Kaffe Matthews - Cd Cécile (1999)

"Kaffe Matthews has been making and performing new electro-acoustic music since 1990. She is acknowledged as a leading figure and pioneer in the field of electronic improvisation and live composition making on average 50 performances a year worldwide. In 1997 she established the label Annette Works, releasing the best of these events on the six cd's, 'cd Ann', 'cd Bea' , 'cd cecile' ,'cd dd', 'cd eb and flo' presenting an annual document of ever developing sound worlds.

Currently she is rarely performing, instead directing the collaborative research project Music for Bodies with multidisciplinary professionals and the community, bringing new music and some ideas about listening to everyone.(NESTA Dreamtime Fellowship, 2005).

Kaffe has become known for making site-specific sound works live, playing in the dark in the middle of the space, the audience surrounding her, the sounds moving around them. She uses self-designed software matrices through which she pulls, pushes and reprocesses sounds live, using microphones, a theremin, and feedback within the space; the site then becoming her instrument.

It is this practice that she has shifted to sonic furniture building, with Sonic Bed_London (Distinction: Prix Ars Electronica, 2006) and the Worldwide Bed project being a central pin in this ongoing project.

Kaffe also collaborates and has worked and performed with many artists worldwide including AGF, Ryoko Kuwajima, Eliane Radigue (The Lappetites), David Muth, Shri, Mandy McIntosh, Zeena Parkins, Sachiko M, Brian Duffy, Leafcutter John, Janek Schaeffer, Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, Pan-Sonic, Alan Lamb, Christian Fennesz, and ongoing democractic stuggles with pan-European electronics orchestra 'MIMEO'. Her most recent collaborative release, Before the Libretto, by the Lappetites, was voted in the WIRE's best top 10 new releases for 2005.

She has also been making a growing body of composed works through collaborations with a variety of people, things and processes. From working with NASA astronauts researching the sonic experience of space travel, making BAFTA awarded Weightless Animals: kites and the weather on an uninhabited Scottish island,Sanda, Weather Made; taut Wires in the Australian outback with Alan Lamb; Touching Concrete Lightly for MIMEO and the Oscar Niemeyeyer Pavilion 2003, Serpentine Gallery; and the innovative Radio Cycle, a concept and works for maps, bikes and radios.

Kaffe's Background:

Playing classical violin from the age of 7, singing badly in one band but getting further with bass and drums in another which recorded and toured for 4 years, in 1985 she discovered electricity and sound and with that, her current trajectory.

Since then, acid house engineering, electrically reconstructing the violin, Distinction for a Masters in Music Technology, introducing and running a Performance Technology course at one of the leading Live Arts Colleges in the UK, and establishing the label Annette Works. She also set up a shop and did a Zoology degree along the way." [in annette works]

1-3. Contact C
4-12. My Love Gave Me A Blue Plastic Watch
13-19. Skagerrak:
13. This Many B Planes
14. The Air Underneath
15. The Surface Is Air I Believe
16. At Night
17. The Air Hostess
18. Touch Down
19. Outside

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Escaping From Color - Rapoon Recomposed & Remixed (2007)

"Again Quasi Pop Label hits the target, with one of the most interesting compilation CDs coming lately to my hands. So, this is at my eyes a kind of tribute to British ethnic ambient industrial solo project known as RAPOON, which has been developing all its talent through the years. Through “escaping from color: Rapoon recomposed & remixed” album. We swim in an experimental sea of creativity, originality and dynamism. This time Quasi Pop Label in the shape of Edward.S has gathered a selection of one of the most representative projects inside experimental/ambient scene to escape from reality and to enter in a no colors world, when Rapoon is the only tangible reality. A reality based in 15 compositions, all of them bringing the necessary essence to represent in a concrete way the nature of an act such as Rapoon.

FRANCISCO LOPEZ, with more a high quantity of releases, and having traveled the world developing electro acoustic performances, is opening this album with a minimalistic ambient composition, floating slowly from start to finish. TV POW, surprises this time with an excellent track, full of dense percussive sounds and effects surrounding the whole track. Really one of the best tracks here. The german duo of Baraka (H) and Glit(S)ch known as TROUM,one of the most representative acts nowadays comes with a tribal ethnic composition with impressive percussive elements which moulds perfectly with the structure of the track in general.

