CAT: RVNGNL47

Release Date:
May 04, 2018 (digital)
May 04, 2018 (physical)

Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is a volume of bodily and geological substrates within poetic theory and sound. It is a place where skins and minerals dissolve and commingle, where gaseous subterranean leaks inflate lungs, where brain cavities echo interplanetary waves bent from passing through atmospheres.

A former geotechnical engineer from Colombia currently residing in Berlin, Dalt’s concern with boundaries and edges shape the lyrics and music of Anticlines, her sixth album. Paying careful attention to pace, breath, and texture, Dalt microtonally shifts the distance between speech and song while using traditional South American rhythms to support her contemporary electronic composition.

Lucrecia arrived at the atmosphere of Anticlines after several months of studying and creating new patches for the Clavia Nord Modular, forming a rhythmic feedback flow with it, a Moogerfooger MuRF, and her voice. The overall effect of cavernous space backdroping Dalt’s intimate vocal phrasing rewards contemplation, supported in the physical formats of Anticlines by a lyric booklet documenting Lucrecia’s collaboration with Australian artist Henry Andersen.

The album opens with “Edge,” bordering on a pathological circlusion of self upon other. The lyrics depart from the Colombian myth of El Boraro, an Amazonian monster who turns its victims insides to pulp before sucking them dry and inflating their bodies like balloons to lifelessly float away. “Tar” ponders human dependence on earth at the boundary of the heliopause, where to inhale might be like breathing tar. Dalt’s distant and obscured vocals end with, “we touched only as atmospheres touch.”

The sonic rise and fall of “Analogue Mountains” is inspired by martian traces found in Antarctica embedded by meteorite ALH84001, suggesting that “we might well be living in mountains transferred from Mars.” The steadily winding music on “Concentric Nothings” descends with the lyrical exercise of dissolution “let my touch be indistinct and instinctive.”

Interspersed with the lyrical pieces of Anticlines are instrumental interstitials that demonstrate preceding concepts — as if to say, “this is what antiforms sound like, and this is what the universe’s indifference sounds like.” Dalt’s ongoing experiments with visual artist Regina de Miguel support these ideas, their practice allowing the objects of their attention to slip in and out of being.

Mystic of matter, Lucrecia Dalt has previously performed and worked with Julia Holter and Gudrun Gut, her slippery spoken word and performative nature recalling the work of Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, Asmus Tietchens, or Lena Platonos. While touching stones, The Thing by Dylan Trigg, Cascade Experiment by Alice Fulton, and Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl are but a few formative scripts that support Dalt’s exploration of the betwixt and between.

In preparing a live set for Anticlines, Dalt plans to stage an uninterrupted configuration, like a kind of alienated lecture, aiming for “gestures that create tensions with non-existent objects.” Dalt intends “to provide meaning and a place for the listener to meditate or relate to the concerns and ideas” she presents.

Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is available May 4, 2018 on LP, CD, and digital formats. The LP and CD versions include a lyric booklet documenting Dalt’s collaborative work with Regina de Miguel and Henry Andersen. The album artwork was designed by Will Work for Good with photographs by de Miguel. An early artist edition will be available at MoMA PS1 and Other Music’s Come Together: Music Festival and Label Market on March 24, 2018.

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CAT: RVNGNL50

Release Date:
June 22, 2018 (digital)
June 22, 2018 (physical)

Moscow is mythologized for its grandeur and gravity but its parable pleasures offer splendor and even absurdity. Over the ten, symmetrical pieces of для FOR, Kate NV scores her native urban environment with just enough whimsy to gurgle through the city cracks and grow psychotropic foliage. Each sound assumes its own personality, moving through the album metropolis like miniature, mutating molecules viewed from NV’s apartment window.

Alternately a guitar-wielding, post-punker and one within the multitude of Moscow Scratch Orchestra’s avant-garde, NV is a versatile artist that maneuvers instinctively in whatever musical environs she finds herself. NV’s second solo album is an even more abstract endeavor than the hybrid pop of 2016’s Binasu. Inspired by casual moments of ephemeral sound from within and beyond her apartment walls, the record has a clarity arrived altogether and from right under her nose. Recorded at home, NV says it was as if the music was not written by herself, but her chair.

