Sedentary lifes, Shinrin-yoku and infinite resting. Stretching metallic slides, harmonic series, deconstructed animal calls and bubbles.

Clasp your hands together behind your head. Inhale and feel your chest rise, pulling your elbows back and pressing your head into your hands. Exhale and release, then repeat as often as you like, using smooth, controlled movements and breathing slowly and deeply. Stand with your feet hip-width apart and place your palms together over your head. Inhale and reach up to elongate your spine. Tilt to the sides. Exhale and release. Repeat.

Ephemeral Observer | E-O-002

A house interior covered with wall-sized, made-to-measure radiators integrated directly into the architecture. The large, resonant metal surface transforms sudden internal events – thermal pops, water hammer shocks, air explosions, debris impacts – into loud, gong-like sounds: build-up and release — a threshold-oriented percussion section.

Thermal stresses in a heating system.

The recording was made with two geophones attached magnetically to radiators at a Parisian maison moderniste by Janine Abraham and Dirk Jan Rol commissioned in 1964

Ephemeral Observer | E-O-005

A festering underworld of microscopic and febrile rhythm structures — calm yet intense. Acoustic and synthetic sounds blend to make a set of speculative environments that are bursting with life. The density of the album opens up across its duration, eventually taking a planetary view.

An assortment of percussion and found objects spread onto a rectangular field. Captured through a spaced microphone array. Sticks, blocks and bells. Voice and synthesis. Third place.

In London I found a perfume that smelled like a brownie made entirely out of wet soil. It was inedible, but still very “cake”. “It’s our signature scent”, said the shopkeeper. But I used to make that cake as a child, with my child hands. I looked at the square bottle and it was me. Chocolate-like, but of the earth. Under our balcony I used to make garden stew in a clay pot with mud and pebbles. I stepped frantically on puffball mushrooms under a tree to make the steam. It didn't matter that the mushrooms were not in the pot. My cooking was by association. Only in the mind do the ingredients come together. Sometimes only as words. On the beach I made sand cookies, sea whip spaghetti and sea water cocktails, and on a school day in the forest we learnt to make flutes out of sticks. They made a whistle sound. The stick flute looked like a cigarette, so I lit the tip to smoke it. I imagined a sort of backwards flute playing, sucking music back into my body, but the stick flute was hollow, of course, and not the sound but the flame went through the wooden pipe and into my mouth, lungs, oesophagus. The body, only held together by words. Words, and also fire.

Ephemeral Obserser | E-O-001
BIN [BIN 00-47]  
All Music By Jennifer Torrence and Niklas Adam
Mastered by Marcus Schmickler  

Supported by The Norwegian Arts Council and CREO

Det Preller Af Stemmer

• a generative sound work for synthesised animal calls and acoustic reflections.

Two loudspeakers are placed in the landscape so that their sound reflects off the mountain on the north-west–facing side of the bay. The mountain becomes a spatial reflector in front of the speakers: sounds are deflected and bounce back towards the shore. The work runs along two strands — an imitative one and an acoustic one. The first is made inside the computer; the second is handed to the rock and the air.

The imitative strand is driven by a small computer running SuperCollider, configured as a cybernetic loop: it listens to its own output and resynthesises it, over and over. Each pass is analysed and rebuilt from its cepstrum — the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) that act as a compact fingerprint of timbre — and the result is fed back in as the next input. With every cycle a little more information is lost and distorted. It begins by resynthesising recordings of otters and other animals, but through this repeated self-listening it gradually drifts away from its sources into something else.

Music bordering between concrete weirdness and arrhythmic convulsions on electronics, computers and synths. Intricate combinations of form, at times minimal and other times filled with a sense of an implacable bleed-through to the boundaries of the contextual space, are projected through a succession of gradual and abrupt transitions thus giving form to the main core of this work as well as its varying dimensions. An eccentric mash up of broken rhythms, weird chocked electronics, computer programmed gamelan and gagaku meditation, steady tones, delightful serenity, borderline tension, esoteric noise bits and abrupt arrhythmic mash ups you can dance to with a broken leg. Imagine Autechre deciding to go Sissy Spacek on Radio Format. The entirety of "Signs and Accuracy" is framed by Paul van Trigt's collages.

Coherent States | CS-46 

1. Lewd Bytes 13:04
2. Null Pointer 08:20
3. Zepto Decay 05:44
4. Overlap Transfer 14:39
5. Signs and Accuracy 18:31
6. Hyperbola 16:45 

All music by Jon Wesseltoft and Niklas Adam
Recorded Oslo 2020
Artwork by Paul van Trigt
Layout by John Kontandreopoulos / Semitone Labs

50 tracks, 2 seconds runtime, all sounds created with dual oscillator feedback. Endless playback intended. Use hardware cd-player in repeat- and shuffle mode.

Redbook standard compatible

Dansk Komputor Musik | BIN [BIN 00-45]

Patterns of buffer processing and portamenta synthesis

0.418 cubic meters less space, apprehending the gravity of the formant whirlpool. This wooden lung soaks up liquid, expanding, with no exchange.

