pemdas
Hearing your music live was a life-changing experience. I still have goosebumps everytime I think about it... thank you so much for doing what you do Thomas, I'm looking forward to seeing you play again in the future.
Thomas Ankersmit’s new album for Shelter Press “Homage to Dick Raaijmakers” is an all-analogue electronic music composition inspired by legendary Dutch composer / electronic and tape music pioneer / multimedia artist Dick Raaijmakers (1930-2013). The work takes inspiration from Raaijmakers’ music from the 1960s, his texts on sound composition like “Cahier M”, and notes on his own music. On this recording Ankersmit plays Serge Modular feedback and sine/pulse/random generators, contact mic, and tape speed variation.
Mirroring some of Raaijmakers’ work, Ankersmit plays his Serge synthesizer as a kind of weather system. He references storms, thunder, crashing and falling objects, and distant radio transmissions in his electronic sounds, as well as dragging a contact mic across his equipment. Despite the abstract nature of the material, a sense of loss or mourning sometimes emerges from the music.
With his homage Ankersmit re-contextualizes Raaijmakers’ ideas about electric sound, composition, and spatial experience. Like Raaijmakers himself Ankersmit exclusively uses analogue devices, such as sine/pulse/random generators, modulators, filters, and especially feedback processes between them.
The music focuses on the sounds of raw electricity through creatively abused electronics, composing with analogue micro-sounds, and the creation of three-dimensional sound fields.
The piece also uses tones produced by the listener’s own ears, inspired by Raaijmakers’ thoughts on “holophonic” sound fields to be individually explored by the listener. With this phenomenon, the listener’s inner ears actively generate sounds that don’t exist in the recorded signal, and which can change with a small movement of the head.
“Homage to Dick Raaijmakers” was commissioned by Sonic Acts and was premiered live at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in February 2016. Ankersmit also dedicates the work to his father Thijl Ankersmit (1947-2016), who first demonstrated feedback to him.
Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker and pressed on 140g vinyl housed in reverse-board outer and inner sleeve. Out in September 2018 on Shelter Press on LP / CD / DL.
credits
released September 7, 2018
* PLEASE USE SPEAKERS, NOT HEADPHONES, BECAUSE OF THE INNER-EAR PHENOMENA INVOLVED. *
Shelter Press is a record label / publishing platform founded in 2012 building up dialogues between contemporary art, poetry
and experimental music through printed publications and records.
Starting September 2021, Shelter Press is also carrying and collaborating on the releases of the Ideologic Organ, Recollection GRM and Portraits GRM labels....more
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