для FOR inhabits a stage that Piero Milesi & Daniel Bacalov, Ann Southam, or Hiroshi Yoshimura may have written music for and dresses it with Viktor Pivovarov’s psychedelic depictions of Moscow – contorting bodies, flying pencils, and multi-dimensional faces dance with subtle arpeggiations, conversational voice synthesis, and anthropomorphic MIDI. Animating objects is essential to the album. Like a surreal still life, each piece is an alien arrangement of common elements that extend the everyday ritual into an eternal landscape of unconscious activity. Somewhere along that landscape, Kate awaits and greets with apples for hands and fish for feet.

Like the album title, each composition contained within is represented as a three letter word, in Russian and English. The first half of для FOR was written in the spring. Starting with “YXO EAR,” previously released on the Peaceful Protest compilation cassette in 2017, melodies meander and lollygag. “двA TWO” incorporates human breath played like notes on a pump organ. “дуб OAK” offers a warm tune to tango. “как HOW” loops curious notes that bump into each other with a chirpy acknowledgement. “вас YOU,” the only track on для FOR with lyrics, sets a Wassily Kadinsky poem to song.

The second half of the album was written in the autumn. The feathery edges of “раз ONE” extend like watercolors bleeding off a rubber scroll. “зря SEE” is a subdued, shadowy variation of “как HOW”, as if the same song were played in different weather, dimmer light, or by Kate’s devious doppelganger. The electronics unravel and unwind on “пес DOG” until the final track, “кто WHO,” ends with vague solemnity and rattled metals.

A short online film series by Sasha Kulak will accompany the release of для FOR. The films follow a solitary figure performing ordinary tasks through a slow, warped lens — each song enacting a daily habit: waking, dressing, reading, and so on. In her live performances around the album, Kate NV will play each song from memory, allowing for variation from the recorded tracks, and scenes from the films will be re-created and improvised in the moment.

Kate NV’s для FOR will be available from RVNG Intl. on June 22, 2018 in vinyl and digital forms. An exclusive CD version will be released in Japan on June 15 to celebrate Kate’s summer tour there.

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CAT: RVNGNL48

Release Date:
April 21, 2018 (physical)

Oliver Coates’ new arrangement of Pulitzer Prize-winning US composer John Luther Adams’ 2007 piece Canticles of the Sky appears for the first time in recorded form as a limited vinyl edition from RVNG Intl.

In March 2017, Coates conducted 32 cellists in the UK premiere of the composition, displaying its intimacies after deeply communing with the trajectories of Adams’ fictional suns and moons, the guiding characters and carriers of the piece.

This recorded interpretation, performed by Coates for multi-layered solo cello, takes Canticles of the Sky to wondrous, dizzying new heights, envisaging Adams’ parallel dimension as an idealised construction. Marrying extra-musical studio techniques and meticulous arrangements to Coates’ fascination with early electronic synthesis (especially the work of Laurie Spiegel), the result offers an ultra-sensory take on classical string instrumentation.

“Making this recording was not only about creating the most finely tuned interpretation of the piece in terms of frequencies and dynamics, but was also a chance to do something I have always wanted to do; to make a study in colour,” Coates says. “Inspired by paintings by Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin, I had a chance to build an overall image using different playing techniques and microphone combinations.”

Coates has released a handful of solo records under his own name, including the acclaimed 2016 album Upstepping, and in 2017 Remain Calm, a collaboration with Mica Levi. As an artist and performer, he is frequently commissioned by world-renowned orchestras, choreographers and visual artists to compose or curate integral new works.

John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Sky is a limited LP release, preempting Coates’ debut full-length for RVNG Intl., and will be available on vinyl exclusively on April 21, 2018 for Record Store Day. This edition will not be repressed.

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CAT: RVNGNL43

Release Date:
September 07, 2018 (digital)
September 07, 2018 (physical)

For Shelley’s on Zenn-La, Oliver Coates designs a complex of bending truths and reverse walkways to vernal states. Open ears can peer down hidden aux channel corridors, while melodic patterns present two-way mirrors to rooms of other retinal colors. An endless euphoria is just beneath the dance floorboards of Shelley’s, and an inquisitiveness unencumbered by the institution of knowledge surrounding its frame and inhabitants.

Shelley’s on Zenn-La was made between the Elephant and Castle neighborhood of London and a future dreamscape. In this realm out of time and space, Shelley’s (Laserdome) – a once-legendary late 80s / early 90s nightclub in the industrial town of Stoke-on-Trent in the north of England – can simultaneously exist on the fictional planet of Zenn-La, and can house a devotional, alien ritual of early UK rave culture, pioneering IDM, and deep minimalism.

