‘face first in the entangled’ is Infant’s illustration of the “organic internet” between different lifeforms built by mushrooms. These mycological structures see wild fungi coordinating and operating in a decentralized yet organized fashion, leading to dramatic ‘social changes’ without the need for leaders. The music follows a similar path, with Detroit-based Patrick Miller working over a year-and-a-half to forge a mimic of such systems, eschewing lead elements in favor of co-mingling patches of sound. The role of composer is reframed here, Infant regressing to a more passive position as listener within the chain that led to the dense and untamed beauty of ‘face first in the entangled’. The process turned crude granular synth freeware into showering spores, vocal improvisations into near-unrecognisable murmurs, and field recordings and drum programmes into a distant pulse. The sonic elements at play swim around one and other and freely-associate, forming “micro-dramas” as the artist puts it, with each element playing a different, mutating part. The networked tangle of sounds adheres to its own inner-logic, pricking the sonic field, turning composted samples into a blooming forest floor littered with unexpected moments of shimmering denouement. The work was inspired by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin or Anna Tsing, both of whom sought to reject traditional hero narratives. The latter’s “The Mushroom at the end of the World” describes the foraging of prized matsutake mushrooms on forest floors worldwide, untamable by humans, and reliant on its symbiotic relationship with tree roots. The symbiosis of sounds Infant captures on ‘face first in the entangled’ reflects such organic structures, where the world is forged by an unknowable network of biological processes, rather than any one being. --- Music by Infantinfaaant.bandcamp.cominstagram.com/infantinfantinfant/Cover and photos by InfantMastered by Adam Badí Donovalabdonoval.comWords by Tristan Bathtristanbath.comPhotography by Leontína Berkováleontinaberkova.com

Somewhere between the buzzing Cyborg bugs and the whistling of extinct birds. Welcome to the hybrid zoo built on the ruins of the biotic crisis. You can explore the chirping, singing and trilling of birds and insects, which you know from pictures of cryptozoological encyclopedias or go straight to synthetic ornithology, where you can listen to mutated biorhythms. Everyone knows Mockingjay call, but who heard the voice of the Double-headed emu or the rustle of invisible community living in the crown of the Muku tree? Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist, composer and an attentive listener based in Berlin. She plays her found native Australian wildlife archive and other field recordings, either through a stereophonic system or often via hand-made speakers and found objects – exploring the timbre and forms of found and self-recorded animal voices while mimicking biophonic patterns to create minimal quasi-bioacoustic environments. "Tracks on Creepy Crawly were made between 2017-19. Samples were taken from found animal sounds and field recordings made in Berlin and trips to Japan and Australia.Some of the material was played live along side my collaborators in duo projects Native Instrument (Shelter Press, Entr'acte) and Plants and Animalia." Five compositions are perfect gateway to the Mangan archive, which is rather embedded aural illusion- speculative echo of spieces than a reproduction of rural soundscape. Felicity has presented projects in many different settings from galleries, gardens, clubs and festivals throughout Europe. Including National Gallery Denmark, Technosphärenklänge CTM/HKW and Sonic Act Academy.

