Various Artists - The Wire Tapper 22

Tracks
01. Stearica feat Dalek - Occhio (edit) (4:34)
02. Arturas Bumsteinas String Quartet - Karlstad (fragmnent) (4:10)
03. Shits and Giggles - Ripcord (4:00)
04. Zenio - The Crab (3:22)
05. Marcus Maeder - quadrate (2:24)
06. Yoshio Machida - Setagaya Art Museum, Sep 28 2008 (excerpt) (4:00)
07. Tomoyoshi Date & Corey Fuller (with Tadahito Ichinoseki) - Seiya (Wire Tapper edit) (4:01)
08. Elodie Lauten - Cat Counterpoint (2:42)
09. Ciang Sayne - A Death and a Vision (2:45)
10. Climax Golden Twins - Chinese (2:46)
11. Netherworld - Aurora Borealis (Blu Ice Mix) (4:05)
12. 10-20 - athens (2:58)
13. Franck Vigroux - New York (4:02)
14. Arrington de Dionyso - Rasa Sentuh (Sense of Touch) (2:42)
15. Pink Mountain - Ditch Witch (3:13)
16. Jorgen Plaetner - Beta (1962-63) (3:58)
17. Angkorwat - Big/Little Edie (2:17)
18. Abreakor - Flagg (3:51)
19. Okie Dokie - The Monad (1:14)
20. Keyboard Choir - Tokyo at Midnight (2:45)

Total time: 1h 5m 49s


01 STEARICA featuring Dälek
“Occhio (edit)”
From OLTRE (Homeopathic)
New Jersey avant hiphop group Dälek smear their vocals over this track by Italian trio STEARICA. The group usually comprises Francesco Carlucci (electric/acoustic guitars, bass, Farfisa, treated piano, vibraphone, loops), Davide Compagnoni (drums, piano, marimba, loops) and Luca Paiardi (bass, electric piano, synth). Here they’re augmented by the insistent string duo of Nick Storring (cello) and Paola Villa (viola). This edit of “Occhio” was created by the group’s friend Emilio ‘ion’ Albertoni.

02 Arturas Bumšteinas String Quartet
“Karlstad (fragment)”
From DASH! Bangalore (EWM)
As well as his own solo work, Lithuanian electronic musician and visual artist Arturas Bumšteinas runs Twentytwentyone, a contemporary music quartet dedicated to interpreting graphic scores. “Karlstad” is a bonus track commissioned by the Dutch jazz outfit DASH! to insert in their album Bangalore. Musicians heard on this piece are Lina Lapelyté and Tadas Zukauskas (violins) and Anton Lukoszevieze (cello).

03 Shits And Giggles
“Ripcord”
Previously unreleased
In a sidestep from his lo-fi Haunted Graffiti releases for Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label, Ariel Pink has teamed up with underground fringe unit Vas Deferens Organization, plus free jazz trumpeter Dennis Gonzalez and his son Aaron, who plays bass, to form Shits And Giggles. “Ripcord” showcases the group’s work in progress, in what they describe as a “wanton miscegenation of psych/Prog, post-punk, plunderphonics and laptop fuckery”.

04 Zenlo
“The Crab”
From Skelethal Antics (Porter Records)
One-man experimental unit Zenlo calls himself music’s “best kept secret”. A veteran of psychedelic groups in the 1960s and 70s, he now parades a concoction of effects-laden drum machines, tub-thumping tribal rhythms, spontaneous sax solos and harmonica drones.

05 Marcus Maeder
“quadrate”
From subsegmental (domizil)
Swiss sound artist Marcus Maeder runs the domizil label with colleague Bernd Schurer. Working mostly in the field of computer music, sound installation and theatre, Maeder’s music probes deep frequencies and the threshold of hearing.

06 Yoshio Machida
“Setagaya Art Museum, Sep 28 2008 (excerpt)”
From Steelpan Improvisations: 2001–2008
(self released)
Tokyo based Yoshio Machida extends his practice across sonic and visual art, including pan-international instrumentation and generative music, and, on Kindermusik, recording improvisations by infants. This track displays the enhanced steelpan drum playing he’s been doing in the past decade.

07 Tomoyoshi Date & Corey Fuller
(with Tadahito Ichinoseki)
“Seiya (The Wire Tapper edit)”
Previously unreleased
Tomoyoshi Date and Corey Fuller met in Tokyo through mutual collaborator Chihei Hatakeyama. The original version of "Seiya" was recorded in a church in Bellingham, in the state of Washington, for their album Intimations Of Immortality. Over grand piano, pipe organ, percussion and electronics, Japanese poet Tadahito Ichinoseki reads lines from his work.

08 Elodie Lauten
“Cat Counterpoint”
From Piano Works 1983–1991 (Unseen Worlds)
After playing in punk and new wave groups in the late 1970s, Elodie Lauten became a full-blown composer of works for piano, electronics, chamber and orchestral ensembles. She set up her Cat Collectors label to release her early work including the post-minimalist piece The Death Of Don Juan, and has since contributed to New Tone, Lovely Music, Point and others. She recently revived her piano music during a performance series at the Issue Project Room in New York.

09 Clang Sayne
“A Death And A Vision”
From Winterlands (self released)
Formed around 2007 by London-based singer/acoustic guitarist Laura Hyland, Clang Sayne create charged textural atmospheres around their crepuscular songs. The current line-up includes James O Sullivan on electric guitar, Pete Marsh on double bass and Matt Fisher on percussion. Expect a UK tour later this year.

