Touchradio

This concert was part of Todaysart, Den Haag, Netherlands on 27.09.09. Also appearing as part of the Touch events were Hildur Gudnadottir, Philip Jeck, Jana Winderen and The Eternal Chord. It was recorded straight from the mixing desk to an Ares Pll Nagra digital recorder. Born in Tromso (Norway), Geir Jenssen is better known as Biosphere, a key figure in contemporary Norwegian music. In 1992, Jenssen shot to fame with his Biosphere-debut album "Microgravity", becoming one of the pioneering ambient artists from the 90's. He was one of the first to come up with the mix of soundscapes, voice samples and atmospheric noise with trancey melodies and solid beats. Biosphere gave an intimate performance in the Lutherse Kerk, a very small church.

Eighty miles off the coast of mainland Scotland, the archipelago of St Kilda is host to almost a million seabirds each summer. Beginning underwater, this journey takes in the remote island group with its gurgling seawash, gannets and storm petrel before sailing east to the Shiants, home to puffins, guillemots, fulmars and razorbills. Finally, a mix of the exotic and commonplace Carrion crow, wren, herring gulls. heron, ringed plover, cuckoo, oystercatcher, song thrush, common sandpiper heard at dawn on the island of Rhona. Sound and photography: Pascal Wyse and Tom Haines. Recorded in June 2009 with Dolphin Ear hydrophones, Sennheiser and DPA microphones and Sound Devices recorders.

1 / f noise While teaching sound art in Cincinnati Ohio's art school DAAP, Montgomery organized sonic tours of the Ceramics Department. The audience was blindfolded and led one by one down 8 flights of stairs into a series of listening stations where ventilators, burning kilns and other machinery were in use (2008). Smoothing Out The Press was composed using the Sound of Sanding from the Crest Hardware Show plus recordings made at Ben Owen's Middle Press in Brooklyn while printing the Ministry of Laminations Almost Blank Notebook letterpress edition (2007).

Biking in Holland | Tears (Sohrab version) | Tanhayi | Satyr | Tears (Esteban Olenikov version Tundra) | There is an ashtray between us | Tears (Yozhik version) | New Zealand | Barf Recorded and played live in October 2009. Sohrab used reason3 his midi controller (R)evolution uc-16 and a sampler, recorded live through ambrosia recording software.

Xinjiang ("new frontier" in Chinese) or Eastern Turkestan is without doubt the first extremely sensitive zone in China, at least in terms of ethnic conflict between the Hans newcomers and muslim minorities who have a longer history of occupation of those areas. Spread from Mongolia to Afghanistan, it is the biggest Chinese province. I was in the north western part of Xinjiang in the prefecture of ILI, called Yining outside of China and Ghulja by the Turkophones, in May and June 2009...

Rehearsal tapes from The Suffolk Symphony. On August 22nd 2009 Touch will present a multimedia perfomance of The Suffolk Symphony - the culmination of the week's work undertaken during the residency. Faster than Sound comes to the Snape Proms for more experiments in sound and image. Faster Than Sound bring more imaginative experiments with sound and image to the Snape Proms with The Suffolk Symphony, a specially commissioned residency and new work by leading sonic and visual production company Touch. Inspired by the historic coastline of Aldeburgh and its surrounding area including Aldeburgh Music's Snape Proms and its history, Touch will create a new audio-visual symphony from scratch, using only locally sourced sounds and images. Beginning on 16 August, Philip Jeck, BJNilsen, Jon Wozencroft, Philip Marshall and Mike Harding will go on a week-long treasure hunt to unearth old records, field recordings, home-made sounds and images to create a new multimedia Suffolk Symphony, culminating in its first perf

Mike Harding was commissioned by The Southbank Centre to record bees for The Bee Symphony, to be performed on Sunday 6th September 2009 at The Queen Elizabeth Hall, London as part of Pestival. The Bee Symphony, with music composition by Marcus Davidson (Spire) and bee recordings by Mike Harding diffused by Chris Watson, will be performed at Cross Pollination An Evening of Experimental Insect Music, curated by Chris Watson. The recordings took place at Cherry Garden Farm, Stelling Minnis in Kent, England. The hives are owned by Olivia Grove on her seven acre small-holding. Also present were Marcus Davidson, who took the photos, and bee expert Mary Hill from Old Wives Lees. You can hear the voices of all four on the episode... Equipment used includes 2 x dpa 4060 mics, recording onto a Nagra Ares P-ll at 48k 24bit, and of course, a coathanger and bee suit... with thanks to Jane Beese at The Southbank Centre.

