SADIE POWERS – SOUVENIR
Sadie Powers is a bassist and sound artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has a wide range of experience: she performed with Shearwater, Ed Rodriguez (Deerhoof), Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu), and many other artists, composed works for ensemble and dance and has a considerable track record in the field of musique concrète, ambient, and electroacoustic music.
On her solo album Souvenir, her music is a meditation on loss and grief.
“Between 2020 and 2022, a significant number of friends and family passed away. Due to the pandemic, funerals became impossible to travel to or just didn’t happen. How does one grieve alone?
The (four) tracks are built around the instrument she has been playing for about 20 years: the fretless bass.
“It’s an unforgiving instrument. It exposes everything. Suggestive to subtle touches. It shows the hand of the player.”
She recorded different improvisations – “improvisations with silence, thinking of those I’d lost” – and then restructured, processed, and layered the tracks to a sound collage by adding music box bells, sheet metal, cardboard box, and field recordings from her home.
The combination is striking – especially on a sound system that can handle the low frequencies:
“Sounds drifting in and out like recollections, like ghosts. The practice became a life raft, or a grieving raft.”
Souvenir is mastered by Lawrence English and released on Room40 as a digital-only release.
Available in a limited (100) CD edition and digital
KURT LIEDWART – VOLTA
Kurt Liedwart‘s career easily spans over 20 years. Electronic (techno and ambient) musician, mastering engineer, graphic designer, and curator for various labels and radio shows.
He recently started a new label, together with Sergey Kolosov (photographer) and Christian Müller (electronic musician). TON Editions will be the home for ambient, chill, downtempo electronica, ambient, and dub techno that will be released ‘on CDs, tapes and rarely on vinyl’.
Volta is the first introduction to that label and sets the tone. It’s the first album in a planned series of five. Liedwart “revisits and reimagines sounds from his unreleased techno albums of the late 1990s, blending them into a fresh sonic tapestry”. His aim is “to create music that is both beautiful and tinged with a sense of naivety, firmly rooted in underground aesthetics’.
The music – and especially the sound – may be firmly rooted in techno culture, but don’t expect beats: this is music “perfectly suited for the chillout rooms of modern techno club culture”.
Even (or maybe especially) if that club is your home.