A field recording I made of bats in a park in Hamburg (pitched down several octaves so that the animals become audible) has made it on the compilation DSR#170 | Sound Imagery by Default Standard Records from Greece. Lots of other great recordings from various locations around the world to explore there.

Also, my track Stuck In The VIP Lounge is included on Syrphe’s compilation Sri Lanka – ශ්‍රී ලංකාව among songs by Cedrik Fermont, Isuru Kumarasinghe and many more.

This is the statement by Cedrik Fermont who compiled and mastered this release:

„A compilation dedicated to the Sri Lankan people, all benefits will be given to Raise Sri Lanka, an organisation that collects money in order to supply medicines to those in need.

Sri Lanka is one more country that faces a huge crisis due to political, economic and agronomic mismanagement and corruption.
For the first time in its history, the country is facing famine. This is not due to climate change and bad weather conditions but to corrupted politicians whose noble ambition to entirely ban pesticides was implemented from one day to another without prior knowledge of the dreadful consequences of such badly planned action.
A switch to organic agriculture is important but it is obvious that such change should be done slowly and carefully. There is no need to be a genius to understand that organic agriculture produces less than the current agricultural model, especially if farmers have not been taught how to deal with organic farming.

Some people never learn.

History has showed us what kind of disaster politicians with little understanding of agriculture and land management can trigger, even when they come from a farmer family (I think about Chinese leader Mao Zedong and its attempt to eradicate sparrows that led to a booming locust population that ate everything in its path, therefore, grain production in most rural areas collapsed and a massive famine began but I also think about the Khmer Rouge policies in Cambodia that had foreseeable and avoidable consequence and that despite the regime’s leaders awareness of their catastrophic effects continued to be strictly enforce and led to a famine too).

In the Khmer language, two words exist to define „famine“, one is „turaphik“ (when starvation is due to natural causes), the other one is „bong-ot“, that implies human causality.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his clan brought an entire nation to its knees by misguided ambitions that are unfortunately leading to „bong-ot“.

Money will be sent to this campaign :
www.gofundme.com/f/h9sax-help-sri-lanka-with-medical-needs „

I’m wrapping up this sickening year with a new release. |​|​| || | |​|​| is the second in the ’skull series‘ of tapes, containing two tracks recorded in 2020. On the A-side there’s Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair. The title is taken from Patty Water’s 1965 version of the song. It’s not a cover by any means but listening to her song is highly recommended. The high pitched sounds on this track were generated by plucking human hair attatched to a contact microphone (taken from a very special person with black hair). The B-side contains Year Of The Plague which sums up some of my impressions of the last 12 months. The limited edition of 20 tapes with individual covers and/or a digital download is now available through my bandcamp account.

New Delhi’s gallery ONKAF comissioned international sound artists and musicians to produce works for their Life Inbetween series, running 03-12 October. My contribution, the 09:30 min. track Psyche – A Model of Infection is now available on ONKAFs website and on YouTube.

The Greek word psyche, analogous to the Latin spiritus, originally meant breath as well as soul or spirit. The invisible and ephemeral phenomenon of inhalation and exhalation connects the inside and outside of the body, it is both a carrier substance of language and of airborne diseases and also a sign for the liveliness of bodies.
Breath is the starting point of this work: a single and solitary breath, recorded with a throat microphone. The inside corresponds to the body of the individual in a symbolic isolation, which becomes a social reality through the distancing measures against the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This isolated sound, a reference to the desire for interaction with others, is linked to field recordings. These sounds were recorded during the recent years in places that are no longer accessible or difficult to visit due to travel restrictions (a collage of street sounds from Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Tokyo and Warsaw). Due to the currently unbridgeable distance, the acoustic reminiscences of these places are charged with nostalgia.
On a further level of the work, an interplay of four different waveforms produced by analog oscillators unfolds in the stereo image – sine wave (left channel), triangular wave (right channel), square wave (half left) and sawtooth wave (half right) appear in a fixed frequency ratio and form a chord. At minute 03:45 a noise signal begins to modulate the first oscillator, the random voltage distribution ‘infecting’ the homogeneous sine wave. The resulting ‘symptoms’ are fluctuations in frequency, a distraction from the normal or ‘healthy’ state. This audio infection is passed on to the next oscillator, while maintaining the characteristics of the sinusoidal oscillation – it is no longer the same noise signal, but a ‘mutation’. This process is repeated until all four oscillations are infected. At the end of the cycle, the output of the last oscillator is fed back to the first – an exponential growth of modulations/infections that changes the characteristics of the whole system.
What remains is the sound of breathing, but no longer as an isolated sound event. By using a vocoder, the sound of breathing becomes the envelope for the collected field recordings, a hybrid sound event that refers to the singularly plural dynamics of the social.