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Touch

NIBLOCK, PHILL - Touch Works, For Hurdy Gurdy And Voice

"Featuring the following works: 1. "Hurdy Hurry" (15:20, October 1999; Jim O'Rourke, hurdy gurdy [samples]). 2. "A Y U", aka "as yet untitled" (21:30, October 1999; Thomas Buckner, baritone voice [samples]). 3. "A Y U, Live", (21:30, October 1999/2000; Thomas Buckner, baritone voice [samples and live]). "Phill is a sixty-something New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He says: 'What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.' The stills in the booklet are from slides taken in China, while Niblock was making films which are painstaking studies of manual labor, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Niblock writes: 'In October 1999, I made a concert at Merkin Hall in New York, as part of the series Interpretations, produced by Thomas Buckner and the World Music Institute. The concert was shared with Ulrich Krieger, a composer and saxophonist living in Berlin. Normally, concerts in this series have two parts. Since Ulrich and I are collaborators for some years, we decided to interleave our works, and also to make a long concert. It was about three hours, nearly twice as long as is usual in this recital hall. I was preparing two new works for this concert. You guessed it, the pieces on this CD. The works are for hurdy gurdy, a stringed instrument played by cranking a resined wheel, and voice. I had met Jim O'Rourke some time before, and had asked him if I could make a piece using samples of his playing the hurdy gurdy. I recorded the samples in the studios of Robert Poss sometime in the winter of 1999. Tom Buckner and I had talked for some years about a possible piece. I asked him if we could do it for this concert. Later, he explained that he commissions works, so that was a pleasant surprise. When we were recording in Poss' studio, Tom was interested in doing some throat singing. I expected to work on these pieces during the summer of '99. I didn't, of course. I didn't start until two weeks before the concert date. I finished the voice piece on October 11, made the hurdy gurdy piece on the 12th and 13th. The concert was the 14th. On the hurdy gurdy piece, we hear only the samples recorded by O'Rourke. In the first version of A Y U, we hear only the original recorded samples of Tom Buckner singing. On the second piece, Tom recorded again in the studio, singing a line along (listening with headphones) with the first version of A Y U, and four channels of pitch shift were added to his live voice. He did this three times, for the entire length of the piece. Thus version one has twenty four voices, multitracked from samples. Version two has an added 15 tracks of the live voice. In each piece, I constructed some pitch shifted samples, and some of them were one and two octaves down. These were used along with the original samples as source material. There is not any other modification of the samples during the recording and mixing process.' [A review by Kyle Gann, published in the Village Voice, New York, November 9, 1999]" - Touch
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After nearly a decade of false starts, multiple game plans veering off the rails, and a handful of shattered hopes and/or dreams, the odyssey is finally complete—the new Fusetron site is here.

This is the first phase of a multipart rollout that will span the next few months: the currently browsable stock includes miscellaneous new releases from the past 8+ months (we have a lot of catching up to do), plus approximately a third of our backstock. Note that we’ve reduced/slashed prices on many titles and will continue to do so in order to make room for new stock. We’ll also be expanding / tweaking / improving / debugging the site itself (for example, we still have work to do on the automated international postage system, not to mention the inevitable inventory discrepancies that come with transferring an ancient and massive database to a new system).

Over the next few months, as we take inventory, clean house, and delve into our storage, we will be uploading thousands of additional items, gradually, on a near-daily basis. This will include the majority of the LPs, as well as many titles, in all formats, once thought long-gone. Many currently “sold out” items are likely to resurface.

Finally, once our general backstock is up (probably in the next two or three months) we’ll begin making our extensive stockpile of rarities available online for the first time: tons of random out-of-print titles, "deadstock," warehouse finds, secondhand collectibles, etc., accumulated over the past few decades.

Frequent/returning customers will be getting early access to these items. Details to follow on how this will work (a priority mailing list? a 'frequent flyer'-like program?), but it will not be based on dollars spent. We want to reward those who consistently support us, especially in the discogs marketplace era (to those who show up trying to poach five copies of a one-off rarity, and nothing else, ever… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ).

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