CV & JAB – KLIMA (Κλίμα)
CV & JAB is the shortcode for the duo Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. Klima is their third album together, preceded by Zin Taylor’s Thoughts Of A Dot As It Travels A Surface (2018) and Landscape Architecture (2020). In 2022, the duo expanded to a trio with Michael Harrison on a self-titled album (with their full names).
They refer to the album as a ‘rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential excursus’ (‘rhizomatic’: a concept describing a nonlinear network that connects any point to any other point). A varied, associative collection of different atmospheres, each of them enigmatic in its own way.
‘Percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface sometimes in solo, sometimes synchronically to eventually dissipate again’.
There are introspective piano pieces, ghostly (‘flickering plasma’) voices, and collages of field recordings taken out of context. The more abstract soundscapes are balanced with more soothing tracks featuring JAB‘s (bass) flute like Dwelling and Pottery Fragments.
As different as the songs are, on the album they still fit together beautifully, ‘inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections … sounds and chords materialize and dematerialize as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey’.
CHRISTINA VANTZOU – OBSERVATIONS, EDITS, A CURE FOR RESTLESSNESS 
More good news for those of you who – like me – can’t get enough of Christina Vantzou‘s music: a 20-minute soundscape track is featured in edition #34 of the Longform Editions series.
Observations, Edits, A Cure For Restlessness presents an ‘exquisitely sequenced stream of intimate sound fragments [that] creates a realm where reality seeps into an imaginary haze, like the random, varying moods that circle through places where time’s measure changes in unexpected ways’.
The sounds were gathered in over ten years. As Christina Vantzou states: ‘I like the idea that sound can ripen like fruit, age like wine, and bond organically when in contact with another sound.’
If you didn’t know already: the Longform Edition series, curated by Andrew Khedoori, releases (longform) tracks from different artists, in batches of four every two months.
Christina Vantzou’s addition is already #134 in the ever-expanding list. Other artists in thís edition (#34, 18-10-2023) are Arp, Dania and Suss & Andrew Tuttle.
JOSEPH BRANCIFORTE & THEO BLECKMANN – LP2
In 2019, Joseph Branciforte (electronics) and Theo Bleckmann (voice) released their first album called LP1. So their follow-up album’s title is hardly a surprise. For those who know LP1, the music on LP2 is hardly a surprise either. Or, let me rephrase that: it’s as big a surprise as LP1 was.
It’s the same unique musical language: Branciforte‘s electronics together with Bleckmann‘s wordless vocalizations. The tracks on LP2 are built on the duo’s experience in live performance, and ‘further dissolve the
boundaries between improvisation & composition, live performance, studio production, human & machine-generated sound’.
Both albums are linked with the opening track, 1.13, which served as a soundcheck improvisation when recording LP1, ‘to make sure levels were set properly and we could hear one another’.
There are similarities in both albums (‘extended improvisations built upon asynchronous looping, live analog & digital processing, and deep listening’), but the compositional process was different: ‘in addition to free improvisation, each of us brought in a few ‘prompts’ or ‘scenes’. These prompts could be a verbal description, a musical or textural seed, or more explicitly composed material’.
LP2 is released on Branciforte‘s own Greyfade label. It will be released on 8 December but can be pre-ordered (soon).