In The Headphones: Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano, Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl, RSN, slow_the_tape, Devin Maxwell
To whom it may interest,
The gray filtered scenery that February often leaves us to wallow in during our Southeastern PA winters only enhances the want of sunshine and color that Spring promises in the months ahead. The environs are sound, though, for meditative and ambient instrumental work—as calming or unsettling as those scape’y resonant explorations can often be—depending, of course, on which artist is crafting them.
Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano
Split Scale
Thrill Jockey
Released: 1/24/25
“Scale A” is featured on Split Scale, a collaborative effort from Berlin-based Japanese composer Midori Hirano and German sibling instrumentalists Brueder Selke. A gorgeous and darkly serene combination of anchoring keystrokes and drifting string melodies, “Scale A” contains the sort of textural subtlety meant for a set of headphones. And while its accompanying video demands visual engagement as the track is played, I’d try closing your eyes when you listen to it, permitting your ears the opportunity to distill every spectral detail. The track’s near-7 minute runtime seems to elapse faster than expected.
Split Scale is currently available via Thrill Jockey Records.
Links:
Midori Hirano — Official / Bandcamp / Instagram / BlueSky
Brueder Selke — Official / Bandcamp
Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano — Bandcamp
Thrill Jockey Records — Official / Bandcamp / Instagram
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Thrill Jockey Records:
Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano have shared the video for "Scale A", taken from their recently released album Split Scale. The video, premiered by Impatto Sonoro, features a pensive, textural interpretation of the piece, using film grain, imperfections, shadow, and light as paintbrushes. The video's rich, tactile aesthetic captures the acclaimed composers' lucid music, blending subtle intricacies with stark beauty.
Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano’s debut album unites three artists who share both inimitable skill and depth of expression. The brothers Sebastian and Daniel Selke are open-minded, critically-acclaimed instrumentalists and composers with a sprawling catalog of international productions. As Brueder Selke, aka CEEYS, the polyinstrumental duo focuses their passion for genre-bending music primarily on their hand-picked Q3Ambientfest, sharing the stage every year with fellow artists such as Laura Cannell, Mabe Fratti, Resina, Jules Reidy, Grand River, Yair Elazar Glotman, and now-collaborator Midori Hirano. Midori Hirano’s mastery of sound sculpting has put her in high demand as a composer for film and television, including recent soundtracks for All or Nothing, Tokito, and a documentary on the Premier League, alongside astounding collaborations with artists including Hprizm of Anti Pop Consortium and Ilpo Väisänen of Pan Sonic. In addition to her own composing, Hirano has remixed the likes of Robot Koch and Rival Consoles.
Split Scale touches on many western musicians’ foundational experiences with sound, the equal tempered scale.
“We, in a way, traveled back in time back to our beginnings… our choice of tones was relatively simple, intuitive, almost child’s play,” notes Brueder Selke. “We wanted to take this unique opportunity with Midori to start from zero, and to do it together.”
Split Scale is an album born of a collective experience and mastery of instrumentation and arranging that manages to convey a dazzling sense of wonder, as if one was playing an instrument for the first time and truly listening.
Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl
For Transulence
Drag City
Scheduled to release: 3/28/25
A four-plus minute excerpt of an instrumental piece entitled “73 | 74” has surfaced to announce the upcoming album For Translucence, a collaboration from instrumentalists Whitney Johnson and Lia Kohl. Overtop a meditative hum, acoustic strings are gracefully dragged into melodic improvisation, generating an enveloping ambience both meditative and gratifying.
Toward the end of the piece, the strings settle, leaving behind a wintry mix of audible breeze and airy bells and chimes. Additional to the instruments, For Translucence features field recordings, Johnson and Kohl ably incorporating these recorded fragments into the composition.
Links:
Whitney Johnson — Bandcamp
Lia Kohl — Official / Bandcamp
Drag City Records — Official / Bandcamp / Instagram
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Drag City:
For Translucence, out March 28th, is the debut album from Whitney Johnsonand Lia Kohl. Their dialogue, found initially in free improvisation on viola and cello, has evolved over time into a neophonic orchestral expression: a living, breathing meditation in which layers of acoustic strings, synthesisers, field recordings, radio and sine waves illuminate and change each other as they twine and grow. Their first single, an excerpt of “73|74”, is out today.
