Preparations is an event where 23 artists create a preparation each for the grand piano. Three pianists/groups are then tasked with constructing individual live performances with the adaptable unit of preparations. For this second iteration of Preparations, musicians Finn Carter, Dear Laika and Ted Mair & Ed Bernez performed on the grand piano with preparations made by Ryoko Akama, Zoë Annesley, Jasper Appleby Sherring, Grace Black, Joseph Bradley Hill, Yasmine Brennan, Kara Chin, Gabriele Ciulli, Jacob Clayton, Leo DMB, enorê, Georgia Gendall, Harley Kuyck-Cohen, Kiran Leonard, Ruoru Mou, Siân Newlove-Drew, Karanjit Panesar, Lou Lou Sainsbury & Gabi Dao, Harry Smithson, Aga Ujma, Jake Vine, Tiffany Wellington & Isobel Whalley Payne. Finn Carter - untitled: For the preparation of the piano, Carter decided to leave the preparations untouched during his performance of the piece, with the sculptures positioned as follows: Yasmine Brennan’s My Albion?? was draped over the cast iron frame in the centre, next to Isobel Whalley Payne’s Untitled clover handkerchief which was weaved between the strings. Joseph Bradley Hill’s Jerry (an old oil can with ball bearings inside and a cloth coated wooden wedge protruding from the underside) sat on the iron frame closer to the keys, accompanied by Harley Kuyck-Cohen’s Demerara, Coffee, Tobacco (a carved wooden cat with a rotating head and beeswax eyes). Moving further up the piano, the arms of Jake Vine’s Mermaid’s Purse (a leather pouch with ceramic buttons inside) were fed in-between the strings, followed only by Gabriele Ciulli’s M & Ruoru Mou’s Scratch - Ciulli’s engraved brake pad dulled the strings with its weight, with Mou’s elongated ceramic hand causing a light resonance. Grace Black’s Conical Side Effect (a metal cone with a connected battery compartment that causes an LED to flash if the compartment is jolted) protruding behind them accompanied by Jacob Clayton’s Fishing magnet to put inside a piano, which stuck firmly to the frame, leaving the plastic keyring attached to the magnet to dangle on the strings and be moved by the vibrations. Sian Newlove-Drew’s Physics Angel was deemed too perishable to sit inside the piano itself, so for all three performances the glow-in-the-dark candle angel resided on the outer ledge of the piano, looking out at the audience. Dear Laika - Small vessel in sea green: For the performance, Thorn began by using Aga Ujma’s a midwinter night's dream (a silver aluminium wiry net of bells) as a shaken percussion instrument and Leo DMB’s waste i saw lorelei to as a mallet to hit the lower strings of the piano. The lower half of the piano was heavily prepared with Georgia Gendall’s Tapestry of Breath (a vacuum packed Ryvita with toothpaste, tic tacs and broken spaghetti), Kara Chin’s Shopping List (a large photo-covered, raisin box-filled, tentacled object), Harry Smithson’s Pothole to Aven (wrapped in Isobel Whalley Payne’s handkerchief) & Jasper Appleby-Sherring’s Praise (cavolo nero) (a bronze cast of kale atop a wooden and metal plate with locator bolts) all sat along one set of strings. Near the end of the performance Thorn used Karanjit Panesar’s Small vessel in sea green as a slide against certain strings, bifurcating them so each one would play two separate pitches on either side of the pot, reaching a sound halfway between that of a slide guitar and ondes martenot/theremin.

A masterclass in sound and texture from the Stockholm-based duo of John Chantler and Daniel M Karlsson, recorded at OTO in December 2023, following on from their ‘Hell or High Water’ release on Chantler’s 1703 Skivbolaget label the same year. From a dual synthesiser setup, the pair craft an incredibly naturalistic atmosphere - electronics not so much imitating organic sounds as creating their own little pocket of life, fully realised. The set slowly awakens like frozen ground thawing in the first spring sun; little sonic tendrils budding and reaching and gradually coalescing together in symbiosis. Ebbing and flowing, the momentum builds inexorably in ever-intricate patterns of tension and release; fractal forms unfurling and intertwining with a density that never collapses into aimless blowout even when the volume reaches a tumultuous peak. Finally, energy expended all at once, the piece falls back into a last cluster of sighing tones, and the day is done. -- Recorded by Billy Steiger Mixed and mastered by Daniel M Karlsson

