Sound Poetics

Erased Tapes announce Bell Orchestre’s House Music — an immersive ecosystem of an album to be released on March 19, and the first full-length work released by the acclaimed Montreal-based outfit in over a decade. House Music unfolds as one long piece, a recorded-then-sculpted improvisation that vastly expands their work, coalescing classical and electronic instrumentation in the creation of genre-defying musical worlds.

"It all started with a field recording taken near a waterfall, where the rushing sound reminded me of the drowsy hiss of a cassette tape. Listening to the movement of water enticed me to explore the poetics of linearity. Each track of the album is made from a tape loop sample of the previous one; what is to come could not exist without the present."

ANNA HOMLER, is a vocal, visual and performance artist based in Los Angeles. She has performed and exhibited her work in venues around the world. With a sensibility that is both ancient and post-modern, Homler sings in an improvised melodic language. Her work explores alternative means of communication and the poetics of ordinary things. She creates perceptual interventions by using language as music and objects as instruments. Since 1982 she has collaborated in America with composer/musicians Steve Moshier, David Moss, Ethan James, Steve Roden, and Steve Peters; and in Europe, with the Voices of Kwahn, Steve Beresford, Peter Kowald, Frank Schulte, Richard Sanderson, Geert Waegeman, and Sylvia Hallett, among others.

Anybody who was hoping the second Lenka album would be a dark, moody, sober, edgy, or in any way downcast affair is, first of all, probably not a very realistic person and, secondly, gearing up for a serious disappointment. Otherwise, it's hard to imagine anybody being disappointed by the Australian sparkle-pop princess' sophomore outing, which is every bit as lovably bright and sunny as her debut. (Unless, of course, the listener in question doesn't have the stomach for this sort of frothy, sugary-sweet musical confection to begin with which is certainly understandable, though still a darn shame.) That said, Two definitely does have a bit more bite than its predecessor, and a slightly more modern sound, tending away from Lenka's lavish, Hollywood-style orchestrations toward lightly embellished small-group arrangements and, occasionally, sleek electro-pop.

For many, Kendra Morris’s Nine Lives will serve as an introduction to the singer from New York: cinematic soul from an artist who’s got the pipes to rattle a listener out of their daily malaise. The latest product of her 11-year bond with co-writer and producer Jeremy Page—a sound that recalls Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi’s success with Amy Winehouse, filtered through slickly-produced hip-hop soul—Nine Lives paints the portrait of a career survivor who’s still willing to take risks after all of the ups and downs.

The paths of our thoughts, fantasies, and dreams are often convoluted. Since ancient times, the labyrinth has been a symbol of life itself with its paths, crossroads, dead ends, and odysseys. Some such mazes, though full of nooks and crannies, have only one path, one goal, and one exit. Others offer various routes. Written in 2016/17 for saxophone quartet, Poética del Laberinto [Poetics of the Labyrinth] by the Spanish composer Alberto Posadas is a cycle about three particularly iconic labyrinths from ancient times to the present day. In contrast to his usual way of composing, these three pieces are also framed by freely determined paths of reminiscence and a successive evolution of the instrumental sound from uniformity of four soprano saxophones through the diversity of four distinct registers to the dominance of the bass register at the end.