Artist: Various Artists
Title: 2024 Taâlem Advent Calendar
Format: 24 x MiniCDr 3″ in Wooden Box, ltd. 60 numbered copies / digital download
Label: Taâlem
Cat. number: almbox 4
Tracks: 29
Playing Time: 483:24
Release date: November 4, 2024 (24 x MiniCDr 3″ Box) / December 1-24, 2024 (digital download)
File under: Electronic / Experimental / Ambient / Dark Ambient / Drone / Electroacoustic / Abstract / Tribal
Tracklist:
Day 1: Nimh – Recalling Black Silences
01-01. Black Silence 4 (19:05)
Day 2: Dronæment – Shamanic Breakfast
02-01. Shamanic Breakfast (20:01)
Day 3: Compest – Zustand und Stasis
03-01. Zustandundstasis (21:08)
Day 4: Maurizio Bianchi – SHREDS
04-01. SHRED 15 (10:56)
04-02. SHRED 18 (10:58)
Day 5: Flavien Gillié – Mes Yeux Fatiguent Vite
05-01. Mes Yeux Fatiguent Vite (20:00)
Day 6: Lecanora – Rust
06-01. Rust on Rust (7:25)
06-02. China (6:43)
06-03. Rust on Brass (6:07)
Day 7: Désaccord Majeur – Les Jugements de Goût
07-01. Les Jugements de Goût (20:29)
Day 8: Modelbau – Mechanical Shadows of the Fading Light
08-01. Mechanical Shadows of the Fading Light (20:02)
Day 9: John Grzinich – Weathering Inside
09-01. Weathering Inside (22:30)
Day 10: I: Wound – This Is NOT the Present
10-01. This Is NOT the Present (18:49)
Day 11: Cinema Perdu – After
11-01. After (19:53)
Day 12: Jon Unger – Magnis
12-01. Magnis (20:44)
Day 13: Tzesne – Rih Zehm Buhl
13-01. Rih Zehm Buhl (17:48)
Day 14: Fredrik Mathias Josefson – Cedars Avenue
14-01. Cedars Avenue (20:01)
Day 15: Andrea Marutti – The Karnak Loops
15-01. Hiss from the Temples (21:30)
Day 16: Orphax – Bellow
16-01. Bellow (20:09)
Day 17: Ingeos – kdi dctb 326 {h}
17-01. Racines / Clairière / Présences Voilées / Ramifications / Étoiles & Cœur (19:12)
Day 18: Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf & Emerge – Fermeture Forcée
18-01. Fermeture Forcée (19:55)
Day 19: Laurent Pernice – PSL Drones
19-01. PSL Drones (21:31)
Day 20: Liquid Sphere + Bruno Verneret – Hope, Fear and Relapse
20-01. Hope, Fear and Relapse (19:40)
Day 21: Aidan Baker – Adventdrones Parousia
21-01. Parousia (19:59)
Day 22: Jérémie Mathes – Pyramiden
22-01. Pyramiden (20:14)
Day 23: Bewilderness – Dead Leaves
23-01. These Promises (11:16)
23-02. Gentle Flycatcher (7:28)
Day 24: Enrico Coniglio – Adagissimo Venexiano
24-01. Adagissimo Venexiano – Parte 1 (9:52)
24-02. Adagissimo Venexiano – Parte 2 (9:59)
Streaming:
Label’s press release:
If you’ve been following our activities in the past years, you’ll remember that, every year in December, we organize a “musical advent calendar” where every day we offer a different digital release from our back catalogue on Bandcamp as pay-whay-you-want download.
Nearly all the back catalogue was offered so we had to find something new for 2024. So we’ve had a (brilliant?) idea: offering unreleased/rare music from selected taâlem artists with one new release each day during the 24 first days of December, still as pay-what-you-want download.
But as taâlem has never been a digital-only label, we’ll also offer a physical version of this advent calendar. That means 24 3″ MiniCDrs of new/unreleased/rare tracks from 24 different taâlem artists in a wooden boxset. The boxset is limited to around 60 copies and there is only around 35 copies for sale.
Of course, as it’s an advent calendar, the contributing artists won’t be revealed before the 1st of December (let’s keep the mystery!). They are mainly from France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and some other countries. We now have all the tracks from the contributing artists and this will be really nice. Tentative official release date is the 4th of November. Plenty of time to get the boxset before the 1st of December!
Notes by Andrea Marutti:
The idea of this special ‘advent calendar’ proposed to me by Jean-Marc Boucher immediately tickled my fancy. I am always happy to receive invitations to any of his projects and this one seemed very special right from the start. Since many years I have been recurrently suffering from one of the worst ills that affects creative talent in the modern world: the almost total lack of spare time. It was a nice opportunity to try to overcome adversities and get to work on a new piece of music, not a short and quick one, but preferrably a longer and more complex track which could perhaps also be turned into the starting point of a work to be structured on different compositions, of which this contribution to the advent calendar could be just the first step, while waiting to be able to continue, who knows when.