Much of the album’s construction extends from specific, self-imposed ambitions; particular palettes applied to individual creative ideas. These limitations become limitless manifestations of theme: two bass lines running in parallel (one cello, one synth), synthesized waveforms phasing with bowed acoustic drones and chords, synth sequences in nonstandard tuning sitting against folk melody in standard tuning. Coates made a lot of the music for Shelley’s in Renoise, composing drum sequences in hexadecimal numbers and pencil drawn waveforms and cementing specificity in the intricate, intelligent dance machinations.

Some of Shelley’s tracks veer into and across FM synthesis. “I like hearing how one tone is enriched by another tone modulating the first, resulting in gleaming sets of new harmonics,” says Coates, “I started thinking about placing live cello playing into a chain of antagonism resulting in sounds I found beautiful.” This instinct to poetically process sounds in real life (“sitting on the tube, thinking: I’d remove the low end on that, compress that, add reverb to that”) give Shelley’s an exploratory feel, both guided and unbound, autodidactic by undoing.

Shelley’s opens with “Faraday Monument,” matching the enigmatic precedent of the Brutalist box in London the track is named after. chrysanthemum bear’s vocals oscillate over “A Church” singing lyrics to melt metal and minds. Large spaces adjacent to small enclosed ones house the voice of Malibu reading poetry within “Norrin Radd Dreaming.” “Cello Renoise” is built upon the image of two drummers playing to one click track as if in different booths. The great flautist, Kathryn Williams, recreated midi parts to end Shelley’s as a “Perfect Apple With Silver Mark.”

Cellist, composer, and producer Oliver Coates has been an artist in residency at London’s Southbank Centre, and received the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Artist Award. Coates has contributed to the recordings of Radiohead, and collaborated with Laurie Spiegel and John Luther Adams. He has also been commissioned for string and electronic arrangements by visual artist Lawrence Lek, recorded with composer Jonny Greenwood on the scores for Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master and Phantom Thread and collaborated with musician Mica Levi on the 2016 album Remain Calm.

Oliver Coates’ Shelley’s on Zenn-La is available September 7, 2018 on LP, CD, and digital formats.

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CAT: FRKWYS14

Release Date:
September 28, 2018 (digital)
September 28, 2018 (physical)

Composer Tashi Wada has performed for years with his father Yoshi Wada—artist, composer, and early member of the Fluxus movement. However, they have rarely appeared together in studio settings. Nue, the fourteenth entry in RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, finally brings Tashi and Yoshi, along with an eclectic group of close friends and extended family, together on tape.

Nue draws on aspects of Tashi’s background for his widest vision to date—among them the minimalist bagpipe music of Yoshi, who co-composed three of the tracks, the psychoacoustic and perceptual explorations of his mentor, composer James Tenney, and reimagined forms of ancient and devotional music. The album, however, is not a tribute to the past or a recapitulation of familiar sounds. Instead, Nue is an intertwining of people and ideas as a means of growing, of looking inward to move outward, and of looking back to move forward.

To achieve this growth, Tashi assembled a core group of fellow travelers, including Yoshi, composer Julia Holter, producer Cole MGN, and percussionist Corey Fogel, to give life to this multifaceted suite. As an experience, Nue subtly navigates the interactions, intimacy and spaciousness of this group.

The album’s title itself is a nod to Tashi’s abiding interest in duality and the unknown: nue is a mythological Japanese chimera with the face of a monkey, the legs of a tiger, and a snake for a tail, a composite form, at once disturbing and otherworldly. But, as the composer points out, nue is also French for naked—stripped of complexity, bare and exposed, but also raw and essential.

From the doubling of tones—and the world of harmonic nuances such an action produces—to the rich interplay between individual musicians, all baring their own personalities and experiences through shared performance, Tashi’s compositions allow space for these elements to join and grow. The multipartite creature that is an ensemble melds in the simplicity and purity of the music itself.

As explained by Tashi, each part was written with an individual in mind, not simply an instrument. And each individual performer makes their mark, from Holter’s vocal performances on the cresting, oceanic “Mutable Signs” and “Ondine” with guest vocalists Simone Forti, Jessika Kenney and Laura Steenberge, to Fogel’s resonant, precise percussion on “Bottom of the Sky.” Producer Cole MGN, who has worked extensively with artists like Beck and Ariel Pink, helped to create a world of sound with minimal yet multi-dimensional materials. Like many of its influences, Nue uses deceivingly simple means to create complex, coherent worlds and narratives.