Recorded 02.04.09 R'Occult 'n' Roll Music and Magic on the Wild Side Readings by Sandy Robertson and Edwin Pouncey at Treadwell's Books, London. The connections between rock music and the occult range from the legends of bluesmen selling their souls to the Devil for success, through to the influence of Aleister Crowley on the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Led Zeppelin in the 60s and 70s, and the Satanic music and imagery of todays Black Metal underground. This talk will cover all these subjects, together with lesser-known examples of rockultism. You may even get to hear some mad, bad and occasionally dangerous musick too. Earplugs optional. Sandy Robertson is the author of The Aleister Crowley Scrapbook (now in print for 20 years) and has written for Mojo, NME and other publications. As well as being a music writer and illustrator for The Wire magazine, Edwin Pouncey (aka Savage Pencil/Sav X) is an artist whose work has been shown in galleries in the UK, Europe and America. Sandy Robertson and Edwin Po

guest: Carlos Santos Recorded 12.12.08 Dome of the National Pantheon, Lisbon Joo Silva: crystal bowl Paulo Raposo: space multi-channel diffusion and real-time processing Carlos Santos: glass and bell "Book of Hours" was recorded in the remarkable baroque central dome of the National Pantheon in Lisbon. The musicians (and the audience) were 40 meters above ground level on a narrow circular balcony looking out over the abyss. The main sound source was a crystal bowl, played by Joo Silva, which was struck and resonated with a stick. Paulo Raposo processed these sounds and diffused them throughout the space via 6 channels, 4 of which were small self-powered speakers, arranged symetrically around the circumference of the dome. Carlos Santos also moved throughout the space and the audience with a small glass and a Tibetan bell. The sonic interactions in "Book of Hours" aimed to reveal the inherently active qualities of the space, itself a performer in this acoustic dialog.

An edited version of the track "Ghost", commissioned as part of "The Space Between Seeing and Knowing is Haunted," an exhibition curated by DL Alvarez at Exile and Arratia, Beer, Berlin [07.02.2009 04.04.2009]. Arranged and produced by Philip Marshall. Voices sourced from "The Ghost Orchid an Introduction to EVP" [PARC, 1999]. Rain recordings courtesy of Dale Cornish.

How to catch a truffle Ancient Greeks, as much in the dark as anyone else when it came to where the white truffle is to be found, shrugged and announced that the tuber magnatum occurred wherever lightning struck the ground. Cobblers, of course, but thats the excuse for beginning this piece with a burgeoning thunder storm in September 2008, on the Barbialla Nuova estate near San Miniato, Tuscany. This is an area famed for its white truffles. Then a truffle hunt, with Imperio, Bobbi and Sabali. Bobbi is a dog, a breed called Lagotto. Imperio is the hunter. Sabali translates Imperio now and again, but most of the time he is chatting to the dog, saying Find!, Is it or isnt it? He gets very angry with the cat (Go home!) who, feeling sociable, joined us on this three-hour walk. A truffle is found and Bobbi, having pulled up a 12-inches of earth, doesn't want to surrender it. At least with a dog you can yank him away by the scruff of the neck, and Bobbi was occasionally seen flying over Imperios shoulder. Not so

A submarine-like structure sits on a traffic island in the middle of Akerman Road, London SW9. It was built in the 1970s above the large underground boiler room that provides heat for the Myatts Field estates, which lie on either side of the road. The boilers still heat more than 300 buildings to the south of the road, but their unreliability caused the north-side estate to switch to another heating source in the early 1990s. The heating system was sited underground because to do so was considered best practice at this stage of the Cold War, when a nuclear conflict sometimes seemed a distinct possibility. At the time the estates were built, both the US and the USSR maintained large fleets of weapon-bearing submarines: ocean-going doubles of the Akerman Road structure. In spring 2008 I made some recordings of the machinery in the boiler room. These have been organised into a composition. I have filtered some of the sounds but no digital processing has been used. Photography by Dollan Cannell. Thanks to Stua

freq_out 7 took place in September 2008 as part of The Happy New Ears Festival in Kortrijk, Belgium. There was also a performance by THE FREQ_OUT ORCHESTRA on Saturday 13th September, which was recorded by Finnbogi Ptursson and mastered by BJNilsen.

Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/48 with a Rode NT4 stereo mic. The forests and meadows of Northern Arizona's high country are populated by herds of elk, packs of coyotes and a variety of frogs, owls and other wildlife. Camping out overnight can be an exhilarating acoustic experience - as I found out... Waking up in my tent just after one am my immediate thought was that I had entered some weird spirit realm and was hearing the wail of a banshee - what turned out to be a bugling elk. The initial recordings were made on 4th September 2007. The main portion of the recording, an ethereal song consisting of a series of explosive elk calls, was made more recently on 10th June 2008.

"The earliest tape used in this radio show comes from 1982 and the most recent is ten years old. AER is/was a name I gave to sound recordings used for the Touch samplers (in particular) and this is no more than an opportunity to clear the cupboards and make the best of them available in one location. None of them benefit from studio production and in the age of easily-available sound recording software, I suppose part of the point is that they are all cassette or minidisk recordings assembled on pre-digital recording equipment."

Donadea Forest Recordings, December 2007 to May 2008. 00:00-04:27 Castle Crow's Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am) 04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics) 10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding) 14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and the 'carbon chorus' [surrounding motorways]). 20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am) Tom Lawrence is a composer/sound recordist. He is on the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Dublin City University. Principle photography by Eddie Mallin from Dublin, currently living in Kildare. Using film-based cameras, he prints using traditional darkroom techniques and favours fibre-based papers. Images for this project are mainly scanned negatives. Supplementary photography captured during recording sessions by Tom Lawrenc

1. Lindsay Anderson recorded at the memorial service for Andrei Tarkovsky [1932-1986] at St. James's Church, Piccadilly, London 2. Filming The Garden [Derek Jarman, 1990] at Dungeness, Kent. 3. Mrs. Oyler in conversation with Derek Jarman 4. Brick Lane Man, 1988

As part of an ongoing series of recordings of unusual sounds of the Venice lagoon, these tracks were made on 29th april 2008 at 2100 in a night-depot of boats of the public transport service at Riva dei Schiavoni, not far from San Marco square. Headphones are recommended. Recorded 24/96, with binaural stereo mic. "Sapientum super acquis" is the title attribuited to the "Magistrato alle acque" of the Serenissima Venetian Republic, an organ istituited on 1501 by the "Council of ten", that had the job of keeping safe the delicate natural/artificial balance of the lagoon, and looking after the "health" of the water. Today the water is mostly polluted because of Porto Marghera, one of the biggest industrial areas in the whole Europe.

Recorded, assembled and produced by Novi_sad, March 2008. Mastered by Electroware and Novi_sad at Dsp Lab, Athens The whole piece is based on field recordings from: Mamori Lake, Amazonia, Brazil Alphios Bridge, Ancient Olympia, Greece Vibrations from the bridge which connects Denmark with Sweden The Heineken Brewery, Greece and hydrophone recordings* from Mamori Lake. Also use were sounds and notes from a church organ. Output signals have been manipulated and electronically treated. Dramazon is made in memory of a long rainy night in Amsterdam... In the era of 0111001100011101011o, one thing remains stable and it will remain stable and non-mutated for eternity. The way people kiss, the way bodies are connected... [*thanx to Scott Konzelmann]

Latitude: 61 2 Min. 12 Sec. Longitude: 4 36 Min. 36 Sec. Name: Utvr Light Nearest Town or City: Hardbakke, Norway Location: About 4 miles west of Ytre Sula. Managing Organization: Coast Directorate Tower Height: 101 Height of Focal Plane: 148 Characteristic and Range: White flash every 30 seconds; range 19 nautical miles. Description of Tower: Red round cast-iron tower. This light is operational Date Established: 1900 Date Present Tower Built: 1900 Current Use: Active aid to navigation. Open To Public? Yes.