The sound & Media explorer from Portugal, PAULO RAPOSO, makes its presence in this album with an interesting track, in the hands of drone sounds mutating into dense ambient atmospheres, creating architectural spaces through such musical vortex, as only Mr. Raposo could create. AIDAN BAKER, devour us with a magnificent convergence of drone elements, mixed with dense eerie percussive sounds floating between each atmosphere, to create an hypnotic voyage to the most hidden realms of Rapoon. FAMILY UNDERGROUND is a Danish trio, adapting its track into psychedelic drone/noise invasion full of madness. Another artist to mention is Swedish RONNIE SUDIN, creating hypnologic states, covering a wide range of styles as experimental and electronics. This time he develops a provocative ambient piece with vibrating elements, abrasive atmospheres and subliminal vociferations at the core of this track.

CISFINITUM, the Russian ambient act, develops a perfect emotive live track which was recorded 29.10.2006 at “Lkra” Club in Moscow, together with RAPOON, in which the percussive elements and atmospheres are the predominant patterns marked here. Limited to 500 copies, and coming in a kind of digipack with abstract drawings and general art, which reflects in part the material included on this excellent release."

1. Francisco Lopez “Untitled #193”
2. TV Pow “Ladder Friends Remix”
3. Machinefabriek “Drijfzand”
4. Troum “Farawer”
5. Steve Roden “Colorscape Forming”
6. Jorge Castro “Depths”
7. Paulo Raposo “Tidal Winds”
8. Aidan Baker “Percussive Drone”
9. Anla Courtis “Rapooned Rapunga”
10. Gert-Jan Prins “Raponsje”
11. Heimir Bjorgulfsson “Obmam Ognom”
12. Mike Shiflet “Version Belize”
13. Family Underground “Tube”
14. Ronnie Sundin “Distant Demons”
15. Cisfinitum & Rapoon “Live in Ikra, Moscow 2006”

+limited edition of 500 copies*

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Terre Thaemlitz - Means From an End (1998)

"Thaemlitz's deepening descent into the obscure sonorities of hard disk recording is here pushed to new extremes. Compositionally, Means From an End focuses on the metaphoric reconstitution of meaning through the social field, and is equal both in scope and sonic detail to the output of freeform academicians such as Francois Bayle and Jim Horton. But as challenging as the music is -- fuzz, clicks, and thin sheets of off-putting digital synthesis constitutes much of the hour on offer here -- the music is among some of the most engaging and even, at times, touching of Thaemlitz's career (particularly the title suite, which closes out the disc)".
by Sean Cooper, in All Music Guide

(1998 mille plateaux mp 44 / efa 00694-2) cd

01 00:02:00 02:01:11 g1.a-j
02 02:03:11 02:05:60 g6.a-s
03 04:08:71 02:49:50 g3.a-l
04 06:58:46 01:34:23 g2.a-o
05 08:32:69 02:18:07 g7.a-t
06 10:51:01 02:33:13 g5.a-s
07 13:24:14 02:09:49 g4.a-s
08 15:33:63 01:11:22 commentary
09 16:45:10 00:49:10 resistance
10 17:34:20 03:19:70 resignation
11 20:54:15 03:09:07 transformative nostalgia
12 24:03:22 08:27:52 still life w/ numerical analysis
13 32:30:74 10:28:30 means from an end
14 42:59:29 03:11:08 reduction of contents
15 46:10:37 01:08:56 reinroduction of contents i
16 47:19:18 07:40:38 means to a means
17 54:59:56 00:34:52 reinroduction of contents ii
18 55:34:33 08:24:36 end to a means
cd 63:56:69_total

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Still about "Means From an End"

"For Terre Thaemlitz, sonic synthesis is analogous to a bewildering, yet liberating multiplicity of historically determined social agendas. It is also his tool for commenting on that multiplicity. Though his theories undoubtedly come first, that's not to say his music disintegrates if you remove its theoretical scaffold. Besides, the weighty language masks a radical playfulness - the project is far more engaging than first appears. The disc comes in four sections. The first, called "Inelegant Implementations," loops brief jazz snippets and passes them through a waveform analysis of radical/pop cultural soundbites, for reasons Thaemlitz's sleevenotes best fathom. The second part is a sonic essay on "overcoming resistance to radical social change," which translates as a witty deconstruction of Billy Joel. "Still Life w/Numerical Analysis" is an eight minute sound collage around a high register operatic drone - which softens you up for the last part, the title track itself. "Means from an End" bombards the listener with high frequency noises. In his attempt to deploy music as an agent of deconditioning, Thaemlitz's methods come close to the audiences-baiting techniques of Non and Throbbing Gristle. But in its final transition from Metal Machine Music aggression to the Enoid serenity of Evening Star, Thaemlitz raises the suspicion that he's not quite the stern neo-Marxist theoretician he makes himself out to be."

by: Chris Sharp; in Wire, March 1998, issue 169.