Maestra Lacrimae

Maestra Lacrimae

Release Date Sept. 12, 2026

Originally developed as the sonic counterpart to an exhibition by Anastasia Bay, Maestra Lacrymae is a five-act opera conceived and directed by Bay, and written, composed and performed by Joseph Schiano di Lombo. Moving through five archetypal figures embodied by a single transforming voice, the work carries Bay’s visual universe into an autonomous double vinyl edition.

Double LP. 140 g black vinyl. Gatefold sleeve.
Edition of 300 copies, including 50 special editions featuring an original artwork by Anastasia Bay.
Catalogue number: SPT26-2. EAN: 7649988016547

Originally developed as the sonic counterpart to an exhibition by visual artist Anastasia Bay, Maestra Lacrymae is an opera conceived and directed by Bay and written and composed by multidisciplinary artist Joseph Schiano di Lombo. Originating in their 2024 collaboration at the Brussels gallery Sorry We’re Closed, the work has evolved into an autonomous double vinyl edition. Rather than documenting the exhibition, the record expands its visual universe into an ambitious, specific operatic musical work.

Structured in five acts, the opera unfolds through five archetypal figures: Golem, Artemis, Dibutadès, Penelope and Gille-en-Elle. Performed through a single voice transformed across multiple identities, these characters draw on mythology, art history, carnival traditions and contemporary feminist thought. As a way of conveying Anastasia Bay’s eerie, multi-layered Baroque visual world, the composition brings together ancient poetic forms, opera, spoken word and electroacoustic treatments in a work that moves freely between music, theatre and visual art.

Joseph Schiano di Lombo’s musical composition and performance navigate masterfully between genres, delicately touching on electronic ritual, psych-folk songs, ethereal modern classical music, and haunting minimalism. The LP presents the complete opera as a listening experience while preserving its close relationship to the exhibition from which it emerged.

Designed by Quentin Lamouroux, the album captures the complexity of this crossover experiment by presenting a complete libretto of the opera in the form of an art object. Anastasia Bay has also produced a limited edition of 50 copies, each of which includes an original, signed, and numbered artwork.

Side A
Act I: La Golem
Acte II: Artémis, La Génitrice

Side B
Act III: Dibutadès, Juste-la-Fille-du-Père
Act IV : Pénélope la Hackeuse

Side C
Act V: Gille-en-Elle, l’Arlequine
Epilogue de Gille-en-Elle

Side D
Ouverture / Fermeture
Placement du public

Anastasia Bay – concept, artistic direction and artwork
Joseph Schiano di Lombo – writing, composition and performance
Emilie Pischedda – dramaturgy
Merlin Modulaw – mixing
Frédéric Alstadt, Mont Analogue – mastering and lacquer cut
Quentin Lamouroux – graphic design

Produced by Sorry We’re Closed × Speckled-Toshe.

Maestra Lacrymae was conceived by Anastasia Bay as an opera for voice and keyboard and written, composed and performed by Joseph Schiano di Lombo.

The work is issued as a double LP in an edition of 300 copies. A special edition features covers individually overdrawn by Anastasia Bay.

Anastasia Bay creates paintings that draw upon mythological and art historical sources, blending ancient figurative traditions with contemporary culture. A graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the French, Brussels based artist’s work ifrom the powers of theater and opera in order to channel the subversive forces of carnival, extending the realm of painting to the environment and the stage.

Joseph Schiano di Lombo is a French composer, visual artist, and author based in Pantin. Initially trained in piano and clarinet, he graduated from the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs de Paris. His unclassifiable music explores the boundaries between songwriting, experimental music, and modern composition. Often working in collaboration, across disciplines, he composed for films, exhibitions, and fashion brands.

This edition is co-published by Sorry We’re Closed and Speckled-Toshe. The collaboration brings together the gallery’s work with Anastasia Bay and Speckled-Toshe’s editorial approach to artist records, considering sound, text, artwork and graphic design as interconnected parts of a single publication.

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon

Zeynep Toraman

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon

Zeynep Toraman

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon unfolds as a series of variations across music, writing and cinema. Rather than treating these forms as separate disciplines, Zeynep Toraman allows them to circulate around shared questions of memory, listening and perception, creating a work that expands beyond any single medium.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe 2026,  SPT25-C4.
purple colored vinyl, EAN7649988016516
Released on 18 April 2026.

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon unfolds through continual variation. Musical ideas, fragments of writing, film and remembered images return in altered forms, not to resolve one another but to sustain attention over time. Variation becomes less a formal procedure than a practice of endurance, allowing the work to remain with the same questions from shifting perspectives.

At the centre of the publication lies an attention to listening as a form of orientation. Instrumental writing, electronics and the commissioned film by Burak Çevik are conceived as structurally inseparable, each opening another perspective on the same emotional landscape. Rather than illustrating an external narrative, the music allows memory, absence and imagined spaces to emerge through gradual transformation and return.

Although the title refers to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, the film is only one node within a wider network of literary, cinematic and philosophical associations. These references never function as quotations to be decoded; instead, they become successive variations through which the work continually reorients itself. Listening becomes a movement through connections that remain open, provisional and in flux.

The LP, Burak Çevik’s film and the accompanying essay form three interconnected versions of the same work. Rather than explaining one another, each offers a different path through its network of recurring images, sounds and ideas.