Tashi notes the influence of legendary Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, whose work looked inward, investigating memory and emotion and dream, to understand the often overwhelming world outside the self. Like Lispector’s classic novel Near to the Wild Heart, Nue cleaves these archetypal dualities—world/self, old/new, complex/simple—to create a work that allows them to coalesce into something singular.

As Tashi states in his liner notes: “My desire was to create something both old and new sounding—ancient and futuristic—and ultimately something of its own world and other. Nue is a vision, an endless night of dreams, and a personal history of sorts, full of joys and demons.”

Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada and Friends’ Nue will be released on September 28, 2018 on LP, CD, and digital formats. Accompanying visuals by Jana Papenbroock will be shared variously before the album release date, and a new touring group featuring members of the ensemble will converge for a special performance at National Sawdust on October 2.

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CAT: FTS005 – FTS008

Release Date:
FTS008 / FTS008BOX: September 21, 2018 (digital / physical)
FTS005: October 5, 2018 (digital / physical)
FTS006: January 8, 2019 (digital / physical)
FTS007: February 22, 2019

Freedom To Spend’s first catalog wide deep dive into an artist’s career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983’s Below The Horizon, followed by 1984’s On Dry Land, 1985’s In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988’s Light Metabolism Number Prague.

Somewhere out there around the turn of the 1980s, to the left of the post-punk crew, to the right of the minimalists, and surfacing with a friendlier face than the dour industrialists of the time – there existed, seemingly unbidden, an entire, networked, tape-trading community; a community that crossed continents and oceans, that relied on the postal service to do its bidding; a community full of humble visionaries and lost, misunderstood, or just plain ignored home steeped genius.

Exploring that thicket of weirdness in the UK wild, you’d likely stumble across labels like Cordelia, Hamster, and Unlikely; compilations like the should-be-legendary Obscure Independent Classics series, or the Real Time cassettes; and inexplicable one-offs like The Deep Freeze Mice, Jody & The Creams, R. Stevie Moore, Leven Signs, Jung Analysts, and Rimarimba.

Rimarimba was the project of Robert Cox, based in Felixstowe, on the seaside in Suffolk, UK. Rimarimba was not Cox’s first entry into the world of recorded music, but was the first time he explored, most perceptively, the parameters of a particular musical mode: one where minimalism is removed from its “high-art” mantle, Cox inveigling its practices in amongst the do-it-yourself creativity of a burgeoning and beguiling underground, letting the music breathe – and most importantly, letting it play, gifting it with imagination.

That sense of play is writ large across the four Rimarimba albums being circulated again, or in Light Metabolism Number Prague’s case, being made newly available. There’s an unaffected, warm-hearted joy to be heard in Cox’s music, hypnotic patterns unspooling from a Pandora’s-box of mass-produced and home built musical instruments, intertwining, tangling up in each other, and then riding out the road until they’ve said their piece, often parking somewhere surprisingly unfamiliar to where they started. Sometimes, it’s as though Cox is channelling preconscious phrases, tunes that exist in some kind of primordial soup of music, the storehouse of melody that we call upon in our most hallucinatory, incantatory moments.

You can certainly hear some familiar names as precursors or as covering similar terrain – there’s a touch of Brian Eno, who attended the same school as Cox, a dab of the process orientations of early Steve Reich, the shifting, sub rosa patterning of Philip Glass. But just as equally, Cox alights on less predictable touchstones: Moondog might not immediately come to mind, but he’s a significant influence, something that comes clear as you listen further and hear aspects of The Viking of 6th Avenue’s “snaketime,” his ornery take on rhythm, in Cox’s constructions. He’s also a fan of the fantasias of John Fahey, whose mercurial spirit and galaxy-gobbling musical open-mindedness finds a home in Cox’s questing to experiment, to make new, and to find unexpected treasure in the communion of the musical moment.

Each Rimarimba album is a functional objects in and of itself; a fully contained world of trash and treasure, play and precarity. But they might be best experienced when taken en masse. It’s a heroic dose, but as with the structures of the music itself, listening to Rimarimba seems to work in a cumulative fashion, and the deeper you go into Cox’s singularity, the more you discover, the more lightbulb moments click into place, and you end up eddying in a pool of all sound; that Rimarimba moment has caught you.

