Preslav Literary School - Echolalia (NO-FI, 2010) out now !

will release 'Echolalia' on October 18th 2010 as 12” vinyl with a booklet containing an essay by Tom Recchion of Los Angeles Free Music Society. The album is a live recording of a tape-loop orchestra led by Berlin-based artist Preslav Literary School and features contributions from Machinefabriek, Posset, Poldr and
many others.

Preslav Literary School held two days of workshops on making tape-loops from compact cassettes in December 2009 at Star & Shadow Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Participants then worked with the new archive of loops in front of a live audience in a performance involving multiple playback machines, mixers, real tape delays and live cassette manipulation.

Recalling the sounds of Faust, Popol Vuh, Throbbing Gristle, The Skaters and Broadcast the album draws on the energy of other decades and scenes as diverse as US underground noise, German krautrock and French musique concrète. At times melodic and blissful, at others dark and cut-up, the album seems to move beyond its constituent parts and methodology to reach something haunting and engaging. The album was mixed and mastered as it was played live, with no extra overdubs, by the cult Berlin dubstep producer Lord Cry Cry (Blunt Force Trauma).

The vinyl, whose packaging is based on vintage cassette design features commissioned artwork from Supanaught and photography from Marion Auburtin with a free digital download of all material, plus a bonus, exclusive Machinefabriek solo tape set from the same performance...

As Preslav Literary School, Adam Thomasmakes live tape collages using sounds drawn from an evergrowing archive of self-generated or discovered outsider noise, found sound and spoken word cassettes. A process of transference, overdubbing and live manipulation reworks these source materials into compelling, ambient broadcasts. Adam has released several albums and live CDrs, and played alongside
Machinefabriek, Leif Elggren, Sudden Infant, Antoine Chessex, Matt Elliott, Shitty Listener & many others.

He has toured the UK, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium and Poland and will play at 2010's flux/s and Shift festivals.
NO-FI

“I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts, Mr. Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant, all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world.”
(Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen, 1881)

The circles of original and copy, of forgotten sounds and awoken memories, of origins unknown and destinations unseen, came alive in the cold winter of 2009. Collecting a group of almost strangers and an archive of cassettes borrowed, lost and found, we began to explore these ghosts.

The dominating physical form of a cassette tape, once you take it apart and examine its capstan holes, guide and pinch rollers, screws, supply hubs and takeup
reels, is also a circle. Reviving the arcane art of tape loops, the group began to make ellipses from the spools of magnetic tape too. Hundreds of cassette shells were prised apart and unscrewed, spools removed and then cut into short sections, following precise measurements from some forgotten handbook, before being individually spliced into loops, turned into helices and replaced into
the cassette's body.

In the process, we began also to decipher the apocryphal scrawls on label and box unverified alphabets of authorship both before listening to hours of anonymous singers, abandoned narratives, obscured sounds and unmistakable analogue hiss. Beyond this we observed the occasional glitches, recording imperfections, erasures and drifting tracks inherent to the medium, open to the possibility of ciphers and hidden messages from long absent sources.

A new archive of endless loops was born, the original recordings of others somehow both destroyed and preserved. The cassettes now were a collection of odd aural coincidences, repetitive vocalisations and endless musical refrains growing narrower in frequency and somehow more beautiful with each revolution as each artefact settled into its new circularity.

From somewhere buried deep within the magnetic mire, spectral announcers preempt
grand movements of distorted symphony. Discordant static and pulses rise and fall cued, apparently, by chance. Unrehearsed, several people began to simultaneously play different recordings of the same instrument. Dropouts and cuts provide unplanned rhythmic accompaniment to haunting disembodied voices and environmental sounds. Accidental sonics fall into perfectly harmonious repetitive phrases. All the time in the background wow and flutter, slowly degrading magnetic tape and the revolutions of the players' mechanisms provide an accompaniment to the circular, spectral processes of memory and forgetting present within the everyday.