Hyperdelia is happy to present Sun Kit’s debut record All The Patterns Inside. Sun Kit is an experimental band, formed in Berlin. The band consists of Jules Reidy (guitar) and Andreas Dzialocha (bass) and fuses both artists' singular sounds. Their debut album All the Patterns Inside is a moody and ecstatic ride that navigates distance and closeness, breaking and re-forming.The record was produced completely self-sufficiently at home, the two sending each other recordings and sketches back and forth, mostly as direct input signals. These layered interactions gradually turned into songs which increasingly were abstracted through electronics, filterings, effects, autotune and a whole lot of distortion. As a result, the album holds song-like structures with vocals (such as the title track, “Vain” or “Red”), electronically powered hyper-ballads (as on “Springtime Rain” or “Tunnel Vision”) as well as more grainy tracks which highlight the band’s experimental side (“All In”, “Release”).Sun Kit started as a friendship project of two musicians who traverse similar musical communities in Berlin. Hyperdelia has provided a home to both artists before through the Serenus Zeitblom Oktett (HEX 001), Andreas Dzialocha’s solo record For Always LP (HEX 005) as well as Stellan Veloce’s Complesso Spettro (HEX 006). All The Patterns Inside now shows Andreas’ and Jules’ different instrumental aesthetics in a band context. Consequently, Sun Kit teases out both musicians’ sonic sensibilities, highlighting the spectral complexities of their two instruments, an admiration for the engulfing power of distortion and a deep fascination for sound detail. Paired with Jules Reidy’s lyrical conjuring of seasonal change – its emotional intensity and healing powers –, Sun Kit at times takes inspiration from Low’s edgy mellowness, Cocteau Twin’s ethereal echoes or reminds of My Bloody Valentine’s blurred inwardness. All The Patterns Inside is the result of a friendship becoming band, a debut record thick with twists and turns and one bursting with feels.  --- Music by Andreas Dzialocha and Jules ReidyLyrics by Jules ReidyMixed and mastered by Joe Talia at Good Mixture --- Thank you Arthur Janssen, David Walker, Johanna Markert, Malte Kobel, Marta Forsberg, Sarah Saviet, Shusha, Silvia Maggi

Musician, writer and filmmaker, Sunik Kim follows up ‘The Bent Bow Must Wait to Be Released’ (Takuroku 2021) with their second LP - a deadly serious dismantling of the limits of contemporary computer music, delivered with playful dexterity and a touch of slapstick humour, a la Henry Cow.  Enlisting General MIDI to create frenetic, vital patterns of dis-organisation made up of gleeful synthetic trumpets, wry orchestral sweeps and brutal key clusters, Sunik Kim explodes a kind of simplistic sound into complex, beautifully uncertain structures. Rather than attempting to overwhelm or stun the listener into subjectivity, ‘Potential’ is ever shifting; regularly breaking form and unfolding, discreetly nibbling at the concept of the Spectacle and un-doing fatally closed systems of cyclic music.  On first listens we recalled Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, Stockhausen’s Gruppen, and even those weirdo attempts at making music from inside the world of Animal Crossing, Lil Jürg Frey. The overflowing ideas of Henry Cow (to which Kim dedicated a fantastically blended mix for the Wire in 2021) never drift too far from view, but contemporary counterparts lay few except for Yorkshire's most eminent polyceleratrix, Gretchen Aury, who we asked to write the liners. Gretchen’s words are unsurprisingly as extraordinary as the record itself, so we’ll close out the call to elicit a Media response to possibly the wildest OTOROKU yet with their words: “Potential reads as a rare honest response to the disaster capitalist era of the apparent nearing end of the anthropocene, a cyborg music which is not hopelessly psychotic like so much contemporary and especially computer-requiring music, but lucidly possessed with rapture, pain, madness, empathy, ecstasy, torment, fragility; all those vital feelings and incentives which our atrociously depressing times seem engineered to quash and bleed out of us. This sound is a blistering Electro Magnetic Pulse wave of revolutionary hope, exclaiming defiantly that History is not over, that the future is not ‘history,’ that there is still a vast multitude of ideas and identities burning brightly and resiliently, despite the fact that they are inconceivable to the tyrannical Hegemonic axis of global capitalist tech-culture. I ask of you, listener, if you truly wish to plunge beyond The Known, give yourself over in full to this record.” — Artwork by Sunik Kim Layout and design by Jeroen Wille  Liner notes by Vymethoxy Redspiders Mastered by Anotine Nouel at Sound Love Studios Track 1 edited by John Wall —

'Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces' is the debut release from London-based percussionist and sound artist Regan Bowering. Her music is created by placing snare drum, amplifiers and microphones in configurations which trigger volatile yet malleable flows of sound. Across these four tracks, percussion and amplifier feedback are carved into crescendos and diminuendos where coarse textures move in intricate constellations. The album charts this process travelling through different contexts, moving from live improvisations in a large, reverberant hall to micro-edited versions on a laptop. Bowering’s interest in feedback is an extension of research into how, historically, technology (such as mics, amplification, instrumentation, and recording processes) have affected the ways improvisers approach rhythm. “I wanted to explore ways to use the drums that extended beyond typical rhythmic gestures or the need to hit the drums to generate sound,” Bowering explains. “To create a continuous texture which doesn’t need continuous input. The unpredictability of feedback is what draws me to it. It’s similar to playing with another musician. Things can happen unexpectedly, just like in a group improvisation.” To our ears, touchstones for Bowering’s use of space and feedback could be Alvin Lucier, or perhaps even Ryosuke Kiyasu’s radical approach to percussion, amplification and setting. However, there are fluctuations between frenzy and gentleness, a sensitivity to mood and affect on 'Solos for _ _ _ _ spaces' which are uniquely hers. This is far more intricate than a simple bridging of minimalism, free-improvisation and electro-acoustic techniques. This is perhaps explained by some of the musicians that Bowering mentions having a long-running impact on her practice, from percussionist Seijiro Murayama to saxophonist, composer and Art Ensemble of Chicago founder Roscoe Mitchell. While their influence may not be explicitly audible in these four tracks, their unique approaches to texture, space and improvisation are undoubtedly present. Bowering treats what might typically be cacophonous – drums and feedback – with subtlety and nuance. “I like exploring the possibilities in feedback beyond just harshness, and drums beyond being loud and rhythmically dense,” she reflects. “The detail that’s possible. The emotional intensity you can get from different sounds. The feelings that come when you move between extremes, such as from loud and abrasive to almost silent. The feedback gives me a different set of colours to work with, a different material to carve as part of my sonic and rhythmic pallet as a percussionist.” System, organism, ecosystem – there’s a litany of metaphors which could be used to describe how her music is produced. All make sense, and all feel slightly inadequate. Her music originates in processes, but its realisation comes through liveness and response. Bowering manipulates the sound by bending drum skins to change pitch, moving mics to alter intensity. Striking the snare to trigger dramatic upheavals in the circuit. But her music is a balancing act, a compromise between her own actions and the context they’re happening in. “It’s a system I improvise within, but it’s also always affected by the space I’m playing in. The acoustics, the number of people in a room and if they move. How I’m feeling at the time. These subtle dynamics all affect the sound.” This variation is highlighted throughout the album. The recordings here document performances in vastly different settings. A reverberant hall at Goldsmith’s University. An intimate gig at Avalon Café where the audience enclosed Bowering, and on track 3, an empty studio. For the final track, a DAW is used to rearrange components from the preceding three into a new composition. Here feedback and drums enter the possibilities of another space, a computer, and the different means of response it offers. More than a live album, this tape charts a consistent practice applied to inconsistent contexts, capturing in real time how the outcomes are determined by the player, the moment and the situation. credits -- Mastered by Billy SteigerAll sounds by Regan Bowering.

Hyperdelia is proud to present “splitter musik” - the first Splitter Orchester album solely consisting of the ensemble’s own music. Previous recordings have highlighted the orchestra’s vast genre-bending output in collaboration with George Lewis, The Pitch and Felix Kubin. This 3CD release aptly titled “splitter musik” showcases for the first time the orchestra’s very own musical process.As a large scale improvising ensemble, Splitter Orchester has no central leader and is organised through direct democratic principles. Founded in 2010, Splitter is a unique collective of composer-performers with various backgrounds in the Echtzeitmusik, free improvisation and experimental music scenes in Berlin. Despite the long lasting collaboration and the mostly consistent line-up of musicians, the band maintains an incredible dynamism, continuously reinventing concert formats and composition processes. Collective and free improvisation involves risk-taking: Splitter’s endeavour of integrating up to 24 musicians takes this motto to heart. The result is a music characterised by an inherent possibility of failure.Splitter has also always been a social experiment, questioning hierarchies of composer and interpreter, of work and event. Sonically and musically non-homogenous but still ensemble, a togetherness in difference. This is also heard in the three different pieces on “splitter musik”.Vortex is a recording of a concert at Berlin’s silent green in November 2019. More than 30 individual tracks have been mixed so as to approximate the listening situation in the former crematorium: musicians were positioned on the balconies of the circular chapel, while the audience was seated below. What listeners of the recording can hear is Splitter in its natural habitat of collective improvisation: various noises of indeterminate origin, miniscule bird-like chirping, tendencies of Postrock cues with culminating crescendi, at other points radical breaks and quiet, drone-like passages or moments of Lynchian haunting.Imagine Splitter - the second piece of the record - takes a more conceptual approach. During the Covid pandemic, the band had to find a different way of collaborating. As a result, Kai Fagaschinski asked all members of the ensemble to record themselves “solo”. The title of the piece carries the instructions: Imagine Splitter. What listeners hear is a synthesis of 22 musicians playing to themselves while imagining what it would sound like to play with the whole group. The piece is not only a fantastically fictitious music but also a reflection on improvisation as a whole and the group in particular. It sounds both strangely familiar and like a music that would never have happened in a live setting.For the last piece PAS, Splitter played their first ever outside and site-specific gig in August 2020. Musicians were positioned on one side of the river Spree, on the docks of the venue Petersburg Arts Space in Berlin Moabit, while the audience was listening from the opposite side. The recording captures this unique theatrical musical event. PAS is an environmental music, a collective improvisation of the group itself and its (in)voluntary collaboration with the sounds of the surrounding: the dogs barking, boats crossing, kids laughing, beer bottles popping, water squelching, ducks singing and of course the characteristic playful searching for one another in the midst of the music.Throughout these pieces, the 3CD release “splitter musik” takes a snapshot of the abundant and ever-shifting organism that is Splitter Orchester.