Fennesz's "Agora" & US Tour with Britton Powell: Mar 6 - Apr 4

In assessing their shared multimedia performance at Seattle's 2012 edition of Decibel Festival, label maven and photographer Jon Wozencroft said of their collaborative project, "Liquid Music was made in 2001, in conjunction with the music Christian Fennesz was developing during that fertile period when the future was still a good idea. The first version was premiered during the Touch tour of 2001, the time of Fennesz's "Endless Summer" and the steady movement towards "Venice". The footage for Liquid Music originates from Prague, Paxos, Crete, Cephalonia, Messinia, London and one short clip from Monterey Bay. It was filmed on H-8 and mini-DV between 1995 and 2001. The main idea was to film everything through the lens, with no post production other than the compilation of many years work into a coherent whole. Fennesz's music, and its ascendent quality, made that a pleasure. The optical quality is on the cusp between analogue and digital resolution. In many respects it‚ "an exchange of values as much as working methods." This approach, to a music which eschews closely to a shared visual aesthetic and themes, not only described this particular work between Fennesz and the label, but his larger discography including the recently released "Agora" and a new forthcoming work for the Touch label.

This most recent album by the artist continues in his trademark textural warmth and embracing immersion of his washes of soft distortion and undulating, lapping waves of processed guitar, while contributing a number of new components to the mix. At times risking spilling into soundtrack-like material, these suggestive ques are instead reigned in by a recent development into a more restrained minimalism, which is also represented in the extended track durations. Fennesz came to notice as one of the first of what was coined 'laptop guitarists', alongside fellow electro-acoustic artists like Oren Ambarchi, Keith Rowe, Richard Skelton, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Rosy Parlane, Rafael Toral and Sebastien Roux. Where Christian Fennesz stood out in this shared company of music utilizing the raw material generated by the electric guitar, and heavily processed and composed on portable computers, was in the visual and thematic cohesion of his releases. The first of the major thematic works, and one that caused ripples in the minimal electronic music world of the early 2000s, was the Pacific Ocean and ceaseless sunsets of the Brian Wilson-inspired musical horizons of "Endless Summer", for the Mego label. A string of releases followed, and a shift to his new home on Touch, including "Black Sea", and the sublime "Cendre", a collaborative work with Ryuichi Sakamoto. This prolific period was covered in an extensive interview and cover story, "Fennesz: A Song for Europe", in which The Wire's Rob Young rendezvous with Vienna's laptop maestro and found an artist immersed in the beauty of disintegration. North American audiences will be similarly immersed this spring, when New York electronic artist Britton Powell joins Christian Fennesz for an extensive series of dates across the country, including a night in Seattle at The Columbia City Theater.

Touch Conference with Philip Jeck, Mark Van Hoen, Simon Scott, Daniel Menche and Bethan Parkes West Coast Tour: Apr 29 - May 10

From it's auspicious beginnings with a meeting with New Order in March 1982, and a following cassette compilation, "Feature Mist" and "Meridians" audio magazine series, Jon Wozencroft's Touch was inaugurated. Co-produced and curated with the label's other shepherds, Halfer Trio's Andrew McKenzie and Mike Harding, these first volumes with images, graphics and stories from Psychic TV, Neville Brody, Mayakovsky, Robert Wyatt and The Residents' Rozztox Manifesto were a who's who showcase for British post-punk, ambient, concrete and industrial music culture and writing. The label's first series of audio-textual compilations encompassed music from every disparate aspect of these interrelated scenes. New Order, Simple Minds, Tuxedomoon, AC Marias, Graham Lewis, John Foxx, Simon F. Turner, Current 93, Test Department, A Certain Ratio, Nocturnal Emissions and experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman all made contributions within the label's first year. Remaining ahead of the curve for more than three decades, the imprint introduced the world to much of the most groundbreaking electronic, minimalist and post-concrete music of the ensuing years. One of the last of the unbroken lines of progressive experimental music issuing from the British underground in the 1980s, interviews with Wozencroft spanning the following decades of 1992, Surface Magazine in 2000, and FACT in 2008 detail an explicit channel of thought on media, perception and experience, which continues into the new century. Celebrating their 30th Anniversary in 2012 with events around the globe, including New York's Issue Project Room and Seattle's Decibel Festival, Harding and Wozencroft spoke with The Quietus on their ongoing endeavor combining the output of an independent record label with documenting and challenging the flow from analogue to digital work through a context for critique of the wider cultural age. Their conceptual and aesthetic legacy also explored in a 2012 interview with Ghostly International label as part of their "The A to Z of Art & Design Influences".