On 12th December 2009, in NewcastleuponTyne, England, the elevenstrong
group orchestrated a live composition in front of an audience using their tapes, offcuts, mixers and cassette players. The performance of concurrence, coincidence and circularity is presented here with minimal editing and no overdubs.
Adam Thomas, Preslav Literary School

preview

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Premières réalisations / First Releases of netlabel Elephant & Castles

Elephant and Castles is a four-hand record label investigating and cultivating a field in between documentary, field recording, unusual sound practices.
All the releases are available both as free downloads on the website and as limited editions cdrs with home-made artwork and beautiful packaging.
All works are released under the "Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike" Creative Commons license (cc.BY.NC.SA)

to get in touch or not receive any more emails from us:
elephantandcastles@yahoo.fr

visit and free download here


This karaoke was recorded somewhere on the Baltic sea on a night ferry going from Stockholm (Sweden) to Turku (Finland) in May 2008.

The DJ was a fat tattooed balding rocker, the public was getting drunk on duty free alcohol an the tv was on the sports channel. Gangs of aging ladies all dressed up for the night out were roaming back and forth competing only with the students wearing their graduation cap and preparing for the early disco... Meanwhile one could enjoy finish tangos, drunker's classics and melancolic ballads sung by the best...


“In the evening you can enjoy live entertainment and a delicious dinner. On board there's always something for everyone”




Second 'studio' album from Berlin-based Adam Thomas. 30 minutes of understated melodic drones, cassette symphonies and analogue disintegration taken 'live' from over 100 salvaged and reconstructed tapes found, bought & borrowed over a two year period.
100 Cdrs with commissioned artwork and inserts.

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Formed in May 2006, Preslav Literary School is the project of Adam Thomas, a writer and musician based in Berlin. Previous albums released on Glosses Fur Die Masses and Clinical Archives (first 'studio' album Autumn Bricolage had over 7500 downloads from archive.org).

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Artist Notes:
“Beautiful Was The Time is the result of two years of listening. The sounds are almost exclusively taken from 100 cassettes and microcassettes found, borrowed or bought in that period, with each having had their own journey before coming into my possession. Recording onto a C90 is both an act of erasure and creation. Every centimeter and second of magnetic tape holds a narrative, but stories only truly live in the associations formed through giving, finding and listening.

Early in 2009, in a Berlin apartment, I began playing back the cassettes. Over one week, sets of coincidences emerged from the tapes' contents that identified themselves as structures previously hidden. Using simple equalization I began to uncover more ghosts, sounds from old recordings by others and patterns within the tape hiss. Using a four-track tape recorder, a microphone and a Casio PT-80 (owned since I was three years old), I began to enter my own sounds directly onto the tapes, into the mechanism of retrieval. Before long I could not remember which were my sounds and which belonged to the original tapes. Organising memories of the tapes using diagrams on paper, adding occasional radio overheard broadcasts, I recorded these findings as a composition directly onto the computer with minimal editing.

The resulting album is an archive of sounds that should have been lost. It is also a homage to my surprisingly effective ability to forget. While I can be held responsible for certain duties of arrangement, no blame or credit can be attributed to me for the sounds within. Those that I did not make will hopefully be reclaimed by their creators, just as an author might notice an idea he once had in the sentence of another. Those sounds that I did create, I have long given up hope of remembering.”


First “studio” album from the French duo. Field recording based compositions from concrete to abstract, often narrative never illustrative. A warm and playful album with the real ability to transport the listener to imaginary places ...
100 Cdrs with color artwork and inserts.

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Biog:
Since 2008, Hotel Gromada is the sound project of Nicolas Perret and Cédric Anglaret. Using reality as a raw material, Hotel Gromada always oscillates between the extremely concrete and the abstract creating imaginary places through a non-pictorial narration, getting close to what could be a cinema of sensations where images are made up by the public's own imagination. Far from an objective point of view their way of working -traveling, meeting people, getting involved in local life...- implicates from the beginning the presence of the recorders and hence the subjectivity of the recordings.
In between concert and live installations each presentation is a live set especially prepared to fit the space and context: very soft and quiet sounds for a headphone festival (Paris, Bruxelles 2007-2008), abstract and loud for noisy places (Finland, Berlin, 2008) or precise and wide sounds for an ancient church (Galeria El, Elblag, 2008).

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Artist Notes:
“The three main tracks of Amazonian Rovers, each with a totally different atmosphere, were composed separately during the winter 2008/2009. In the idea of a live set for a Spanish tour, they were put together and transitions which soon became new tracks were added in order to create a 35 minutes piece. The piece was then cut into tracks back again and arranged for this cd version.
All the sounds used were recorded by ourselves in the ten past years in various places around the world including: France, Poland, Russia, Peru, Portugal, Finland, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, etc... recording devices ranging from DAT to mobile phone.