This edit of “73|74” is a heady moment in the composition, where sounds appear to be going backward and forward at once — much like the overlapping imagery of Whitney’s music video, which drifts between portals of snow and doubled images of Whitney and Lia. Their viola and cello meet in a harmonically felicitous zone, droning in open tones, before improvising within the vibrations of their binaural beats. Their goal is “for translucence”: for each successive part to add clarity to its others.
Lia and Whitney began playing together in 2018, exploring the space between Lia’s cello and Whitney’s viola with their shared tuning one octave apart. Lia’s work explores the possibilities and dualities of mundane and profound sounds; Whitney, under her own name and as Matchess, presents the listener with the effects of sound on bodies and mind. There was an ease in weaving their instruments and ideas together, but several years passed before they considered recording as one — both share identities as string players, composers and sound artists based in Chicago’s rich experimental scene. Within the double layers of their four strings and added instruments — Whitney’s ARP Odyssey synthesiser, Lia’s Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer and AM/FM radio — a symmetry emerges that is the key to For Translucence. The songs are two improvisations superimposed over each other, the titles derived from the two fundamental frequencies in which they improvise. Like all of time put together, their past and future selves unfold with a flowing energy of fresh discovery breathing through each track.
For Translucence arrives on the heels of three entrancing works released in 2024 by Whitney Johnson (Hav), her alter ego Matchess (Stena), and Lia Kohl (Normal Sounds, Moon Glyph). Witness the unique organic nature of For Translucence, as it blooms, on March 28th.
RSN
Porosity #1
Difficult Art & Music
Released: 1/28/25
RSN is a project by composer Thomas Rosen.
A single piece clocking in at 20 minutes and some change, “Porosity #1”’s slow manifestation of melody and tonal subtlety was built from a bass and what I can only imagine to be some expert studio enhancements. Over this track’s runtime the air slowly changes, fusing moods that subliminally facilitate calm and instill some level of impending dread. Those shifts, though, are remarkably covert. If subconsciously allowed to set your mind at ease as Rosen’s conjured swells of sound carry you, you’d likely miss those transitions. I certainly did per my first listen.
There are moments in “Porosity #1” that evoke the softer side of Swans, keeping with Michael Gira’s penchant for song length and repetitious elasticity, though without the sudden musical jump scares or punishing, thunderous accents. Rosen’s composition is steady, patient, and its intensity catches its listener off guard.
Porosity #2 was released on 2/14/25.
Links:
RSN — Official / Bandcamp
Difficult Art And Music — Official / Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were discovered via DAAM’s Bandcamp:
The permanence and recurrence of “porosity #1” creates a kind of meditative permeability. The musical maelstrom creates a seemingly endless surface that develops from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. But this sufrace is porous and has loopholes. It is not a fast ride through this soundscape, but rather a walk - and the landscape hardly changes noticeably, but there is a resolution, a small aftermath. “porosity #1” is slow and deliberate, waiting and gentle.
slow_
the_
tape
unreachable
Autoclave Records
Released: 2/3/25
slow_the_tape is the solo project by songwriter Andrew Howie, whose latest album, unreachable, surfaced on 2/3/25. This work is the sixth installment of a series entitled zen guitar, named for a book of the same name written by author Philip Toshio Sudo.
The album opens with its longest track, “the trap,” which combines a picked guitar melody and additional layers of distorted guitar sound that gradually build up to a sizable din. Sonics were captured onto cassette, which facilitates audible flaws and discordance that act as additional seats in Howie’s ensemble so to speak.
While the album does sound largely improvised and its construction is rather coarse—I’ll admit that the D.I.Y.-ness and expected lack of fidelity add immediate appeal for me as one who grew up hearing music on cassette—there lies an inferred intention to many of the textures (“duvet,” “school gym hall with wooden floorboards”) and atmospherics (“‘definitely the most disturbing film i’ve ever seen’”) herein, all of which contribute to the album’s melancholic tone. While there are at times dramatic shifts in volume, the same cannot be said for mood.
