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Touch radio

Turning 25 all year long

By SUSANNA BOLLE | October 22, 2007

Chris Watson

For the past year, the venerable UK experimental-music label Touch has been celebrating its 25th anniversary. Known for its distinctive graphic design (one of the label heads is the celebrated designer Jon Wozencroft), Touch has released music by a stellar line-up of sound artists and musicians including Austrian guitarist Fennesz, British turntablist Philip Jeck, and New York composer Phill Niblock. The “Touch Radio” section of the label’s Web site periodically posts live sets and unreleased pieces by its stable of artists as streaming MP3s. Here’s an overview of some recent offerings.

Lasse Marhaug, “Into the Pandemonium”
Norwegian noise artist Lasse Marhaug recently released his first CD on Touch, a collaboration with the classical organist Nils Henrik Asheim titled Grand Mutation. In this similarly overpowering set, Marhaug celebrates the glories of extreme heavy metal by ripping apart classic death-metal songs and reconfiguring them into a thunderous, 32-minute dirge.

Chris Watson, “The Sound of Islay: A Report from the Hebrides”
Watson was one of the original members of the experimental industrial group Cabaret Voltaire. Since leaving the Cabs in the early 1980s, he’s made his name as a professional sound recordist, doing work in the field for BBC nature documentaries and the like. “The Sound of Islay” is a collection of Watson’s recordings and observations of wildlife on the Island of Islay in the Scottish Hebrides; it offers the strange, often unearthly sounds of birds, the clattering of grasses, and wind, wind, and still more wind.

Steve Roden, “9 Sided Room”
A little bit of self-reflection from this Los Angeles–based sound artist, as Steve Roden layers nine of his own vinyl recordings to create a crackling, oneiric bit of sonic drift. With its woozy piano and gentle, rumbling textures, this is vaguely reminiscent of some of William Basinski’s looping decompositions, but a tad less mind-numbing.

Leif Elggren, “Live In London”
In this 2006 live set, the eccentric Swedish sound artist and founder of the mythical land of Elgaland/Vargaland purports to use sounds that his fetal self captured in utero using a recording device lodged in his as-yet-unformed teeth. The results are not nearly as odd as the concept, centering on washes of static and a rather pleasant, propeller-like buzz.

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