The editorial bit at the top of the five slices of music thing again and again and however you slice it we can’t go on about cat food again. Of course it was sushi and here comes the introduction that heralds the latest Five Music Things thing and whatever the hell the five music thing is actually all about. actually today, the five have a rather electronic flavour. Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Do we need to do the editorial bit again? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling giraffes out of hats? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more, everything must go and same as last time (and the time before) five, and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and cut cut slash and cut it, who needs an editorial or words or worms in general? Just facts and links then.  Here you go, play the music, grab your five, eat your greens, go eat some art, go eat some dirt and don’t forget the yellow trousers,,

Here we go, five (or so) more musical things in no particular order and for no particular reason

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1: Terence Fixmer – No Latitude For Errors, A track taken from the new Terence Fixmer album, Shifting Signals. Released on Mute on December 2nd, here it is,

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Like we already said up there, Terence Fixmer has shared the furious beats and jabbing synths of ‘No Latitude for Errors’, one of the floor-shaking club tracks from his forthcoming album, Shifting Signals – set for release on double vinyl, CD and digitally on 2 December 2022.

“Over two decades, Terence Fixmer has mapped his singular sound across a sizable stack of singles, EPs and seven grit-smeared solo albums intended to make you sweat. For his first album on Mute, the space-inspired Shifting Signals, he deals out a fistful of club-minded, pitch-black ragers while expanding his sound palette to convey a wider spectrum of moods.

Throughout Shifting Signals, the follow up to 2018’s album Through the Cortex, he fixes his gaze on an unknown world where deep space stretches out infinitely. Shifting Signals is about the interaction between the infinity of nature – wind, sea, space and time – and the human desire to conquest and control it.

“On each album I aim for something different but I retain the core sound, which is always there and often dark and melancholic. Sometimes the balance tips slightly and on this album, I’m striving to be freer and open myself up more to melody.”

Shifting Signals swoops, dips and scales the heights of white-knuckle adventure, and throughout the album concepts of unknowable space extend to the vast and mysterious natural world in our more immediate orbit”. 

Here’s some more from the rather crisp new album

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2: Lea Bertucci announces Xtended Vox & shares new track ‘Tulsa’ ft. Ben Vida. Xtended Vox, a compilation of avant-garde voice pieces curated by Lea Bertucci, is out Dec 8th via SA Recordings. The press release and the hype is under the Youtube slice of goodness, do you need us to add anything? Do you need our words? We wouldn’t have parked the music here if we didn’t think it worthy of our time and space, we clearly need to go take the time (when is there evert time?) to go explore the art of Lea Berucci properly sometime soon…

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“Acclaimed experimental musician, composer and performer Lea Bertucci has announced that on December 8th she will release Xtended Vox, a compilation of avant-garde voice pieces, via SA Recordings as well as an accompanying Spitfire Audio voice sample library. Today, Bertucci has shared ‘Tulsa’, a new track featuring Ben Vida and the first piece to be taken from the compilation.

This is the second release and library Lea has done with SA Recordings and Spitfire, her 2020 project Acoustic Shadows, received high acclaim making it into Boomkat’s top 5 albums of the year as well as being The Guardian’s contemporary album of the month. Curated by Lea, this project features four acclaimed creative vocalists and pioneers of the avant-garde, stretching over a number of generations and across varying geographies, these artists lend their unique sonic vocabularies to the project, including Audrey Chen, Phil Minton, Cansu Tanrikulu and Ben Vida.

Taking a timbral approach to the sounds, the library and compilation encompasses the most radical of vocal techniques from the most fragile of whispers to throat singing and even alien nasal sounds. Xtended Vox pushes the boundaries of what can be done with contemporary voice, melding free improvisation with formalised composition. Bertucci describes the compilation as “deeply human music”, referencing Joan La Barbara’s 1976 album Voice Is the Original Instrument, Bertucci’s newest project celebrates the voice and the idea of how it is the first and only innate instrument, experimenting with the most ancient instrument in a contemporary context, with diverse and contrasting approaches from all of the compilations collaborators.

Bertucci’s approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience. Her work spans over a decade, with 8 full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since gone on to found her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release followed by 2022’s Murmurations, a duo with composer, improviser and artist Ben Vida who features on Xtended Vox alongside Lea on ‘Tulsa’.

Vida’s work explores aural phenomena, language, durations and systems, the pair met during the Summer of 2021, while living on opposite sides of the same mountain outside of Woodstock, NY. What began as a series of conversations between friends, slowly formed into the development of a unique form of nonhierarchical improvisation that challenged and rethought the nature of dialog and language itself; intertwining their respective practices into a series of fluid compositions where the identities and locations of each artist become progressively obscure.

