Peter Duimelinks / Roel Meelkop / Ralf Wehowsky – Verklärte Tage

From Allmusic.com : "This compilation harks back to the early mail-art collaborations that were practiced in the early '80s among musicians deliberately working outside the standard commercial realms and taking a Do It Yourself attitude toward music making. All three composers involved with this release were active in this scene. Ralf Wehowsky was a member of the post-industrial group P16.D4 and has several releases under the alias RLW. Roel Meelkop and Peter Duimelinks are members of Kapotte Muziek, GOEM, and THU20, as well as solo artists with albums on Trente Oiseaux and Staalplaat, among others. All six tracks were assembled in iterations. Two of the pieces use pre-released material as a sound source. "2x10.5" is by Wehowsky, using each ten seconds from Duimelinks' 1991 release Desiderio in Rovina and Meelkop's 1997 release Hikari. Two of the pieces ("Unvoll Plus" and "9 in 3") have each of the three collaborators working on different tracks independently, with Wehowsky putting together a final edit. The other two pieces are each by Meelkop and Duimelinks using original material from Wehowsky. For the most part, these tracks are sparse affairs, full of quiet drones and low hums. "2x10.5" contains sudden variations in sound and occasionally gets loud and piercing. "9in 3" has the three composers working in three separate frequency regions, which makes for a very full and complex sound. "Eemix" also gets quite noisy, as can be expected from reworking one of RLW's most noisy releases (and also given the piece's original post-industrial origins)."

"Verklärte Tage" was released by Sonoris in 1999.

Get it here : Peter Duimelinks / Roel Meelkop / Ralf Wehowsky – Verklärte Tage

Ralf Wehowsky - Nameless Victims

From Allmusic.com : "Ralf Wehowsky is one in a growing group of non-academic sound artists whose work is abstract, but very focused on the possibilities of sound and very rewarding over repeated listenings and different works. Although he started his musical career in the post-industrial scene, his musical output in the '90s resists categorization as well as casual listening. His sonic interests are wide, but it is perhaps his pursuit of the transformation of simple materials that distinguishes him from his colleagues.

On one of his albums, When Freezing Air Stings Like Ice, a common set of parameters is the foundation for all seven pieces, but the parameters that create the pitch curve for one track create the volume curve for another, and so forth. Thus, a common foundation becomes the generative force for a vastly different collection of pieces. His album Tulpas took the concept of transformation even further by inviting several other sound artists to participate in the process, creating a reflection and commentary on his own work unparalleled in contemporary music.

Wehowsky was born in 1959 in Mainz, Germany. In the '70s, his musical interests ranged from hard rock (the Stooges, Black Sabbath) to prog rock (Henry Cow, Faust), and free jazz (Ornette Coleman, Peter Brötzmann) to new music (Stockhausen, Pierre Henry). He became disillusioned with rock because it stopped being challenging and was too much entertainment, but shared a brief interest with punk because of its revolt against mainstream art. His earliest recorded work was with the post-industrial group Permutative Distortion (later called P.D. and finally recording as P16.D4), and in 1981, Wehowsky and his colleagues formed the collective Selektion, whose members worked in both acoustic and optical arenas. The culmination of P16.D4's recording career was a double LP, entitled Nichts Niemand Nirgends Nie!, released in 1986. This album already shows Wehowsky's interest in repeated transformations of a given set of material. It included two studio sides (one by P16.D4 and the other by many of the same musicians in a different project, S.B.O.T.H.I.), a side of live presentation of the same material, and a final side of specific transformations of the previous three sides. Although this album has not been specifically reissued, it has been used as source material for two CDs in the '90s, and has even been used on a collaborative CD released in 1999.