It will come as no surprise that I am a big fan of music in general, and especially of vinyl records. The reasons why a record interests me can be many, and often they are completely separated from the music such record may contain. Wherever I find a flea market, a stall with old records for sale, I never fail to check and browse through the stuff available for sale. The more the records look messy, without any separation or particular order, be it alphabetical or by music style, the greater is my curiosity to rummage through the merchandise, looking for who knows what. Sometimes I happen to stumble upon weird records – which of course are those that interest me the most – originating from faraway countries, never seen before items that God only knows how they have reached the place where I found them.
Such is the case with a double LP, published in Egypt during the early 1970s by no less than the Ministry of Culture and Information and the Egyptian Organisation of Antiquities, containing the audio portion of a sort of theatrical performance, accompanied by music and, originally, a light show, which I easily guess was staged for use and consumption of the multitude of tourists visiting the Karnak Temple Complex. Once back home, I can only imagine that the album served as a mean to relive, at least in part, the emotions felt during the live performance in that extraordinary and unique setting.
I must be sincere here: even before I had a chance to listen to it, the very moment I had it in my hands, I instantly thought that I was meant to do something with that double LP and that, even if I still didn’t have a clue of its contents, I would use the audio as the basis for a composition. The chronic lack of spare time that I hinted earlier meant that such intuition, such desire, had to wait quite some time before being realised. When the day came, I didn’t bother to wash the records before importing the audio into my DAW; I wanted all the dust and scratches to be present and clearly heard. All those kinds of imperfections that I painstakingly remove or correct when I am hired for mastering duties, I wanted them to remain and become part of the project that would soon begin to take shape.
After an initial listening session, I choosed and cut out about a hundred fragments of varying duration, from just a few seconds to more than one minute, trying to isolate interesting musical parts that seemed particularly suited to manipulation, and excluding – except on rare occasions – those filled with the voices of the performers, which clearly seemed useless for realising what I had on my mind. After this cutting phase it took some time before I could continue my task. When the opportunity arose, I processed about thirty fragments with various audio plug-ins, creating multiple versions of each of them, and tried out juxtapositions and superimpositions to understand how much of the selected material was actually usable for the purpose.
Once I had successfully passed this stage, I had the idea of recording these fragments on a cheap run-down cassette tape, one of a very poor quality even when it was new at the time of purchase, at least forty years old and already recorded countless times, most recently with a 1976 David Bowie live bootleg… For a few years now I have been fascinated by the imperfections found in recordings made on cassette tapes and the hiss that characterises this type of medium. Not satisfied with just the recording itself, later I pulled out the entire recorded tape from the cassette body, without taking care not to mistreat it. Once the tape was completely loose, I began to rewind it with the help of a Bic pen, sometimes with difficulty because part of it had rolled in on itself – knotted would describe the phenomenon better – at my feet. Sometimes I had to cut and then join the tape with Scotch™ because unravelling was not an option.
When that old cassette was finally reassembled, I digitised it and cut again in my DAW the fragments I had previously selected, so as to have them available again for audio editing after I had run them through that sort of “manual plug-in” as explained. In the end, of the thirty or so previously selected fragments, I used only a dozen, trying to proceed more by juxtaposition rather than layering them, favouring a sparse structure made up of loops that repeat and fade into other loops, and only rarely developes vertically.
Thus was born “Hiss from the Temples”, the only track included in the 3″ MiniCDr entitled “The Karnak Loops” that is part of the “2024 Taâlem Advent Calendar”. This also explains the reason to those who wondered why a release with a particular title only contains one track with a different title. My resolution for 2025 is to have at least enough spare time to create another composition in the same vein using the same sound source so that, paired together, they can be included on a full-lenght CD, or better yet, on a vinyl record that could possibly get scratched and full of dust, so that my work is enriched with new imperfections.
(December 2024)
Reviews:
Bauke van der Wal, Vital Weekly #1465, December 2024
Andrea Marutti is a frequent visitor of the Taâlem catalogue. Several 3″s and many annual samplers have enjoyed carrying his music. Andrea is the man behind Afe Records, which was incredibly active in the first decade of this century. As Amon and as a member of Hall of Mirrors, Maribor and Sil Muir, he is part of my collection and gets played quite often. “The Karnak Loops” has one track titled “Hiss from the Temples“; I can’t tell you why both titles are different. I can tell you that this piece is a heavy orchestral composition, which may be limited in its choice of different sounds and, therefore, sonic complexity. Still, the composition and atmosphere are essential because if this choice is so dense, minimal and intrusive, it has become an example of what you can do within your chosen limitation. A beautiful orchestral drone that might, no wait, that will appeal to fans of Lustmord in his “Heresy“-era.