On September 21, Freedom To Spend will offer all four Rimarimba albums in an edition of 250 screen-printed canvas carriers with a “Certificate of Absurdity” from Robert Cox. The canvas collection will be the only opportunity to access Light Metabolism Number Prague. Below the Horizon will then be released in a one-time edition of 750 copies on October 5, followed by On Dry Land and In The Woods on January 8, 2019 and February 22, respectively. Each album features artwork reinterpreted from its original edition by Will Work For Good, and accompanying abstracts by Jon Dale.

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CAT: CMMND004

Release Date:
September 19, 2018 (physical)

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, because I am not myself, you see. Anyway, explanations take such a dreadful time…”

Phantom Kino Ballett evades explanation, its stage in perpetual set change and motion. Our guides, the Phantoms, lead us through a well-worn labyrinth of Warhol glamor avatars, bel canto icons, and sensory fragments that converge within black boxes or simulated enclosed environs.

Pirouetting between theatre and club, while conjuring ghosts of Sylvia Plath’s The Applicant, Holly Woodlawn’s nervous breakdowns, Mario Montez’ mobilee, Maria Callas’ chiffre and Anna Oppermanns’ eyelashes, the Phantom effect feels dreamlike.

To characterize this experience as such falls short of the carefully collaged concert and immersion the Phantom Kino Ballett becomes. So, let’s call it a hallucination: a socially-conducted, aesthetically-charged experience that whirrs, reels, and metamorphoses as a film playing in the deepest crevice of one’s mind.

Phantom Kino Ballett is an audiovisual drama created by Amsterdam-Cologne-based collaborators Lena Willikens and Sarah Szczesny. An assemblage of performance, installation, soundtrack and video, the work gathers and distributes sonic, optical, and experiential references widely and to delirious effect.

When the Phantom physically manifests, collaged film scenes and interview excerpts dance with kinetically captured, painted, woven, and other manipulated surfaces. Our guides don costumes like puppets, with white phantoms on black shirts (or black phantoms on white shirts) appearing to move unaccompanied through space.

Strobes and smoke machines make sculptural use of club mainstays, while fourth-world murmurings and techno catharsis give legibility to a fragmentary experience where spoken excerpts are cut and placed roughly into non-sequiturs of intentional misunderstanding, and jagged panning reveals only the surface of areas of static visual works and readymades.

Willikens’ transportive DJ sets and music productions have instituted her as an in demand and in command dance music presence the world over. For her acclaimed Phantom Delia release on Cómeme, minimal-wave tinged techno chug was paired with five video chapters created by Szczesny together with Willikens, a precursory tale to the Phantom Kino Ballett chronicle.

Szczesny studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dusseldorf under Rosmarie Trockel. Between 2011 and 2014 she has designed all the artwork for the Cómeme label. Her work investigates the materiality of media and the history and production of commercial visual culture. Appropriating and reassembling figments of popular, mechanically produced art and culture (both imagistic and textual) inform Szczesny’s contribution to the visual content of Phantom Kino Ballett as well as her musical contributions.

Varied, site specific iterations of Phantom Kino Ballett have occurred in Tokyo and Osaka; at Meakusma Festival in Eupen, Belgium: at Commend in New York, at PCP Gallery in Paris and most recently, at Dekmantel Festival in Amsterdam. In each, a contemporary, Carollesque story of domestic dissociation, public scrutiny and suffering explanation is told.

For Commend See, the Ballett’s tactility and collectability are expanded. An artist edition of 15 vinyl pieces and 300 cassettes capture two alternate takes of its soundtrack, with paper materials commemorating its character. The cassette edition includes a 40-minute addendum called “Passage Transkript,” a soundscape created by Willikens & Szczesny inspired by their time in Kyoto, Japan in the fall of 2017. Will Work For Good’s responsive design includes Thomas Venker’s photos from the various happenings past.

