Hello
A new year is with us and I sincerely hope that you made it through safely, though it’s just another night, of course. As ever in recent years, I was fast asleep well before midnight, so any stories you may have read about me partying naked in Trafalgar Square in the press were completely untrue.
Sometimes I pretend I’m writing music for a film that doesn’t exist yet. I know I’m not alone in this. I thought it would be interesting to share this little minor work to begin 2023 with. I composed it using Seed Audio’s expansion for Arturia Pigments which is such a beautifully inspiring piece of software. Listen back here.
For those of you who have seen me perform live, you will be aware that my live shows are frequently improvised. In fact, the music is often taking shape before my very eyes and ears at the very same time as the audience.
A good example of this can now be seen on online, captured at the Leeds Modular Meets in August 2022. I performed a short intense set, moving from rattling rhythms to deeply dubbed out pulses, and a little bit of ambient sound too.
I used my Submodular Shadow 6U modular synth set up and Empress Zoia pedal for the performance. I only had an idea of how to open the set, with a patch on the Zoai, but from then on in it was a completely wild ride. I enjoy how aspects of the performance seem to appear, without even my knowing what is to follow next. For example, I have almost no idea how the dubby section around half-way appeared, and I’d suggest playing the set through some decent speakers to pick up on the low end, which was literally shaking the bones of the spectators at the time.
Some of you might be aware that one constant in my career since 1997 has been composing for dance. At this point in time, I’ve now scored over 66 dance works across the world.
Splinter Group from choreographer Lucy Guerin and students from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at The University of Melbourne, was recently performed and I was delighted to have my work ‘The Canonization’ used alongside music from my sonic pals Murcof, Farben, Demdike Stare and Biosphere. You can watch the full performance back online.
I was recently invited to create a special two-hour mix for Spanish radio of Industrial Music, offering up a picture of much of the transgressive and intense music I grew up with. It features music from Pierre Henry, Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Einstürzende Neubauten, Laibach, Test Dept, Nurse With Wound, :zoviet*france, Kollaps and many more.
There are even a couple my own pieces dropped in from the 1980s in there. The mix begins after about 05:00 mins after my rather terrible Spanish introduction. A few technical tips though:
The link works best on a computer, not a mobile phone.
Don’t click ‘live radio’ at the top, but scroll down to the play button beneath the track listening.
You can download the full mix where it says ‘descarga/deskargatu’
Happy listening! And it goes without saying PLAY IT LOUD!
I’m finally so pleased to share full documentation of Live Transmission: Joy Division Reworked after so many years on my own channel, only this time with timecode for each of the tracks. I can’t begin to think how many emails and comments I’ve received over the years asking about this extraordinary show too.
Live Transmission was an audio-visual performance that paid homage to one of the world’s most progressive bands, taking audiences on a trip into a dismantled, electrified, and orchestrated world inspired by the music of Joy Division. The work was reinterpreted by myself and Heritage Orchestra with visuals by Matt Watkins. Happy viewing!
So, a decade to wait for this documentation, but how about 20 years then? Yes, after almost two decades, these two remixes I created for the lovely Jem Finer, of popular band The Pogues, are finally available to listen to.
In 2003 Jem began inviting artists and musicians to choose a 10-minute section from Longplayer’s past, and to use it, in any way they chose, to make a new piece of music. Recorded in the autumn of that year, these two tracks I created are now available for the first time. They are ‘pay what you wish,’ which means you can grab them for free, or offer a little more something, if you want to.
They are reinterpretations of his work for Artangel, Longplayer. Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.
A share of any earnings from these tracks help keep Longplayer playing. Pick them up here.
Don’t miss out on this rather luscious mix from the label A Strangely Isolated Place. It’s a showcase of individual tracks from ASIP’s 2022 label releases and a special continuous DJ mix of music from 2022 by todos. As the label writes:
“After providing 2021’s compilation mix, our esteemed journeyman, todos takes the reigns again to interpret this year’s label releases. Containing at least one track from each release along with many snippets and samples from others, todos weaves a tapestry that somehow manages to traverse ASIP’s potentially most varied year to date.
From the intricate world-building sounds of Gadi Sassoon, Deepchild and Strïe; to the dramatic synthesizers born from Scanner and OKRAA; the granulated textures of Viul & Benoît Pioulard; the delicate keys of ASC; and Illuvia’s illustrative DnB footprint; this year’s mix seemed impossible to weave together, but todos tied it together in style.” Don’t miss out, and download it for FREE here.
And whilst there, I suggest you take a listen to my double LP, Struktura Revisted, with the lovely Polish composer Olga Wojciechowska, which is a dreamy delight.
And future plans? Well, there are many adventures ahead. There is a new album, OLA, with French band Geins’t Nait out in February, which will be available digitally and on limited CD on my Bandcamp account. You can still pick up our debut collaboration there too.
And then a week or so later a special collaboration with long-term friend David Harrow, who I first met in the mid 1980s, and it’s taken this long for us to release an album together. More on this next month.
2023 will also include a few live performances, collaborations and much more. Well, if you are a long-term reader of this newsletter, then you know how it all pans out…
Thanks as ever for your support
Best wishes
Professor Scanner
::: listen :::
Various: Irida Records Hybrid Musics from Texas (Blank Forms)
Iain Chambers: Ivry-sur-Seine (Bandcamp)
Oren Ambarchi: Shebang (Drag City)
Nils Frahm: Music for Animals (Leiter)
::: read :::
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (Penguin)
Derek Jarman: Through the Billboard Promised Land (House Sparrow Press)
Christian Marclay (Pompidou Centre)
Valeria Luiselli: Lost Children Archive (Fourth Estate)
::: watch :::
Triangle of Sadness: Ruben Östlund
Hit The Road: Panah Panahi
The Silent Twins: Agnieszka Smoczynska
Neighbouring Sounds: Kleber Mendonça Filho
