If there is one thing I am certain of, then it is that Fosel’s release The Difference Engine, is perhaps the gloomiest album of 2009 on Petcord, albeit a special quality of gloom:
Darkness combined with a cold and chilly atmosphere which provides inspiration for my phantasy and usually generates images somewhere between the faint green curtains of an aurora rising on the sky and the deep blue glow of Cherenkov radiation inside a nuclear reactor. This may had a significant impact on the cover art Marco and I were preparing for the release. Like our previous work, the cover comes along with a rather early nineties retro style, though the text alignment was partly inspired by covers that even go back several decades before that (hint: the late sixties ;-)).

Speaking of the music for a change, I feel the first impression of The Difference Engine may deceive. Granted, the lack of familiar parameters serving as orientation points is perhaps irritating at first glance. However the perception of micro-details comes with repeated listening and co-incides with a certain degree of addiction to recreating the imaginary scenery. Imagine this process as one’s eyes adjusting to the darkness after having been exposed to a bright light source and close your eyes. Each of the four songs provide a different quality of darkness, and they do not wear thin even after having been added to a playlist for weeks.

In the past, I wrote about how Marco and I opted to use the moniker “Synflict” for creating cover artwork. As of today, we officially added another dimension to our work and released our first common album Prismatine on Petcord – of course as Synflict. How could this happen? It started with some audio leftovers Marco had and experimented with. He sent me the files, I added some stuff to it and eventually it developed to something that seems superior to what we did in our solo projects. Does this sound familiar? It seems, the same synergetic effects were responsible for this as they were for the cover artwork, adding a real life dimension to the phrase “never change a winning team”.

The cover makes use of an unusual amount of red. The colour even dominates the entire canvas, which has more similarity to a pattern than a composition. If red translates to dissonance and the pattern with the degree of abstraction, it may even seem a plausible explanation. Since I’m only reflecting by the time the work has already been completed, not whilst creating it, I cannot really claim there was a master plan. Rarely is there such a thing as strategic calculation, it just happens and if the draft matches the music, it will be used. It might have looked differently on another day, with another mood or under different circumstances. Adjust your interpretation as you see fit for it.

A new release by a new artist on Petcord whilst retaining a general electroacoustic direction: 39 68 99 09 by Stig Inge Oy is a both intriguing and intense work, because it exposes the listener to emotions for which there don’t seem to be much room in today’s golden age of political correctness and triviality. This is even more interesting because the work isn’t overly dissonant by itself, but yet its way of “saying it” is hard to ignore. The creator of this work is Maciej Miskiewicz from Kraków in Poland and equipped with a love for acoustic intruments, which often form the base of his electroacoustic compositions.

The cover art was another cooperation with Marco Cervellin: As so often, Marco came up with a draft he didn’t mean to use ;-) and I was more convinced of than the actual main drafts he prepared. After having worked this version out the remaining things came up pretty fast. Maciej’s photo suggestions for the cover were gladly accepted by us because they fit the mood we had in mind.

Yesterday, the Petcord netlabel released Resonant, the second album of Austrian artist Fabio Keiner. Lasting almost 78 minutes (which makes it the longest Petcord release ever), it presents a collection of electroacoustic works with a rather dark timbre and cinematic qualities. I’m not going too much into an analysis or review here, because most of it has already been written down in the official liner notes (leaving little to add). The cover art is another Synflict branded co-operation between Marco and me, a creation that did not came into being easily. The idea of using a Möbius band like form dates back well into June, but we couldn’t turn it into a meaningful artwork at first. When we picked up the idea again, we still weren’t satisfied with our drafts, because they somehow put too much bloat around the form. We then gradually reduced the drafts and eventually wound up with a minimal, but effective formula. I particularly like the composition’s clarity and how the word “resonant” neatly interacts with the fading shapes, somehow illustrating the title’s meaning.

Yesterday, the Petcord netlabel released Solid State, a collection of pieces by US-based composer Greg Surges, ranging from electroacoustic to contemporary chamber music for both laptop and traditional ensembles. Having received a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours in composition and music technology, his extensive formal education enables him to pursue a great variety of strategies. As a constant factor, an open form with variable elements prevails, leading to markedly different interpretations of the same work, as demonstrated by the two versions of “153 x 56″. Due to time constraints, the cover art was a solo work of mine (the first one since November last year – all others were co-operations with Marco Cervellin). It incorporated scores and screenshots of Greg’s works and reflects pretty well the music characteristics in my opinion.

Today, the Petcord netlabel released a work by Tim Salden, better known as Osoroshisa with the title Nanimo nai Wakusei. The music could be described as somehow related to drones, but incorporating quite a few influences, so that drone alone would be an inadequate description. Much of the music reflects subjects like loneliness and isolation and the empty planets it is referring to, may as well be synonymous for people in their own world.