All proceeds from this release will be donated to agisra e.V., a non-profit organization advocating on behalf of migrant women and against sexual and racist violence. agisra is based in Cologne, Germany, and was chosen by Lena and Sarah. — agisra.org

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CAT: BIS035

Release Date:
September 4, 2018 (physical)
September 21, 2018 (digital)

The Working Elite are Berlin-based spark plugs Thomas “Saap” Sabrowsky, of Extra Producktion, Terre des Pommes, ex-marine soldier, seasoned cook and barkeeper; and Daniel “D´LonelyAl” Nentwig, who co-directs Extra Produktionen, plays keyboard and electric bass for various outfits, and engineers at Berlin’s Butterama Recording Center. Suffice it to say, the pair have named their collaborative project suitably. The Working Elite create recreational music for dancers to shimmer through the days and nights of balmy season.

Following a killer acid-piano house 12” and contributing a Test Pressing-certified new-disco chug to a split release with Tuff City Kids (both) on Terre des Pommes in 2014, The Working Elite further refine their ability to soundtrack festivities with Rockman / Born Again. While “Rockman” conveys an understatedly cinematic mood with repeated imitation string cycles over crisp electro foundations, “Born Again” presents a new wave / rave endurance test, summoning perspiration from dedicated day-dancers with its metronomic hammer of a beat overlaid with motivating synth-lines like marching toys. On the flip, Saap and Lauer (Tuff City Kids) provide inventive interpretations of these tunes, reshaping “Rockman” into a stomping, flashing-lights electro jam while “Born Again” gets a delightfully multi-dimensional digi-dub treatment complete with acid-reggae breakdown over a 4/4 house beat.

Sabrowsky and Nentwig both grew up in Hanau, West Germany, spending their formative pre-stage days inside the cultural consequence of a U.S. Army Base near to the small town – snacking at Burger King and shopping at the PX Store. Both acknowledge the longevity of this American influence in their musical lives – Rockman / Born Again is in part a self-proclaimed testament to that influence, an offering to an American label as a small act of diplomatic celebration that elevates the bewildering global political mood and promotes togetherness through dance.

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CAT: ReRVNG12 / FTS011

Release Date:
November 09, 2018 (digital)
November 09, 2018 (physical)

Michele Mercure often dreams of music, and in her waking life, reclaims fragments of these fleeting, floating melodies in her compositions and sound art. Beside Herself, an anthology of Mercure’s self-produced and distributed cassettes released between 1983 and 1990, collects these dreamlike passages and lo-fi nocturnes, preserving the qualities of discovery and intimacy surrounding their genesis.

Mercure’s sound is a porous electronic art that overlaps ambient, abstract, and industrial sensibilities – its spaciousness reveals an artist attuned cinematically rather than for radio play or public performance. She approached the latter theatrically, and rarely, disdaining most live shows as too serious, and bringing her music to bare on her audiences in playful, immersive contexts. On recordings, Mercure’s night lit synth music evokes non-confined environments, at once expressionistic and minimal and always aware of its surroundings.

Mercure was a busy collaborator during the years surveyed by Beside Herself, making music for theater, performance, film, and TV animation, yet it was through her self-released cassettes that she established her music among like-minded artists abroad. Circulated through tape-trading networks assisted by insightful reviews in Eurock, a seminal music magazine covering progressive rock and electronic music scenes, these album-length releases included Rogue and Mint (1983), A Cast of Shadows (1984), Dreams Without Dreamers (1985), and Dreamplay (1990). Though unvarnished in fidelity (and now scarcely seen), these tapes showcased Mercure’s transportive aptitude within and beyond the limited sound recording medium.

Mercure’s artistic path never ran through creative meccas New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. Raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, and then moving to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in her twenties, Mercure was already an adept musician when she encountered a local and lively theater scene, and was asked to score an unorthodox performance of Waiting for Godot. The experience was pivotal in marrying music and image for Mercure, and so she began making music for film, television, dance, and theater. It wasn’t until a long sojourn in Eindhoven, however, that she became transfixed by electronic music (ala Conrad Schnitzler, whom she would correspond with for years) that would inform her music to come.

Acoustic elements such as voice and stringed instruments add a haunting lyricism to the non-tonal space unoccupied by electronic presence in Mercure’s music. The graduality of phrasing and measured sequence of tones also distinguish her music from the repetition and improvisation-heavy hallmarks of the Kosmische genre, a stylistic antecedent for the artist. Mercure’s fascination, or obsession, with new, consumer conscious music technology is demonstrated in her inventive sequencing and sampling, adding a mechanical, sometimes menacing, feel to Beside Herself.