For us, the act of composing begins with listening. Improvising a lot, we are first of all active auditors of our own recordings looking for their texture, timbre, melodic or rhythmic quality, details or imperfections.
When a structure is found, we then refine each layer for what it brings to the overall composition and, through mixing we sculpt atmospheres that we like to be serious and playful at the same time, strange and sometime uneasy but also sweet and warm; imaginary places we hope to transport the listener to.”




This recording was made on a very sunny spring afternoon strolling around place de l'Albertine in Brussel during the Fête de l'Iris, the city's days. For this occasion various sound sculptures by Etienne Favre were installed on the square to be manipulated by the passerbys... Under the amused and a bit jealous eyes of their parents, children were playing focused on their music without paying attention to the activity around, chips and Ricard vendors as well as the DJ checking the sound for the night show. Sweet as the wine...
30 Cdrs with lino block printed artwork and inserts.




Second album of Cawa Sorix, Pipistrello is a mix of various compositions recorded over the past few years. Working with tapes he writes his poetry with his dictaphones mixing found footage, music and his own voice in a playful collage cut up. Sometimes violent or epileptic, sometimes sweet and touching but always humorous such is the bizarre universe of Cawa Sorix.
50 mini Cdrs with original handmade artwork (3 drawings/cd) and inserts.

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Biog:
Cawa-Sorix is the sound project of Grenoble (fr) based poet, drawer and artist Tito Gascuel. Since 1995 he sometimes works as an illustrator, has released several books and images -recently for the Orbis Pictus Club, but also fanzines, tracts, collages, mail-art, micro-edition and cut-up comics. He has also composed writings and soundtracks for theater, radio pieces, movies, and showed cheap videos and exhibitions in such places as squats like "Le Brise Glace" or "La Generale" (Grenoble, Paris, etc.). His first album Fledermaus was released in 2004 by french label universinternational.

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Artist Notes:
“C’est le moyen pauvre qui m’a donné l’idée. Tape-to-tape = vampire business. One night, Bruce Wayne saw a living bat, as an omen : « I shall become a bat ! », he said (1939). C’est la superstition qui fait les noms d’artistes, as the college’s names : Aragon, Prévert, Pablo Neruda. Nothing to do with that stuff, my loving technique ISN'T about FAME. Just need some good sounds, voice, a floor, a machine. Sometimes i stop, but mostly i don’t. J’ai seulement besoin d’appuyer sur les touches du lecteur, un besoin inutile : unusefull is my lovable technique. Originally, my audio-tape player was defective; so, i obtained double tracks, and often overdubbed them. A rub’a’dub style is born. Not my voice, not my music, mais something like le kung-fu. Ou pire. Meanwhile, i met some clever people that loved that. This is writed, this is done.“


visit & free download here

Preslav Literary School - Beautiful Was The Time (Elephant & Castles, 2009)

1 John the Exarch
2 Ohrid Must Die
3 Cyrillic

Reçu un mail aujourd'hui d'Adam de Preslav Literary School, très bel album de drones mélodiques parfois un peu dérangeant, entièrement constitué d'enregistrements d'une centaine de cassettes réarrangés.
Il devrait se produire à Paris le 28 mars à 18:30 pour 6 euros à l'Espace en Cours 56 rue de la Réunion 75020 Paris avec :Take:, Aymeric Hainaux, Cawa Sorix, Le Lit (in bed with Schubert), Pali Meursault et Maité Arroita Jauregi....

Received a mail of Adam from Preslav Literary School today, very nice album so....
"At times disturbing, definitely inquisitive, this composition requires attention, rewards lurking behind the corner if one’s patient enough." Massimo Ricci, Paris Transatlantic Magazine
"Halfway music, halfway aural investigation... the approach of Preslav Literary School results in rich textures and a specific sound that makes his tracks unique and memorable." Phlow Magazine
"...a fine balance between deconstructing itself and creating an audio-environmental soundscape that is fascinating and diverting." Ampersand Etcetera

try
visit Preslav Literary School
visit Elephant & Castles myspace and Elephant & Castles website (work in progress)
premier album en téléchargement libre sur archive.org / 1st album available from archive.org