Though unreachable is available digitally, this is a cassette-only release that is physically recorded upon request. This is as analog as it gets.
Links:
slow_the_tape — Official / Bandcamp
Autoclave Records — Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were discovered via slow_the_tape’s Bandcamp:
for eight days in July/August 2023, i read one chapter a day of philip toshio sudo's book 'zen guitar'
after reading each chapter, I wrote and recorded a new piece of music
the corresponding chapter names and tracks are:
zoom in, zoom out: track 1
trust the take: track 2
attend to detail: track 3
thought: process: track 4
carriage: track 5
sound painting: track 6
tone: track 7
intuition: track 8
the process of writing and recording this album was very different from all previous slow_the_tape releases
all the compositions were recorded on one c90 tape, using a fostex 280 four-track cassette recorder
i recorded four guitar parts for each piece - one for each of the fostex's four 'tracks'
i wrote and played each guitar part as quickly as i could, in as few takes as possiblei kept going until
the tape ran outwhile recording and mixing, i embraced my ongoing preoccupations with immediacy and imperfection (both of which, in part, birthed my slow_the_tape project) by including (and sometimes magnifying) the quirks and limitations of the medium (wow & flutter, tape hiss, clicks, pops, etc.)
the tracklisting represents the order in which the pieces were recorded
this is the sixth in a series of slow_the_tape albums inspired by sudo's 'zen guitar'
Devin Maxwell
Selfies
Infrequent Seams
Scheduled to release: 3/14/25
I had to look up the word sonification to completely understand the concept behind composer Devin Maxwell’s upcoming album Selfies and the other three albums (the first of this series, Timebending, was released last July) that are planned. Sonification is the conversion of data into sound. For Selfies, the data being mined and composed as music comes from Paris Hilton’s hacked T-Mobile Sidekick.
A statement piece meant to question the collision of tech at the dawn of our current century and our eventual incorporation into the lives of celebrities via social media, Selfies contains Maxwell’s interpretation of the material, which was recorded live and performed through acoustic instrumentation, often with minimal players. The album’s final track, “Minnesota,” is available to sample via Bandcamp, the incidental sounds of attendees from the evening’s performance audible as the University of Utah O. C. Tanner String Quartet plays.
Selfies, the aforementioned Timebending, and the other two upcoming albums in this series are being issued as vinyl LPs in editions of 40.
Links:
Devin Maxwell — Official / Bandcamp
Infrequent Seams — Bandcamp
Links, knowledge, and sounds were handed over courtesy of Clandestine Label Services:
Selfies, the second of four planned releases by composer Devin Maxwell, is a collection of compositions in his PH series. Each work sonifies a text message or phone number taken from Paris Hilton's hacked T-Mobile Sidekick, transforming ephemera into permanent sonic objects. A reaction against the digital doom to come that was birthed in early 2000s, Selfies is a nostalgic soundscape that questions and critiques the intersection of celebrity and technology.
Maxwell’s eclectic career includes collaborating with Anni Rossi, including on her Steve Albini recorded debut release Rockwell on 4AD Records as well as Heavy Meadow, along with other projects across the musical spectrum. Originally from northern New Jersey, Maxwell spent much of the early 2000s in New York (following the completion of his MA studies at CalArts in 2002).
Before moving to Utah, Maxwell frequently performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Kitchen, Joe’s Pub, Monolith, Mercury Lounge, and The Stone, among locations in and outside New York.
He has recorded with record labels including 4AD, Polyvinyl, Parlophone, Cantaloupe Records, and Mode and can be heard on music for TV, film, and video games including Grand Theft Auto IV, The Whitest Kids You Know, Grey’s Anatomy, and BBC. An avid supporter of new music, Maxwell has commissioned and performed dozens of solo or chamber compositions throughout the course of his career.
Maxwell co-founded the LoudLouderLoudest Music Production Company in Brooklyn, NY, and was responsible for many firsts in wireless music and mobile game sound for clients such as Sony, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Atlantic Records, HBO and Disney.
Sincerely,
Letters From A Tapehead