Mercure’s contemporaries became the kindred minds of the Eurock “scene” such as The Nightcrawlers, Lauri Paisley, and Don Slepian. It was in association with Paisley and Pauline Anna Strom that Eurock featured Mercure in an article titled “Women Synthesists” in 1986. The three artists all shared a bravura for homespun, self-produced electronic music that looked beyond pop conventions for a higher plane of avant-gardism or musical spirituality. Not long after the article went to print, Mercure offered Eye Chant, her standalone vinyl album self-released in 1987.

Beside Herself extends RVNG Intl.’s preservation efforts to sister label Freedom To Spend who reissued Eye Chant in 2017, an occasion marking just over twenty years since its original release on Mercure’s own Quick Shower Music. (Eye Chant, and the cassettes surveyed on Beside Herself, were originally credited to Michelle Musser, the name which the artist used until a divorce in 1987).

The anthological scope of Beside Herself joins Eye Chant to restore the canon of Mercure’s arresting dream-music, revisiting this anomalous creator’s breakthrough material. Beside Herself will be released on double LP, CD, and digital formats on November 9, 2018. The set features liner notes by Emily Pothast and an incredible array of unseen photography and ephemera of the era.

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CAT: RVNGNL42

Release Date:
November 2, 2018 (digital)
November 2, 2018 (physical)

Colin Self’s Siblings is a proposal for interdependence, critical joy, and an expansive sense of being. As the lyrics beam, “I used to live as an anomaly… no explanation biologically,” so siblings share hidden language, lore, and identity. On Siblings, ecstatic voices and sound knot to form new ideals of kinship, emerging as horizontal relations for multi-species flourishing.

Colin Self challenges boundaries of perception with his art, music, and performances. Inspired by the work of Donna Haraway (Cyborg Manifesto, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene), Siblings is the final segment of the six-part opera series entitled Elation. Informed by Self’s exploration of the ways of knowing, Siblings places a non-biological family at its center. The characters, bonded by curiosity and caring, generate ways of collectively coming together on a damaged planet. Self uses Siblings to define this familial experience through sound and its soundmakers.

Siblings is a mobile, transitional production, in equal parts by circumstance and happenstance. Field fragments taken from Halloween party laughter in Jamaica Plains and a cross-country video chat are refracted by session recordings willed to happen in places as far flung as Stockholm and Los Angeles. Siblings is a sound scrapbook or poster board collage, but not one without careful consideration of the clipping and composition.

From years experiencing Riot Grrrl shows around Self’s early home of Oregon to his involvement in the New York City-based performance collective Chez Deep, Self expands the DIY ethos to a space and mind of Do-It-Together. Feeding into Siblings is XHOIR, Self’s ongoing project of group vocal workshops for singing and listening, and a broad cast of kin including but not limited to Michael Beharie, Greg Fox (drums), Martine Syms (words and voice), The Mivos Quartet, and Raul De Nieves (cover art).

On “Story,” Siblings’ opening moment, breath and beats emerge as echoes within a vast, heaving chamber, sound conjured and cajoled into a new, blistered terrain. “Foresight” urges us toward a worlding – a break from the planet we’ve disregarded: “I see on my screen all the doubt, where it comes from, why you trust in no one. I see a new light.” While the unhinged form of “Ante-Strategy” lays the sonic compost for a Belurusian political poem, written with Tanya Zamirouskaya and Anastasia Kolas, Self tends toward elaboration and excesses in a “joyous rendering of survival.”

Siblings splits sides with “Transitions,” a pluri-vocal burst called forth from interstellar margins to put uncounted bodies in motion. Repetitions of “I commit to you” end with “We commit to you.” Self utilizes theoretical vocabulary to encourage germination of a new language. “Research Sisters” will make their own myths and forge their own families, the work’s fire sparking frenetic, ecstatic voices flashing back and forth in stereo. The gathering of choral voices lift up the melancholic words of “The Great Refusal” over pillowy layers of strings and stumbling, sputtering showers of keyboards.

Siblings is Self’s second full-length release following 2015’s Elation. Siblings has been performed iteratively and internationally with humor, drama, and fierce song. Siblings’ MoMA PS1 staging in 2018 featured black-light messaging, countdown clocks, books on rope, and dancers adorned with swirling prints and LED lanterns. Self follows, in Haraway’s words, towards a “commitment to the finicky, disruptive details of good stories that don’t know how to finish.” Future performances will likely carry away in the best way.

Colin Self’s Siblings will be released November 2, 2018 in limited vinyl and digital editions.

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