10 Climax Golden Twins
“Chinese”
From a forthcoming Etude Records release
Seattle underground unit Climax Golden Twins and their associates have made music for a wide range of contexts, including dance, theatre, radio, art galleries and film soundtracks. As well as curating Victrola Favorites for the archival Dust-To-Digital label, they were most recently heard on the 10" collaboration with A Frames, AFCGT (Dirty Knobby Industries). “The noise informs the dreams which informs the ambiance which informs the chaos and so back to the beginning and vice-versa,” reads a group statement.

11 NETHERWORLD
“Aurora Borealis (Blu Ice mix)”
From Over The Summit (Glacial Movements)
Italian Alessandro Tedeschi fabricates his NETHERWORLD music from raw field recordings of glaciers and fragments of classical music, in an attempt to conjure a sonic imitation of polar landscapes and cosmic phenomena. His label Glacial Movements is likewise given over to releasing music that aims to evoke Arctic and Antarctic climates, with releases lined up from Thomas Köner, Francisco López and Marsen Jules.

12 10–20
“athens”
From Isthmus 7" (Highpoint Lowlife)
Hailing from Devon in South West England, the producer behind 10–20’s shatter-beats has so far declined to reveal his real name. But his dexterity with handling huge chunks of machine-tooled sound and coarsely chopped samples were very much in evidence on his first album for Highpoint Lowlife, 10–20, and on this satellite 7" release.

13 Franck Vigroux
“New York”
From Récolte (D’Autres Cordes Records)
Franck Vigroux – composer, guitarist, turntablist, video artist and producer – commutes between New York and Paris, working in a vast number of groups and contexts with contemporary musicians and improvisors such as Elliott Sharp, Marc Ducret, Joey Baron, Matthew Bourne and others. His first composition for an orchestra – Ars Nova Ensemble – will be premiered in Paris next spring.

14 Arrington de Dionyso
“Rasa Sentuh (Sense Of Touch)”
From Malaikat Dan Singha (K Records)
Based in Olympia, Washington, the shamanic bass clarinettist/guitarist has worked with Old Time Relijun, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and The Naked Future. On his latest project, Malaikat Dan Singha, he sings entirely in Indonesian, based on his own translations of William Blake and the Zohar, and employs vocal techniques pitched somewhere between Tuvan throat-singing and Captain Beefheart.

15 Pink Mountain
“Ditch Witch”
From Pink Mountain (Sick Room Records)
Pink Mountain is a collection of US rock and improvising musicians drawn together by a mutual love of heavy rock, Noise, free music, Rock In Opposition, No Wave and stoner Prog. The line-up on this recording features Sam Coomes (keyboards, vocals), John Shiurba (guitar, bass), Gino Robair (drums), Scott Rosenberg (reeds) and Kyle Bruckmann (analogue synthesizers).

16 Jørgen Plaetner
“Beta (1962–63)”
From Various Pioneers: The Beginning Of Danish Music (LJUD)
Born in Copenhagen in 1930, Jørgen Plaetner studied composition under Vagn Holmboe, and attended contemporary music courses at Darmstadt in 1950, where he came into contact with the experimental practices of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Despite living in Sweden since 1977, he became one of Denmark’s foremost electronic composers until his death in 2002, and this LJUD Records release commemorates his computer music and proto-electronica.

17 angkorwat
“Big/Little Edie”
From angkorwat (Osaka Recordings)
Angkorwat is the alias of Ireland’s Niamh Corcoran, a classically trained violinist who has adopted the compositional palette offered by a laptop computer. Her forthcoming album, says Corcoran, is “the result of several obsessions including synaesthesia, [American painter] Romaine Brooks and hidden histories”.

18 Abreaktor
“flagg”
From Any Day Now And (Brigade Der Besten Qualität)
Over the past ten years, Germany’s Alex Osmialowski has dabbled with everything from Gabba to jazz, via Noise, but now, as Abreaktor, the Düsseldorf producer has embarked on a series of electronic micro-arrangements governed by the maxim ‘Scheitern als Chance’ (failure as chance). Crediting influences as diverse as Autechre, Aphex Twin, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Bill Evans, Osmialowski hopes to “get as much feedback and publicity as possible and then to modify the tracks accordingly”.

19 OKIE DOKIE
“The Monad”
From OKIE DOKIE (Aagoo)
“OKIE DOKIE is a power drill of top speed voodoo black magic. One growling guitar of battering directness and one thick burning muscle of walloping bass. No human drummer could supply the austere precision required, so they flinched off the fat and put the machine to work. Finally, a maniacal vocalist spins cryptic riddles like dark spells in menacing rhyme to grip this beast together. This is what post-hardcore set out for but couldn’t cut.”

20 Keyboard Choir
“Tokyo At Night”
From Electrical Unity EP (Brainlove Records)
Formed in 2004, Keyboard Choir is a collective of electronic musicians from Oxford and London who aim to bring the turbulent, unpredictable dynamics of live performance to electronics and found sound. Their debut album Mizen Head To Gascanane Sound came out in September 2008, followed this summer by the Electrical Unity EP, co-released with The Independent Online, last.fm and Brainlove Records.