The macroscoped dust mite play and alien synthesised chirrups of ’╔══╦═════╗’ establishes his parameters in a hyperreal mode that informs the rest of the EP, which plays thru seamlessly into fractal echoes of claire rousay’s lower case domestic rustles on ‘╠══╬═╦═══╣' and creaking, brownian slosh of ‘╠══╝╔╩══╦╣’, with the curdled chatter of ‘╠═══╬═══╩╣’ placing his work in a lineage of Xenakis-Hecker-Becker, while ‘╚═══╩════╝’ feels as though we’re calmly being fed thru his digestive tract.

— Boomkat

I slipped up on the ice, hit my head against the frosty pavement and now these sounds are coming out of my eyes?

— Mads Kjeldgaard

After having lived in a bat cave for the past decade I’ve stumbled my way out towards the sun and all of a sudden my internal organs, cerebral memory loops and the glitching light and wind in the trees all started to sing simultaneously. Reparative Torque is a very beautiful, complex and inspiring rabbit hole to fall into ✨

— Jenny Berger Myhre

1. ╔══╦═════╗ 03:53
2. ╠══╬═╦═══╣ 06:10
3. ╠══╝╔╩══╦╣ 05:20
4. ╠═══╬═══╩╣ 02:22
5. ╚═══╩════╝ 06:11

Active Listeners Club | ALC009  

File under: EXTREME / COMPUTER MUSIC

A many-sided weave of memory

A hybrid of field and concert recordings, made by the duo on travels to Seoul, Tokyo, New York and London and put together in Absorbent Templet in Oslo, is housed across two flexi-disc box-sets, each containing 4 square flexi-discs, housed in heavy-duty clear plexiglass cases. Issued in a tiny edition of 100 copies each.

Integrationer is, in all likelihood, the most beautiful Danish oddsize of the year.

— Michael Mørkholt / Simon Christensen

As both an object and as body of sound, this one is a stunner. Integrationer, whether addressed as discrete sides / moments, or as a totality, is its own world — a sonic sculpture, built from darkness and light — a flashing image of dystopia, underlaid with humanity and hope. Highly recommended on every count.

— SoundOhm

A sparing dialogue between a synthetic bird and an indecisive printer; shrieking crystalline tones over scratching tactile textures; a not-easily-penetrable promenade conversation in halting English about taxidermied drone-cats, sliced and vacuum-packed grandparents and Damien Hirst; delicate metallic resonances that explode out into febrile, chaotic cityscapes. Listening experiences beyond the ordinary.

— Passive Aggressive

Across two extended pieces — "gestures, percussion solo, jungle" and "other solutions and mimicking object a" — struck objects, field recordings and synthetic events surface and disappear, their sources kept deliberately uncertain: acoustic, electronic, or somewhere in between. It is an austere, episodic music in which silence carries as much weight as sound. Recorded between 2015 and 2018 and mastered by Marcus Schmickler.

We languish in the space between the notes

— Nick Luscombe (Late Junction, BBC Radio 3)

A choreographic system in which the composer can play — or "show" — a movement pattern to a sculpture or object. Every movement is retained in memory, forming the basis for new variations across time, space, and synesthesia. The work is music drawn in equal part from graphic structure and from dance, conceived as sculptural practice and autonomous performance.

We are always in motion, whether we choose it or not — never being, only becoming, and always becoming-other. Memory becomes score: the past pressing forward into each new movement. What is remembered does not repeat; it endures, and in enduring, it changes.

The object is not inert matter waiting to be moved. It receives, it remembers, it performs — a thing with its own vitality, acting when no one attends it. We do not move it. We meet it halfway: two motions, each becoming through the other.

The method was used in Verdensteatret's installation Enter ghost, exit ghost, re-enter ghost at Nitja Centre for Contemporary Art, 2022.

Directly in front of where I have sat down hangs a white canvas that moves seemingly at random by means of a mechanism. It is surprisingly lifelike, and it gives off intimations of spirit. Where Fried worried about the size of object art and that it might tower over the beholder, here it is the canvas's interplay with the air around it that gives life to this otherwise dead object. There is something almost eerie about it, creating a level of tension in a room where there is otherwise no one but me for as long as I am there. I become deeply fascinated by how theatrical and communicative the room appears despite existing independently of me. Whether or not I had sat there, the canvas would have moved — but in the moment I experience it, it becomes communication.

— Julie Rongved Amundsen, "Varighetens kunst" (The Art of Duration), Scenekunst.no, 17 March 2022. Translation mine.

Y LAZ YUNGSTER is Taku Unami, Anders Vestergaard and Niklas Adam

Abstract Tits – AT014 

1. The End  55:55
2. And The Rest 29:35

Recorded By – Niklas Adam
Mixed and Mastered By – Taku Unami

Folded Periods – A small set of rotating x-rays, discs and objects wrapped in Atkinson dither. Excited by video feedback and a no-input sampler.

Objects fall in and out of phase.

Breathing together. The perception of time, and the accumulation of emptiness, as primary compositional elements. Texture over tone; the succession of occurrences over development. Active environment and static object, weighted equally.

A3 is an improvised piece for baritone and alto saxophone that explores minimal gestures against a ground of near silence.

&B is a drone piece for two players at an antique harmonium, its atmosphere turning from calm to intense with playback volume.

Original released in 2010. Ltd Edition in 100 copies
Reissued in 2016. BIN [BIN 00-28] | Ltd. Edition of 80 copies.
Supported by Koda Denmark