Strom Newsletter – 01.2024

January 2024

Hello

A warm welcome to 2024, a leap year and the 24th year of the 3rd millennium and the 21st century, and the 5th year of the 2020s decade. Now, let’s not start counting!

Ending 2023 in Pattaya Thailand

My entry into this new year was, as always, quiet, going to bed before the clocks struck midnight and waking up feeling quite refreshed and ready to begin new adventures.

2023 closed with a couple of live performances, firstly in Pattaya in Thailand at the Wonderfruit Festival. This was a quite remarkable experience, exchanging damp cold weather in the UK for 35-degree temperatures and performing outdoors at night.

I presented a new work in collaboration with MSCTY Studio from Tokyo, where we sonified the local environment, with bird song and insects and transformed and treated the sounds. Amusingly, by the hour of our performance, the wildlife was quite deafening, so it turned out to be a surprising collaboration with nature itself.

Nine Earths live at Iklectik

And in truly rock ‘n roll fashion, I flew overnight back to the UK to play a farewell show to the wonderful Iklectik arts venue in London, where premiered my live soundtrack to the film installation Nine Earths by London digital artists DFuse. It was an incredible evening, especially since the show had sold out in just a couple of days and we had a capacity crowd squeezed into the space.

The irony that we were presenting a work about consumption and creating a better world at a venue being forcibly closed due to London property developments was not lost on anyone, I think. We intend to present this work in other places later this year so stay tuned.

Et il y’avait CD

My new release schedule is rather intense at present. In December, I released Et il y’avait, my new album with French artists Geins’t Nait and L.Petitgand on CD and digital. This follows our collaboration early this year, OLA. And, at the time of writing, we’ve just finished another full-length album which will come out in 2024.

Et il y’avait can be picked up on my Bandcamp, with the last remaining copies of OLA.

A Scanner Christmas was released towards the end of December, and this digital only release has proven to be quite a success. Designed to accompany your festive antics, I covered a combination of classic Christmas hymns, as well as popular songs, including Away in a Manger, Silent Night, Last Christmas, O Come all ye Faithful and many more. Pick it up here.

Alchemeia – a tribute to library music

And here we are, in the first month of a new year and I have something super exciting to share with you. I set up a new label, Alltagsmusik (everyday music), on which I shall be releasing a host of new recordings. The first release, Alchemeia, will be released on 19 January on limited digipak CD, as well as on all streaming services.

The album was created as an affectionate tribute to the early 1960s and 1970s library music culture, applying crude techniques of electronic composition, using a mix of hardware and software.

It explores a form of musique concrète, electroacoustic in character, in an otherworldly cinematic fashion. It’s cheeky, mysterious, playful and positive music. Interestingly, Library Music remained for many years an almost ephemeral art form, quietly accompanying the TV shows and films that many of us we grew up with, but with little recognition for the makers themselves.

With this in mind I created Alchemeia, inspired by such composers as Tod Dockstader, Delia Derbyshire, Bernard Estardy, Ron Geesin, and many more.

The artwork by Matthew Shaw is a wonderfully clever piece of systems minimalist design. CD buyers will discover something very amusing when they see the physical artwork too. Wait and see! Each release on the label, on CD, digital and sometimes vinyl, will feature a similar design but with a numbering and colouring system to differentiate the releases.

I’m aiming to release at least 6 more albums as the year progresses, with both solo releases, but also some wildly different collaborations, including albums of post-punk instrumental guitar music, dub flavoured electronica, fourth-world Eno/Byrne style funk and much more. Definitely stay tuned for some sonic adventures!

The album is available for pre-order, with a single track to download, and accompanying video. The full-length will appear like magic in your account on the day of release, and CDs posted out to arrive on release day.

The Creative Impact of Covid

We all know how much of an impact Covid has had on the lives of others, both physically and mentally, and yet somehow some positive effects were born from this, especially creatively. One of these projects, @ovid’s Metamorphoses, was initiated by Bernd Herzogenrath, professor of American literature and culture at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek.

With a wide range of work by sound artists and musicians, writers, filmmakers, photographers, and visual artists, @ovid’s Metamorphoses used the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching consequences as an instrument for change, artistic and otherwise. A play on experiment across various fields of artistic practice, all featured work revolved around ideas of transmission and inspiration, conjuring up a massive body of vital and daring artistic expressions unashamedly avant-garde. 

