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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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2LP
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AF 001LP
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Written and conceived by Stephan Crasneanscki, LOVOTIC is a concept album by Soundwalk Collective, composed in collaboration with lauded actress and singer/songwriter Charlotte Gainsbourg. Featuring veteran techno stalwart AtomTM, rising singer/composer/performance artist Lyra Pramuk, celebrated actor Willem Dafoe, and writer/philosopher Paul B. Preciado, the album is released by the new Berlin-based Analogue Foundation. Inspired by a relatively new field of research that seeks to explore and develop the possibilities of sexual and emotional relationships -- and even love -- between humans and robots, LOVOTIC interrogates the impulses, ideas, and needs underlying this phenomenon. The project ventures into a future where sex, intimacy, and desire are reformulated through the connection of humans, robotics, and artificial intelligence. At present, however, such technologies are primarily used to produce programs of limited sexual iterations that do not question the preformatted categories of gender and sexual orientation. In contrast, on LOVOTIC, Soundwalk Collective ask whether the future of sex and sexuality could instead be an exponentially expanding kaleidoscope. Sonically LOVOTIC is unidentifiable, artificial, and genuinely futuristic, occupying an amorphous androgynous netherworld at the borderlands between biotic and android. The production tangibly evokes the odd, rubbery textures of faux flesh, the slick virtual glide or glitchy mishaps of software, and the sleek shine of hardware. Gleaming sound design creates shard-like surfaces redolent of Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's Glass, the slippery stretched sonics Gabor Lazar, and the unsettling dark ambience of TOWERS and Hallmark '87. At turns intimate and inviting, with whispering-in-your-ears ASMR vocals evoking blissful, heightened sexual states, within LOVOTIC there's optimism, but also unease; As well as the positive, it implies the negative ramifications of technology. Charlotte Gainsbourg invokes a being of unknown identity -- an artificial eve, the oracle and the portal --speaking from an unspecified time in the future. The voices of AtomTM, Lyra Pramuk and Willem Dafoe weave in and out of Charlotte's, often overlapping, merging into one another, expressing the entity of a being that's ephemeral and in constant flux, oscillating between the natural and artificial. The record's other bonafide singer, Lyra Pramuk's delivery alternates between spoken word, operatics and partially- unintelligible language. A multi-media project, LOVOTIC also features the work of writer, philosopher and curator Paul B. Preciado -- a leading thinker in the study of gender and body politics. Paul contributes a post-apocalyptic, quasi scientific and fictional text, which adds further fantasy, artistic and intellectual depth, augmenting the listener's experience. 180 gram clear vinyl; gold foil print; includes 16pp booklet.
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