In 1992, Wehowsky released his first solo album under the name RLW. Most of his output in the '90s was collaborative, but he did release four additional solos (see discography below). His work in the '90s culminated in a five-CD set, Tulpas, where he invited several leading sound artists from all over the world to participate in a transformative process that took two years to complete. The participants themselves chose how to proceed, whether to use a structural approach or an emotive affect, or simply to do a remix. He sometimes transformed the pieces even after delivery in order to create a more perfect whole. Far more than a simple remix project, Tulpas is a model of collaborative transformation as well as a complex overarching vision."

"Nameless Victims" was released by Metamkine in 1996.

Get it here : Ralf Wehowsky - Nameless Victims

RLW - Acht

From Allmusic.com : "This album is divided into two sections. The first, Four Compositions 1992, is a collection of abstract pieces of sound art. "Restless Occlusion" is an exploration of the insides of a piano, with string scraping and prepared tones in addition to a little bit of straight playing. "Kleine Blaue Hybriden" is quieter, alternating between metallic rattles, buzzes, and ominous, bass-rattling drones. "In Acht" starts with single-note attacks like on a guitar, then reworks the resonance and harmonic signatures of the resulting notes. The final composition, "Is it?" is the most abstract of the four, sounding like feedback or radio waves before RLW's transformations. Again, he transforms the material by altering the attack or decay or applying filters to various parts, but the result is often delicate. The second section, Pop Tools, uses pop recordings as source material for a commentary on popular music. "Silent Calculus" uses a punk rock recording as an audible source, while "Über den Plan" uses circus-like organ sounds. "Hohe Mauern" is a pointillistic piece for piano and voice dedicated to poet Philip Larkin, which shows RLW's interest in the human voice (an interest which he will explore more fully on Pullover)."

"Acht" was released by Selektion in 1992.

Get it here : RLW - Acht

RLW - Tulpas [5 x CD Boxset]

From Allmusic.com : "Tulpas is a sprawling collection of reinterpretations and transformations of RLW's work through the early '90s by many of the major sound artists from around the world. Five CDs in length, almost six hours in total duration, the scale of the work is unlike anything else in recent sonic art. Over two years in realization, it combines two major aspects of RLW's work: that pieces themselves are in a permanent state of flux (as witnessed by the number of times RLW has reworked his own pieces over the years), and the collaborations, which provide him with new material and new impulses. Wehowsky invited the participation of the collaborees, but left it up to the individual participants to decide what approach to take. Different participants received different inputs, ranging from a score to sequences on floppy disk to original sound material on DAT. The starting points range from RLW's most recent pieces (including seven interpretations of Nameless Victims) to his earliest work with P16.D4. Most of the pieces take a single RLW piece as a starting point, but several cover the entire RLW catalog. The degree of collaboration also varied, in some cases involving several exchanges of material. When all the pieces had been delivered, Wehowsky edited, remastered, and sequenced them to the final form they have now. The CDs come in a cloth-bound book along with 40 pages of essays, notes, photos, and sketches. A "tulpa" is a term from Tibetan Buddhism and refers to the phantom projection of the bodhisattva in countless magic forms, and this collection shows RLW's sonic presence as manifested in the collaborations with so many luminaries of the late 20th century."

CD 1 :
1-01   Michael Gendreau - 2-NV-PO33M(0-20KC)preRAII-S
1-02   Jos Smolders - Through The Looking Glass
1-03   Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock - -
1-04   Noise-Maker's Fifes - Nameless Victims
1-05   Crawl Unit - One Clank In Loop Formation
1-06   In Be Tween Noise - Vein   Stems   Is   Calm
1-07   Eric Lanzillotta - Unrecognizable Compositions

CD 2 :
2-01   Artificial Memory Trace - Äwron Pt   1 & 2
2-02   M   Behrens - Quersumme RLW
2-03   Koji Marutani - RLW Assemblage
2-04   Lionel Marchetti & Jérôme Noetinger - -
2-05   Lionel Marchetti & Jérôme Noetinger - - -
2-06   Antanas Jasenka - Room Music