The results are now available in an absurdly ambitious package – in a box that contains seven CDs, two data DVDs with short films, and a 200 pages full-colour book with texts, drawings, photographs, and paintings. Neither the music nor any of the other work comprised in the box is available digitally. I contributed exclusive material to this release, alongside Maja S K Ratkje, Michael Gordon, Bill Morrison, Tom McCarthy, KMRU, Lucrecia Dalt, Lawrence English, Gareth Davis, Thomas Koner, David Rothenberg and just so many more.

It’s not cheap but it’s an extraordinary work of art capturing a particular moment in time and can be picked up here.

EarSpace – from the Weird to the Wonderful

Episode 5 of my EarSpace radio show will be broadcast on Slack City Radio on 4 January, and you listen back to all the previous episodes on Totally Radio. Episode 4 from December took listeners on a global time-travelling sonic trip, from pulverising industrialist Ben Frost, Indian and Finnish experimentation, Coil and Suzanne Ciani’s soundtracks for ads, Sheffield’s finest Cabaret Voltaire and Hula, glacial guitars with The Bug and Francois Bonnet, Vince Clarke’s Eurorack adventures and much, much more. And not a Christmas tune in sight!

I have such a wealth of archival materials that I will continue to add these to both Bandcamp and YouTube. Don’t forget, if you join up as a fan on Bandcamp, you will receive exclusive releases, unavailable anywhere else, plus around 40 other releases. Not bad for the price of less than two artisan coffees a month! Join in the community here.

Brabant Film

Whilst exploring through my film archive, I was astounded to discover that it’s 16 years ago that I scored this short film by Dutch artist Olga Mink. It was commissioned by the Province of Noord Brabant in The Netherlands and looking back today I’m still so proud of this collaboration.

Every now and then I get the chance to sit down and just write for the pleasure of it, and these are posted onto my website. They are minor think pieces in a sense, offering up some modest inspiration for a moment.

The Found Object in Creativity

I just wrote about the notion of the ‘found’ object. The unexpected, the unknown. The idea of something being abandoned, dumped in the street, into a waste basket, onto the floor of a studio, given new meaning by someone else, offering it a fresh meaning.

I have long been fascinated by this idea, from the earliest age. I remember the first time I saw the objects of Marcel Duchamp, with his bottle rack and toilet, and how within the walls of a gallery an entirely new way of looking and interpretation was left to the viewer. A toilet bowl was now ‘Fountain’ (1917) and signed R Mutt. It had transcended its origins and purpose.

You can read the full feature here, that draws on the work of Dick Jewell, Sue Smallwood, Erik Kessels, Peter Tscherkassky and Found Footage Magazine. I hope you will enjoy this little exploration.

Sound Art in NYC

Now, if any of you are living in NYC or visiting any time soon, then LeSon 7 is coming to your city in January. LeSon 7 is a sound art gallery founded in 2021 by Carolina Podestá and Andy Footner, which currently represents unique pieces of sound art by 25 artists from different fields and practices.

So far, the gallery has travelled from Paris to Buenos Aires, London to Madrid, with this next in January in New York, from 9-14 January, at 570 Broome Street. My own exclusive work wil be available to listen to, alongside Stephen Vitiello, Matthew Herbert, KMRU, Francois Bonnet,  Beatriz Ferreyra, Caroline Devine and many more.

Now, onward with a positive start to the year. Thanks, as always for your support and wishing you a good year ahead.

Warmest wishes

Professor Scanner

::: listen :::
The Complete Obscure Records Collection (Dialogo)
Carsten Nicolai: Ray Collector (Noton)
Clark: Cave Dog (Throttle)
Tom Recchion: Japanese Cassette (Feeding Tube)

::: read ::: 
Stanley Schtinter: Last Movies (Tenement Press)
Jason McBride : Eat Your Mind (Simon & Schuster)
Katharine Gates: Deviant Desires: A Tour of the Erotic Edge (Powerhouse)
Bruce Adams: You’re with Stupid (University of Texas Press)

::: watch :::
Fingermnails: Christos Nikou
A Short Film about Love: Krzysztof Kieślowski
The Golden Glove: Fatih Akin
Annette: Leos Carax