The cover art was once again done by Synflict (aka. Marco and me) and required a lot of fine tuning with major changes even occuring in the final drafts. Though some ideas were present from the beginning, progress was rather slow and at some point, the front draft was even close to being abandoned altogether. This seems strange, because the artwork does not look like being the product of fierce struggling.

More releases are coming during the next weeks and I hope to be able to devote more time to updating my site, too.

Today, the latest work of Chilean composer René Muñoz Córdova, La arquitectura sónica de Amacelin & Luyelval (the sonic architecture of Amacelin & Luyelval), was released on Petcord. As part of the cover artwork, a poem by René was included:

Amacelin & Luyelval

Ellos se mueven al igual que los electrones
grabando los eternos caracteres
sobre los interminables muros invisibles.

Luego ellos me hablaron al oído
y me contaron acerca de todo lo que existe al otro lado de los muros
revelándome la existencia de los 9 portales de fuego
que nos conducen a los 4 mundos eternos.

Not everyone is fluent in Spanish (neither am I, mind you), so I thought it might be useful to add an inofficial English translation :

Amacelin & Luyelval

They are moving like electrons
writing down eternal characters
on endless invisible walls.

Then they whispered into my ear
and told me about everything there is on the other side of the walls
revealed the existence of nine gates of fire
which lead us to four eternal worlds.

I’m not sure whether this is an accurate translation, but if not, someone will eventually let me know ;-)

Just two weeks after the last release, another one went live on Petcord, this time featuring an artist that has been played on Leftob for a while and is an excellent match for the typical Petcord sound:

Chilean composer René Muñoz Córdova combines in electroacoustic abstraction with isolated elements from more conventional music genres: Field recordings, vocoder and speech synthesis voices, patches of strings, computer generated sounds, feedback or deconstructed samples of real instruments. In Obras Musicales an aural universe is created where dissonance and harmony can peacefully coexist.

source: petcord site

Apart from the music, Obras Musicales is also interesting, because it features Marco and me in our first appearance as Synflict, a project focusing on netlabel related design and artwork needs. Consequently, the artwork is more lavish than usual, featuring a folded front sheet that also contains lyrics and an inlet for the back of a CD case (requires disassembling of the latter, but is rewarded with a self made CD that can be found quickly on a shelf).

The liner notes already provide a summary of the music, so there is no need to add redundency in this post ;-)

Today, after having seen some rotation on Leftob, a new release on Petcord has finally seen the light of day: Slow Movements by the Austrian artist Fabio Keiner, a work that turns out to be difficult to classify:

It shares some characteristics with Drone, but clearly differs by its lack of inertia and repetition. An alternative approach may be to classify it as Dark Ambient, which again is conflicting with the abstract harmonies which rather bring up associations of crystalline space rather than misty vaults and feelings of distress. The treatment of space and dynamics in Slow Movements also hints at electroacoustic, as is the generative character of the music.

(Source: Release liner notes)

The work gains with repeated listening and interestingly even difficult to understand passages eventually resolve into more than listenable music. I suspect perhaps it is a bit like the eyes’ adjustment to darkness. In the beginning you do not see a lot but after a few minutes, a lot of contures and details start to turn up from the seemingly uniform mass.

There is an ambiguity concerning Slow Movements in that it both refers to interconnected units that define a whole (sometimes returning to previous patterns) and the infinity of variations that neither know a beginning nor an ending. And thus tracks are not remembered and recognised by phrases but instead by their character as a whole.

(Source: Release liner notes)

This is much like listening to a blackbird’s song: You cannot exactly determine a beginning or end, just a constant movement. However, you can immediately identify its characteristics, despite the fact that there is constant variation in its phrases.

The cover art was another cooperation between Marco Cervellin (of Wacky Southern Current fame) and me. The initial idea was a sequence of butterfly movements, which quickly inspired me to build the remaining scenery around it. Some time was spent on improving details and applying requested changes, until both we and Fabio Keiner were satisfied with the result.

My work for a new release is yielding surprisingly good results so far. Normally, much of my drafts are perfectly in line with Sturgeon’s Law, but this time I seem to work more efficiently. I noticed the tendency of going back to smaller sample units and a more synthetic approach, because I feel a need of more control of events within my music, especially finetuning spectromorphological details. Perhaps it is owned to my desire of more clarity and contrast. Also, there is still the thought about Giorgos’ approach of adding room illusion as another musical parameter. I think the degree of abstraction is increasing and the music will move away from its previous idioms as I look for new ways of organising events and creating structures. I don’t know when I shall be finished, as it depends on the number of promising drafts and to what degree I shall be able to get lost in my work, but I think it will be a larger one in terms of duration, but without any ambitions of creating several movements. And rest assured, I’m quite confident that this work won’t ever make it on the Stillstream playlist, just like any of my previous works ;-).