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LP
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AF 002LP
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Laura Poitras's Oscar-nominated film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is an epic, emotional and interconnected story about internationally renowned artist and activist Nan Goldin. Told through intimate interviews, photography, and footage, central to the story is her personal fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for the opioid crisis. The film cuts to the bone with its incandescent celebration of life and condemnation of those who threaten it. Art and activism are one and the same. Helping to interweave Goldin's past and present, multi-disciplinary duo Soundwalk Collective soundtrack her personal and political struggles to sublime effect. The contemporary sonic arts platform of founder and artist Stephan Crasneanscki and producer Simone Merli, the pair work with a rotating constellation of artists and musicians, developing site-and-context-specific sound projects through which to examine conceptual, literary, or artistic themes. And for all the beauty and the bloodshed on show here, the duo strikes the balance just right; their compositions in collaboration with Zacharias Falkenberg and Johannes Malfatti producing a trance that oscillates between grace and madness. Within the score, Crasneanscki draws connections with the life and work of German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who was removed from society through confinement in institutions. In his last poems, written as fragments while he was plagued by mental illness, Hölderlin renders nature, in all its fragility and ephemerality. Similar themes merge in Laura's portrait of Goldin and serve as an inspiration for the composition of the choral songs and cantus within the soundtrack. Through the repetition of words and the layering of voices, the lyric scansion operates like a language possessed, echoing various styles from sacred music to modern minimalist techniques. The music is characterized by quivering strings and swells, de-tuning and lingering, shifting around the surreal, and creating a spectrum of musical experience. Exerts of Nan's narration are featured in two of the tracks, her powerful narration offering a more direct approach to the storytelling. In All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Poitras shows protest is really Goldin's great artwork: Her entire life had been leading to this moment of passionate expression, an inspired situationist gesture which fused the personal and the political. Art can change the world, which Poitras and Goldin tell us with powerful results. While there are multiple threads in this remarkable portrait which could have carried entire films, the soundtrack provides a sonic identity that helps keep track of proceedings. Utterly unique in their approach, Soundwalk Collective have delivered a gripping and thoughtful score, helping turn Goldin's personal pain into culture-rattling impact. 180 gram black vinyl.
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12"
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MARIONETT 008EP
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"Soundwalk Collective is a multi-disciplinary audio-visual collective founded by Stephan Crasneanscki, including members Simone Merli and Kamran Sadeghi. The Collective's approach to composition combines anthropology, ethnography, non- linear narrative, psycho-geography, the observation of nature, and explorations in recording and synthesis. The source material of their works is always linked to specific locations, natural or artificial, and requires long periods of investigative travel and field work. Their recent projects include a collaboration with Patti Smith and reworking the archive of recordings on Jean-Luc Godard's film set. For the 8th Marionette publication, Soundwalk Collective present Death Must Die. A sound piece that began in 2004 and ended up as a composition for the PS1 radio in NY. For this New release the Collective has revisited the piece in a more musical way. Death Must Die is based on Stephan Crasneanscki's multiple visits to the sacred Indian city of Varanasi, originally known as Kashi and Banares. Sacred texts maintain that Varanasi isn't even a city, but rather a lingam of celestial light, the subtle and cosmic form of Lord Shiva which manifested itself as a city for the sake of seekers of liberation. To bathe in the holy Ganga is to be purified of your sins. To die in Varanasi, is to attain liberation and to bring an end to the cycle of rebirth known as transmigration. Determined to capture the elusive reality of this ancient city, Stephan has day by day recorded and re-imagined his understanding of how to perceive the continuously moving stream of the holy Ganga; performing a simple form of sadhana, which request is to be very alert but also to allow your mind to be quiet, making it easier to slip into the streams, and into the current that both the city and the river are offering. Death Must Die begins before the rising of the sun and reproduces the cycle of a day in Varanasi, going down the river that is believed to be the divinity descended to this Earth in the form of water. She grants us happiness and salvation. The composition attempts to emulate the vibration of Kashi that encourages the kind of interiority that enables a person to get a better perspective on reality than one might have, while constantly being in the current of human life. A vibration dedicated to eliminating the distinction between human and non-human, between alive and dead, between light and dark."
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4LP BOX
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FANTOM 001LP
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A four-record anthology of Soundwalk Collective. Hertzian frequencies, radio interceptions, fragments of voices, singing sands, shortwave transmissions, archival recordings, vanished worlds, chaotic harmonies, daunting moments of confusion, an audible entropy, elation, and an endless search for beauty into chaos. The box set gathers four previously unreleased studio compositions by the New York and Berlin-based group of artists-musicians: Ulysses Syndrome, Medea, Empty Quarter, and Bessarabia, and a booklet including "Black-Winged Night", an essay by musician and writer David Toop, and a conversation between Soundwalk Collective and Dischi Fantom founder, Massimo Torrigiani. The four compositions -- mastered by Stefan Betke -- are the result of extensive journeys and field recordings in the Mediterranean basin, the Black Sea, the Rub' al Khali Desert, and the region around Odessa, once known as Bessarabia. An international genre-bending group of artists-musicians with studios in New York City and Berlin, the three members of Soundwalk Collective (Stephan Crasneanscki, Simone Merli, and Kamran Sadeghi) bound in Manhattan to produce concept albums, sound installations, and live performances, often in collaboration with other artists, musicians, and writers. Selected tracks from Transmissions are being broadcast internationally as part of Every Time A Ear Di Soun, the radio program of documenta14, curated by Adam Szymiczyk. The program includes a headphone installation in the Press and Information Centre in Kassel, designed by Aristide Antonas, and in the ASFA Library in Athens. An excerpt from the included essay by David Toop: "I hear this displacement of refrains. I am not fixed within signs but adrift within signals. Like a bat or a dolphin, I hear scanned frequencies otherwise inaudible to my human limitations and these voices and tones captured from the aether seem to me to
be our equivalent of those voices of gods who spoke 'words that flew'; music asserts its regional and cultural affiliations and yet at the same time it drifts unmoored
in the ocean of sound." Graphic design by Fabrizio Radaelli; Photography by Stephan Crasneanscki; Printed and assembled in Italy by Grafiche Antiga. Record pressing: Optimal Media, Germany; Mastering by Stefan Betke at ~Scape Mastering, Berlin; 160 gram vinyl; Edition of 300.
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