MARTINA BERTONI – Electroacoustic Works For Halldorophone

Format: 2x 180gr LP, clear vinyl / limited edition tape, 50 handnumbered items /download

Release date: february 21st 2025

https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/electroacoustic-works-for-halldorophone

For her new and most radical album »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone«, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.

Martina Bertoni returns to Karlrecords with »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone,« her most radical album yet. The foundation for the four electroacoustic pieces was laid during a residency at Stockholm’s legendary Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) that the Berlin-based cellist and composer used to explore the curious instrument, originally designed by Halldór Úlfarsson in 2008, as an algorithmic system in order to examine tunings and the mathematical relationships between harmonic frequencies. Aiming to analyse and understand their interaction beyond the composer’s control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. Accordingly, her four »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« seem both massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.
While the halldorophone—famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her »Joker« score—roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on »minimal interventions—some string strumming and plucking« that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. »I decided to not approach it like a cellist would,« she explains. »Instead I used it as a kind of generative organ by turning it into a feedback machine, with tuned feedback triggering more feedback depending on the tuning, which was based on tetraphonic scales that I could apply on the four main strings as well as the sympathetic group of strings.«
Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O’Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. »The halldorophone doesn’t have a line output, just a double set of speakers, which is why I recorded all sounds with two microphones in the EMS studio,« she explains. »That’s why there’s plenty of breathing sounds here and there—label owner Thomas Herbst and I jokingly refer to the album as my ›chamber music record‹.« And indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay.
Indeed, »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener »Omen in G« is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, »Nominal in D,« plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. »Fades in C«—the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes—unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and »Organon in D« closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni’s unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound. (Kristoffer Cornils)

Tracklist:
A. nr. 1 – Omen in G
B. nr. 2 – Nominal D
C. nr. 3 – Fades in C
D. nr. 4 – Organon in D

Credits:
Halldorophone recorded at EMS Stockholm in November 2023
All music recorded, composed and produced by Martina Bertoni
Mixed and mastered by Ciaran O’Shea
Lacquer cut by Kassian Troyer at D&M, Berlin
Cover Artwork by Gregory Cowling / Praxis Typography

DAVID WALLRAF – Crudeltá Necessaria

Format: tape with download postcard + 8pp booklet / download

Release date: february 7th 2025

https://karlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/crudelt-necessaria

Noise artist DAVID WALLRAF returns with his second album on Karl – “Crudeltá Necessaria” deals with the role of cruelty in the works of PIER PAOLO PASOLINI.

DAVID WALLRAF is a noise artist and theorist living in Hamburg. His artistic work deals with the repressed and uncanny sonic residues of quotidian life, crafting soundtracks for the creeping disaster we inhabit. His works have been released on numerous international tape labels. A recent interest of his is the live scoring of silent films, including works by Luis Buñuel, Maya Deren and Jean Genet. In the academic world, WALLRAF graduated with a BA in musicology at University of Hamburg, MA in time based media at Hochschule für bildende Künste, PhD on noise at HFBK, his PhD thesis “Grenzen des Hörens. Noise und die Akustik des Politischen” (Limits of Hearing. Noise and the Acoustics of the Political) has been published in German. He also regularly gives lectures on power relations in music, noise-theory, sound art/studies and the politics of listening.
“Crudeltá Necessaria”, the follow-up to last year’s „The Commune Of Nightmares“, deals with the role of cruelty in the works of PIER PAOLO PASOLINI by blending noise, raw electronics and field recordings into a detailed dystopian sonic experience that „you don’t have to be afraid of“ (R. Mießner, taz).
In the words of WALLRAF himself:
„The world (another word for society) is cruel in a banal sense: unjust, brutal and segregating. Life under capitalism is the generalized and global form of this cruelty, organized by the logic of abstract labor and alienation. But cruelty also carries a different meaning, one that has resonated with a few artists of the 20th century who positioned themselves against the cruel banality of their times. Cruelty in the sense of mercilessness or remorselessness, both a realism and a necessary stance in a battle against an overly powerful enemy. Antonin Artaud’s conception of the theater of cruelty exemplifies this stance, an “appeal to cruelty and terror […] whose range probes our entire vitality, confronts us with all our possibilities” (The Theater and Cruelty). All our possibilities: an affirmation of radical difference. A similar posture, although it replaces Artaud’s mysticism with a communist viewpoint, can be found in the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Pasolini was a merciless analyst and critic of society under capitalist production. His answer to the banal brutality of capitalism was an artistic cruelty of his own design, a necessary cruelty which is evident in the films and texts that inspired these recordings. It is evident in the transformations and transitions of the novel-fragment Petrolio, it glares and screams from the screen in his films. You can hear it in the last and only words of the young cannibal in Porcile (“I killed my father. I ate human flesh. I quiver with joy.”), in Medea’s curse against Iason (“It’s useless! Nothing is possible anymore!”) and in the Sphinx’s desperate cry when murdered by Oedipus (“It’s useless! The abyss you’re throwing me in is in yourself!”). It gazes through the masks of mythological and historical settings. It is evident in the almost violent way Pasolini edited his films, a form of Verfremdungseffekt that exemplifies his remorseless stance towards his audience, the spectacle of the film industry, fascism and capitalistic society. This necessary cruelty serves as a last line of defense in the political and artistic struggle against societal and political pressure. With this release I hope to capture at least a fragment of this demeanor.”

Tracklist:
A1 Porcile
A2 È Inutile. Niente È Più Possibile, Ormai.
A3 È Inutile. La Abisso In Cui Mi Spingi È Dentro Di Te.
A4 Nuova Periferia
B1 Petrolio

Credits:
Recorded in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg, 2023-2024. Sound design fragments from Pasolini’s films Edipo Re (1967), Porcile (1969) and Medea (1969) were recorded to ¼-inch tape loops and appear throughout these selections.
Chanting on A1 recorded on Easter Sunday 2019 outside Karola Boromeusza church in Warsaw, Poland. Boars on A1 recorded in November 2022 in Hellenthal, Germany.