the particular imprint of the individual creator so as to universalize the production in question.

The CD-R's three audio works are true ‘headphones listening' pieces in that while there is a generous amount of activity in play in each, close listening is required in order for it to be fully appreciated. The sound artists present long-form recordings that pay tribute to minimalist artists who exerted a profound influence on their work and, in each case, the sound artist names the piece after the visual artist or an associated work that has been translated into sound. Though all of the sound artists involved share a commitment to the values of reduction and austerity in their micro-sound creations, their pieces also reveal differences in sonic character. Dedicated to Mark Rothko, FOURM's “Seagram Series” presents ten minutes of faint bell tones and rustles in a manner that often suggests winds blowing through hollowed-out concrete tunnels. Pregnant pauses of silence alternate with field recordings of leaf-like crackle, distant bird calls, and snatches of human conversation in “Nokori,” a fifteen-minute setting Shinkei (David Sani) composed in honour of Ken Nakazawa. Italian sound/installation artist and graphic designer Luigi Turra contributes the longest and most reduced piece of the three, the eighteen-minute “Alluminium.Zinc,” which, like the Shinkei work, segues between passages of silence and low-level industrial sonics of a rather metallic kind.

December 2009