CD 3 :
3-01   Francisco Lopez - Untitled Piece
3-02   Christoph Heemann - Breaths Of Freezing Air
3-03   Bruno Moreigne - Virtual Eardrum
3-04   John Duncan - Split Second
3-05   Werner Durand - Third Monolith - Close-Up
3-06   Asmus Tietchens - Es Sei
3-07   Ryoji Ikeda - One Minute
3-08   Action Concret - Opka: Unlit
3-09   David Grubbs - Pullover
3-10   Das Synthetische Mischgewebe - Unworn Cellophane (Sliced Return)
3-11   Jim O'Rourke - Strictly Yours

CD 4 :
4-01   Toshiya Tsunoda - L: Movement By Induction; R: Limitative Current
4-02   Peter Rehberg & Ramon Bauer - Sometimes Titled
4-03   Peter Duimelinks & Roel Meelkop - Pierremi
4-04   Bruce Russell - Fried Eyes
4-05   N.N   Und Ähnliche Elemente - Erneut Gekreuzt Und Ausgemendelt
4-06   Toy Bizarre - KDI DCTB 42 - Heda!
4-07   Meeuw - Vier Mal Die Null
4-08   Achim Wollscheid - -
4-09   Jan Peter E.R   Sonntag - Between The Days Für Elektronik Und Das Sierra Bar Trio
4-10   Minoru Sato - -- In Blank / -- On Sound

CD 5 :
5-01   Brume - Kleine Blaue Hybriden
5-02   Kimihide Kusafuka - The Lowest Karlsruhe #2
5-03   Baraka[H] - Mutilated Monolith
5-04   Merzbow - Kleine Blaue Hybriden
5-05   Idea Fire Company - Silent Calculus
5-06   Jörg Thomasius - Phone Cumn Reallow
5-07   Brume - Wer Nicht ...
5-08   Husk - Sentiment Und Frohsinn 1983/1985/1996
5-09   John Watermann - Cows In ¾ Mourning, Maybe
5-10   Giancarlo Toniutti - Hal Qáygein Hal Qáalgan
5-11   Contrastate - Pierre Never Made It
5-12   Aube - Gegenraise
5-13   Frans de Waard - Waving Back

"Tulpas" was released by Selektion in 1997.

Get it here : RLW - Tulpas

Ohmix

From Allmusic.com : "By 2001, the Quebec city sound art collective Avatar was undergoing important transformations, with two of their founding members -- Jocelyn Robert and Christof Migone -- turning or already turned toward new cities, new people, and new ventures. The intent of this remix project was to recycle the past in order to point to the future. Eight artists were commissioned remixes using the first CDs released on Ohm Éditions (Avatar's label). The music of Robert, Migone, Pierre-André Arcand, the collective projects Radio Folie Culture and Rappel, and precursors Bruit TTV was treated, sampled, and recreated by Ralf Wehowsky, Martin Tétreault, Christian Calon, Terre Thaemlitz, John Oswald, Diane Labrosse, David Kristian, and Alexandre St-Onge. So there are musicians from the Ambiances Magnétiques and Alien8 Recordings stables; from Montreal, Europe, and Japan; and from electro-acoustic and electronica realms, all on the same CD. They approached the subject from different angles, but came to similar conclusions. All pieces belong to the turn-of-the-century avant-garde stylings of digital lowercase or new electro-acoustics."

Tracklisting :

1. Ralf Wehowsky - Gesichte
2. Martin Tétreault - Bloc De Vitesse Brune Avec 2 Trous
3. Christian Calon - Aiguiser L'Ouïe
4. Terre Thaemlitz - Transit(ional Edit)
5. John Oswald - Ohmigone
6. John Oswald - Ridge
7. Diane Labrosse - Curieux Mélange Pour Amateurs Auditifs De La Jeune Radio
8. David Kristian - Ohmite
9. Alexandre St-Onge - I-I

"Ohmix" was released by Avatar / OHM Editions in 2001.

Get it here : Ohmix