Among the musicians whose work closely reflects the reduced forms in experimental music, perhaps the most interesting is Cristián Alvear, a Chilean guitarist performing formally radical post-Cagean music, as well as Laurent Peter aka d'incise, a composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer, one of the key figures of the eclectic scene in Geneva. The numerous projects in which they participate prove their strictly defined artistic vision and active involvement in networking the music community, so it’s appropriate to consider them as transitory elements between several scenes on different continents. They have collaborated, among others, with Ryoko Akama, Cyril Bondi, Michael Pisaro, Sarah Hennies, Seijiro Murayama, Taku Sugimoto, Lance Austin Olsen and The Pitch.Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings is a good example of the refinement of the style developed by Alvear and d’incise in recent years. One can observe here how their musical language and range of instrumental techniques in the use of guitar and idiophones got crystallised.The classical form of a musical piece organized in time and characterized by a set of elements that create a coherent narrative is replaced here by the primacy of repetition, pitch, precise articulation and reverberation. Sounds seem to be clearly rooted in specific acoustic spaces, which allows the space itself to be treated as a real instrument that adds another layer of meaning. Repetitive sound sequences operate in a similar way to the metronome, determining an obsessive rhythmic pattern, a kind of matrix on which all the details are inscribed. The static structure of the pieces allows the music to function as a sound sculpture - breaking time constraints in favour of continuous duration and acting in a multi-perspective way. This material, does not promise any solution, but strictly accompanies the listener and tries to close itself in the continuous present.At the same time Bow Down Thine Ear, I Bring You Glad Tidings is a clear dialogue with the work of Henry Purcell. The title of the album is a reference to the anthems written by the British composer (Z11, Z2) and the titles of the pieces refer to his sacred songs (Z192, Z342). Apart from a skillful attempt to decontextualize the lyrics (biblical or rooted in the tradition of baroque religious poetry), we can see here not so much an attempt to give the music a metaphysical character, but certainly Alvear and d’incise tend to replicate a similar mode of listening, as in the case of Purcell's compositions - meditative and at the same time oriented to all elements of the musical situation.  --- Cristián Alvear / guitard'incise / percussion (2 series of "tuned objects"), post-processings recorded in a different space ---Recorded at Insub.studio, Geneva, May 2019Processings recorded at La Senne, Bruxelles, May & September 2019Edited & mixed by d’inciseCover art by Nick Hoffmanpilgrimtalk.bandcamp.comMastered by Adam Badí Donovalabdonoval.comWords by Paweł Szroniakrozkurz.tumblr.comPhotography by Leontína Berkováleontinaberkova.com

"From the crystalline sources of the stony rivers through the waves of 5G networks to the blood stream of yellow plasma. Mustikoita ja kissankelloja is like a chaotic sonic sedimentation of new weird Finland music revitalised and flowing through different waste channels, protected habitats and clogged veins. You can scan the microview and listen to the pointillistic murmur on a petri dish or try to stalk the tectonic movements.Do you remember the pure electronic ocean of the Pacific Tubular Waves created by Michel Redolfi in 1980? Take Redolfi's water music, pour it into the electron–positron collider, and use Olli Aarni's nanoscopic microphone. You'll find a frenetic mix of trembling static, singing bacteria, thermal bubbles, crinkling fossils, buzzing signals and crackling glaciers – all teeming on unseen wavelengths.The result is a living matter: soundscapes recorded in humid forests, endlessly mutating patterns, and warm ambient evaporating from various well-known electroacoustic studios."  --- 2016–2019Vaatekomero, VantaaElektronmusikstudion, StockholmQ-O2, BrusselsWorm/Klangendum studio, RotterdamMusic by Olli Aarniolliaarni.bandcamp.comVideo by Olli Aarniyoutube.com/watch?v=ztyEdc6qNfoCover art by Heta Bilaletdinhetabilaletdin.weebly.comMastered by Pentti DassumPhotography by Leontína Berkováleontinaberkova.comThanks toMusiikinedistämissäätiöSamuel Huberin TaidesäätiöEMS Stockholm & Worm / Klangendum Q-02