Also featured is Turkish artist Cansu Tanrikulu’s new piece, ‘Drank vs. Drunk’. Cansu is a singing multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and improviser. Tanrikulu uses elastic singing, wide stylistic vocabulary and a far reaching approach to melody and text based improvisation. She collaborates with exceptional creatives making shape-shifting music mostly based on topics that are hard to imagine as musical entities at first glance.

Also on the compilation are three collaborative pieces named ‘We Do Wish We were With You’ by Audrey Chen and avant-garde legend Phil Minton. The two have been performing as a duo for more than a decade with concerts and tours across Europe, China, Argentina and Brazil. In 2013, the duo released By the Stream via Subrosa and in 2020 they shared the follow up, Frothing Morse, via Tour de Monde.

Over the past 20 years, Berlin based Chinese/Taiwanese-American Audrey Chen has focused predominantly on her solo work, joining together the extended and inherent vocabularies of the cello, voice, and analog electronics. In the last few years, she has shifted back towards the exploration of the voice as a primary instrument, delving even more deeply into her own version of narrative and non-linear storytelling. She derives her sound material in continuous process, championing the “in-between” and overlooked. Regardless of instrument, her mode of experimentation touches both the abstractly beautiful and the aggressively unsettling, creating a kind of curiously imagined architecture, non-prosaic song or ritual that reaches beyond gravity or language”

lea-bertucci.com / Bandcamp

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Meanwhile, been meaning to mention The Beka for a while, these pages tend to build up over time, music gathered and whene there’s five up they go.

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3: the beka – another artist who likes lowercase, the beka’s pieces are like aural paintings, small unasuming (in the best sense) electronic instrumetal pieces, indeed his Bandcamp page looks like an on-line art gallery, one piece of art with each piece of music. I guess you’d call them soundscapes, the pieces of music have a glow to them, they do feel like a set of paintings (there’s no indication in terms of the art, does he create it? is it found imagery? Nothing is credited, no information is offered). These are very likable pieces, I like that each piece is presented in isolation, I like the way the beka does his thing, he could probably refine it a little but then that probably goes for any artist, i like the wat the beka paints..

“I have come to your door as someone who believes in the power of music and knows that there is music in everything in the universe. You can open this door if you wish. I am the Don Quixote of music, although it is not widely accepted as a character”.

Find out more, well no, he doesn’t tell you that much, I kind of like that he doesn’t tell us much, find all the music on the beka’s Bandcamp page.

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4: Pas Musique – We have covered pas Musique before, there is lots of bac kcatalogue to explore, Silbar is a five track release conceptualized by Robert L. Pepper and Jesse Fairbairn during 2020. It was performed in its’ entirety at three gigs slowly coming out of the pandemic. Silbar is the Spanish language word for whistle.

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“Pas Musique started in 1995 out of Brooklyn, NY, USA, driven by the creative talents of Robert L. Pepper working in the mediums of sound and video. Members include Jon “Vomit” Worthley, Michael Durek, and Robert Pepper. Pas Musique have performed in 17 countries” so it says here, we have covered them before on these fractured pages….

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5: Chris Liebing and Ralf Hildenbeutel have just “shared a newly commissioned, unreleased Tom Adams remix of ‘Circles’, taken from their forthcoming release, Another Night, an album of remixes and mixes from their 2021 album, Another Day. – Circles (Tom Adams Remix).

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“The album, out on Mute on 25 November 2022, sees tracks from the 2021 album reimagined for a club context. Blistering remixes from the likes of Nicole Moudaber, Plaid, Anfisa Letyago, Radio Slave and Jan Blomqvist are accompanied by Liebing’s own club mixes, allowing the worlds of his bourgeoning recording career and his worldwide reputation for working dancefloors with pummelling techno, to overlap

The tracks to be given the remix treatment were selected from Liebing & Hildenbeutel’s Another Day album, which was created in collaboration with an eclectic mix of artists, including several who were involved with the previous album, 2018’s Burn Slow. As well as Miles Cooper Seaton, on one of the last recordings made before the Akron/Family founding member’s passing, they also reunite with Polly Scattergood for the album’s title track, and Ladan (formerly known as Cold Specks), Tom Adams and Maria Uzor (Sink Ya Teeth) all join as new collaborators.

Despite Liebing & Hildenbeutel very much directing and driving the shape, tone and essence of the album, Liebing ultimately views it as one rooted in collaboration and one more contributor to the album is Mute’s Daniel Miller, “Daniel’s input was just incredible,” he says. “He brought his modular setup in our studio and he added this extra flavour.” This added element, combined with Hildenbeutel’s silky production skills and the eclectic presence of the guest vocalists, result in something truly unique”

Another Night is released digitally on Mute on 25 November 2022. here’s the Bandcamp link

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And while we’re here, just for our own enjoyment, we do gather some of these things, these electronic flavours that come our way together on another ever evolving playlist, it is really jsut for us but hey, if you want to enjoy it then here you go….