Billus
Shifting Sands

Seance Centre: ...INCANTATIONS is a collection of sixteen visual and sonic experiments centred around the idea of score as spell, curated and produced by Séance Centre’s Brandon Hocura and Naomi Okabe.A spell and its incantation are distinct, but conjoined by a symbolic, almost umbilical force. A spell is a totem text, a material call for change — a seed, a recipe, an instruction, a potential. The incantation of a spell gives it life, brings breath to body, raises hairs, moves minds. For this project, eight spell-scores were created by visual/text-based artists for a musician/composer to incant. Taking a wide interpretation of what can be considered a score, these works include concrete poetry, collage, painting, drawing, spell-poetry, instructional art, and recipe. The resulting sound works give voice to these evocative “texts”, residing in the liminal space between musical form and magical utterance.

Comfortnoise: ...Ever since it was founded in 2003, Comfortnoise has featured events, podcasts, and texts rotating around mighty basslines in Techno and Dub. Now, NEW.COM («new-dot-com»), head of Comfortnoise, emerges with four of his own productions exploring the depths of dancefloor, even soundsystem-oriented music:«Mountainous Conquest» piles up a ground-shaking bassline interspersed with breezy percussion and a fragmented melodica theme. «Mental Canoe» lays out an utmost stripped-down, metallically droning Reggae tune, while «Green Plunder» presents a nasty, shattering, technoid roller. Finally, percussion-oriented «Ravings Of Rock» playfully swings between stops and goes, seabed and rain clouds. The EP casually follows a powerfully eloquent poem by Carribean poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite (r.i.p.) and closes with this pretty evident line: «The Unity Is Submarine».