"Panelák. Fenced square garden at the entrance. Tree limbs, dried skin of snake, snails with cracked shells. Once upon a time there were plants. Soaked orange peel in front of the door. Buzzing of door bells. Elevator drone. You count the floors while you follow the picture instructions. Capacity and weight of three-dimensional space. You are entering the apartment. Horseshoe above the door. A wooden mask next to a whistling kettle. Seashells in plastic box. Phantom signal. Sheep fur on the couch. You straighten out all the folds. Mute TV. Documentary program- wolves, octopus, worms and a shark. Clock metronome. One minute, two minutes, twenty-seven minutes. 60% polyester pyjamas. Brain-shaped smog behind the window. Smoke, dust or just fog. You put wax in one ear, cotton in the other. I love this city and its outlying lands. My romantic landscape.Sarah Hughes’ multidisciplinary arts practice, comprising composition, performance, curating and installation, revolves around the relationship between social and environmental systems of cooperation. The work draws from various contexts including ecology, feminist politics, alternative economies, land use, and protest in order to explore speculative systems of organisation and collaboration as the ground for social change.Hughes’s work has been exhibited and performed internationally, including at South London Gallery, Punt WG Amsterdam, Cass Sculpture Foundation, Supplement, and Modern Art Oxford. Her compositions have been performed by various ensembles and at various festivals including London Contemporary Music Festival, Music We'd Like To Hear, and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Realisations of her compositions have been published by Another Timbre, Suppedaneum, Melange Editions, and Consumer Waste, and broadcast on the BBC." --- Composed and performed by Sarah HughesFor zither, piano, Hammond organ, sine tones, white noise, electric harpsichord and objects.Written in response to the work of Fernand Léger First performed at an exhibition of his work at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes --- Recorded by Patrick Farmer at SARU studios, 2017, OxfordThe recording was supported Sound and Music and Oxford Brookes UniversityArtwork by Andrea Šafaříková (andreasafarikova.com)Risograph print by HIBERNANT.NET

It is raw material rather than tool. Polished metal body or beslavered tube. Just tenor sax at the end of its pilgrimage. It is sculptural object - assemblage without original function rather than a museum artefact of musical viruosity. Heavy metals flowing through the sewer from the concert hall. Small scrap dried by sunlights. Bubbling, squealing and rustling. Circular breathing - as if you have been blowing glass. Objects shaped by breath. Sébastien Branche as a sculptor and a bricolier. Sébastien plays soprano, tenor and C-melody saxophones. He got started with improvisation through workshops with musicians coming from contemporary jazz or improvised music.Interested in perceptive phenomenons, he works mainly with sound as a material, describing himself as a “sound crafter”. His interests also extends to body and space, as he regularly confronts his practice to contemporary dance, soundart, through collaborations mainly with photographer Diane Martinot and music and technology, through the use of programming language Supercollider. Based in Leipzig, Germany since 2015, he is an active member of the blooming local scene. --- "Augmented Saxophone Solo" Performed by Sébastien Branche Recorded at Neue Musik Leipzig by Sébastien Branche Artwork and risograph print by HIBERNANT.NET

“The recordings were made over a period of a couple of years. The windmill is located about a mile north of the town where i live, on what i assume is ranch land used for raising cattle. It was once used to pull water from underground to fill a couple of large tanks nearby. It's in a bad state and no longer in use. There are two large crows nests at the top, and the inner workings are laying on the ground next to it.” The recordings were made using a mini-disc recorder and hand made contact microphone. They are monaural recordings. Jeph Jerman is appearing in a variety of musical groups and collaborative projects across different genres for more than three decades. From the nineties, we can see in his extensive work a great interest in the sole act of listening. Rather than a classical musician, he is more suggestive of a sound wanderer who sets off daily from his home to the surrounding Arizona desert (characteristically named Sonoran desert), where he records sound fragments or collects found objects which he uses in his improvisations and performances. As a contemplative walker without a set destination, he is interested in the pure sound without references. To what we listen is not so important, what matters most is the time, place and the way we listen. Unlike other field recording artists, Jerman is not interested in the aesthetic richness or sonic variety, but simplicity, gentle differences, vibrations, moderation, and the primordial animalism on the quiet edge of organic and inorganic nature. The 34° 111' 3" N 111° 95' 4" W named field recording is a collection of three pieces, in which Jerman maps a specific place and which carefully reflect his life philosophy. It’s a recording of an abandoned windmill in different times, stages of decomposition and weather conditions. The symbol of the circle and rotation and the moaning material shaped by nature elements subtly fit in the comprehensive sound diary and environment where Jerman moves and lives. "These days I don't try to evoke anything. I make sound that'll hopefully be listened to.“ Jeph Jerman has already collaborated with artists like Jon Mueller, Ben Owen, Taku Sugimoto, Tony Whitehead, John Hudak, Bernhard Günter, Greg Davis, Tim Barnes, Aaron Dilloway, and others.