Since the label's inception in the 1980s, Wozencroft has curated an intersection of sound, text and image coupled to the sublime incidental austerity of his photographic and design eye. Over the years his shared vision with Harding playing home to the sonic ecology of Cabaret Voltaire's Chris Watson, the challenging conceptual explorations of John Duncan, digital abstraction of space and time witnessed in Ryoji Ikeda's audio-visual environments, and the guitar expressionism of Christian Fennesz. The most recent decade has seen the roster expend to include Icelandic neo-classical composers, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Hildur Guðnadóttir, the analog brutalism of Pan(a)Sonic's Mika Vainio, Oren Ambarchi's reimagining of bass potentiality and American minimalist composer Phill Niblock. Next month Wozencroft returns to the United States with the most recent iteration of his touring Touch Conference, featuring a gallery exhibit of his own photographic work "An Ambivalence Towards Trends" at Aeterna Gallery. The exhibit initiating a four city venture beginning with Los Angeles' Volume Projects and DubLab Productions, a night at San Francisco's new premier experimental media venue, Gray Area Art & Technology and showcase at Aquarius Records. Followed by Portland's Holocene and concluding under the vaulted ceilings of Wayward Music Series' home in Seattle's Chapel Performance Space. A cross-section representation of the label's aesthetic, conceptual and sonic concerns can be heard in the pure concrete of Philip Jeck's phonography manipulations, the video synthesis collage of Seefeel's Mark Van Hoen, the dichotomy of finesse and assault heard in the noise sculpting of Portland's Daniel Menche, the ambisonic field recording mixes of Bethan Parkes, and Simon Scott's explorations of guitar and electronics outside of his groundbreaking shoegaze pop with Slowdive.

Substrata 1.1: Sound & Visual Art Festival: Jul 15 - 17

Exceptional three day mini-festival (two nights of performances, third day field recording workshop ) of precisely curated sounds by Rafael Anton Irisarri from the 'heavy' end of the ambient, neoclassical, immersive-avant spectrum, in an intimate setting of the Chapel Performance Space with a explicit audience in attendance (no loud rock bar, and hangers-on here) and a dedicated sound engineer. Exactly as a festival of these sounds, with the corresponding audience and venue should be curated, hosted and assembled. The festival also bringing together associated aesthetics and theory in a booklet published featuring essays by Irisarri, Jon Wozencroft, Lawrence English, and others. Along with complimentary photography by Wozencroft, Phil Petrocelli, and Thomas Meluch. Check that lineup: Biosphere - Oren Ambarchi - Nils Frahm - Rafael Anton Irisarri Trio - Benoit Pioulard - Marcus Fischer - Eluvium - & Crys Cole - Here's hoping this is the first of many!

From the Substrata site: "Substrata seeks to explore varying perspectives of scale though the use of sound, composition and visuals - an international showcase featuring accomplished artists working in the cutting edge where structural abstraction meets physical dynamics. By creating compositional spaces dealing with a sense of mass, along with openness of structure, the perspective of scale and the listener's place in relation is shifted to allow for greater a sense of 'place' beyond the environ of the performance in the interplay of the moment and physics of the larger world. Wherein the most minute of gestures are made significant, or massive planes of perspective become revealed, as dynamic interplay builds these spaces that are as much acoustically sensed, as perceived in the mind's eye. Each showcase features distinctly different takes of the potency of this kind of minimalism, varying between weighty combinations of bass and tonalities used to sculpt out atmospheric ambiance, or powerful dynamic structures made up of the subtlest filigree of sonic building materials."
Photo design/credit: Petrocelli Designs LLC