various: touch 30 years & counting

Released to coincide with Touch's 30th anniversary celebrations at Beaconsfield, London, on December 5th and 6th, 2012. All tracks are exclusive and original to this release. Music by Touch 33, Fennesz, Bruce Gilbert, Rosy Parlane, Oren Ambarchi, The Book Depository, Eleh, BJNilsen, Nana April Jun, Chris Watson, Mika Vainio, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Jana Winderen, Philip Jeck, Z'EV, Hildur Gudnadottir, Senescent, and Biosphere. "30 Years and Counting is an echo of a time when the world was in a critical condition, and potentially about to blow itself into oblivion. As such it is a wry reflection on the situation we find ourselves in today, where the final curtain is less likely to close, but the stakes somehow seem to be more extreme and polarized than ever. As far as Touch is concerned, it is an expression of our youthful relationship to the work. Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft invited each of the Touch artists to contribute a glimpse of their current practice to what is effectively a group show rather than a compilation. The brief was not only to celebrate a situation, but to remind each other why we are doing it, and make a kind of documentary realism. Some artists responded quickly with significant twists and returns to their signature sound and others left it to the last minute. The net result was that Mike and Jon mastered the LP/CD more or less as live performance in the cutting room, Transition, as an expression of the vitality of the project rather than some pre-ordained historical item. The history is built into the cover with two images of the first computer, the 'Colossus', built in Bletchley Park during the early 1940s as a means of cracking the Enigma codes? Here the pressure of time is at its most compressed. Two contrapuntal images were shot only recently, backstage moments of Touch 30 situations which as historical events, pale in comparison -- they are just personal, memory. Duration becomes a key aspect, which might explain why there is no recording by Phill Niblock, but nonetheless a filmic/time-based response from a collective of artists who have made a distinct impression on contemporary music and the way things go. We started with cassettes; this project commenced as a dedication to vinyl rather than digital. 30 Years and Counting is a manifesto after all these years. The vinyl flares with the crackle of the present." --Jon Wozencroft, November 2012