Related:
An extensive conversation with Zeynep Toraman about Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon, the role of film and writing in her work, and the ideas that informed the composition: Going Nowhere Inside a Carefully Designed World: A Conversation with Zeynep Toraman (Foxy Digitalis)

Peter Margasak discusses Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon in his monthly survey of contemporary classical releases:
The Best Contemporary Classical Music on Bandcamp: April 2026 — Bandcamp Daily, May 8, 2026

Dear B,

In this second-to-last month of the year, I am thinking of you very often. I’ve also been thinking about the lines from Rilke, where he asks Kappus: “Why would you want to exclude from your life all disturbance, pain and dejection, since after all you don’t know what work these states are doing upon you?” Thinking of endurance as a form of sustain. As a way to address some unspeakable aspect of being alive. When I first watched your film, this is what stuck with me, your addressing of this unarticulated thing by way of Cézanne.

Also what endures between these two people – an incomplete love, but also not love, a form of attachment and alliance, and moreover maybe this thing which can survive in a hostile environment somehow. But also an ode to the complete intertwining of art and love and things that get lost in-between, but also the things that never get lost. Serres writes somewhere that “Growth and phantasm often go hand in hand.” (I almost want to apologize for still speaking of ghosts here, but I know it is a mutual interest of ours.)

While watching this scene, I of course remembered that I have a copy of Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne. I tried to read it a few years ago. I had to stop not even halfway through. I simply couldn’t get into it. I picked it off the shelf last month and this time the pages (and time) flew by.

I guess I am writing to you now, because I know you will understand. Ever since I started thinking of my silence as a gift to others, and in relation to that, my sustained optimism as a gift to myself, things started becoming a bit lighter.

Then again why write a theme and variations?
Is this piece anything more than my (perhaps very personal – as if there could be any other way to interact with it) take on this form? And my sense that this form ultimately is about endurance.
(Zeynep Toraman)

Side A – 19:07
Side B – 12:04

Zeynep Toraman – composition, texts, electronics
Ensemble Contrechamps – performance
Simon Aeschimann – electric guitar
Martina Brodbeck – cello
Laurent Bruttin – clarinet
Maximilian Haft – violin

Burak Çevik – film
Didar Püren Erbek, Fatih Gençkal – voices in the film

Nazlı Cengiz – illustration (booklet cover, watercolour)
Christophe Egea – recording and mixing, recording session photography
Frédéric Alstadt, Mont Analogue – mastering and lacquer cut
Zeynep Toraman, Simon Aeschimann – artistic production
Serge Vuille, Laurent Schmid – executive production

Castle Terraces in Barry Lyndon was co-commissioned by Contrechamps, Geneva, and Another Sky Festival, London.
Recorded at Les 6 Toits, Geneva, 15–17 November 2024

The images on the outer and inner gatefold cover are stills from an untitled film by Burak Çevik. The film was shown as part of the performance, and fragments of its dialogue appear on the recording.

The booklet includes two texts by Zeynep Toraman, Wenn ich schriee, hörte mich? and a letter to B, with a watercolour illustration by Nazlı Cengiz on its cover.

Zeynep Toraman is a composer and performer from Istanbul, based in Berlin. Working with voice, instruments, electronics, film and text, she explores how autobiographical, poetic, fictional and historical materials can enter into musical composition. She approaches her own library as an archive, drawing connections between reading, writing, memory and sound.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a collaborative series developed by Speckled-Toshe and the Ensemble Contrechamps. The editions present newly commissioned or recent works by contemporary composers, reconstructed as autonomous vinyl publications. Rather than documenting concerts, each release is conceived as an editorial project in which sound, text and visual material form a new constellation.

Tabustar

Rabasta

Tabustar

Rabasta

Tabustar develops an instrumental language built from rhythm, repetition and pressure. Taking its title from a passage in Pascal Quignard's The Hatred of Music, Rabasta explores the unstable territory between percussion, resonance and noise, shaping a record driven by pulse, texture and continual transformation.

Speckled-Toshe 2026,  SPT25-2

Cover in two-colour screen print (printed by Atelier Obscur, Renens), inner sleeve in offset. Blue and black marbled vinyl. Limited edition of 200 copies; a CD version was released in parallel by Thödol Records. Blue-black marbled vinyl.

 

Taking its title from Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music, Tabustar begins with an unstable word. A sound suspended between quarrelling and drumming, between human noise and resonant bodies. The title itself behaves like the music it names: resistant to fixed meaning, driven instead by rhythm, resonance and the physical act of sounding.

The record unfolds through insistent rhythmic structures, interlocking instrumental layers and a constant sense of propulsion. Rather than relying on melodic development, the music advances through pulse, repetition and subtle displacement. Patterns emerge, dissolve and return, generating a restless equilibrium between precision and instability.

Quignard remains present less as a literary reference than as an underlying impulse. Rhythm precedes language, organising movement, memory and listening before it settles into meaning. This shared intuition shapes the work without ever becoming a programme to be illustrated.

Across the duration of the LP, these shifting rhythmic relationships gradually reveal their complexity. Listening becomes an experience of continual reorientation, as recurring figures acquire new meanings through repetition, interruption and return.

“Tarabust is an unstable word. Two distinct worlds meet in it, attract it, and thus divide it according to two processes of morphological derivation that are both too plausible for the philologist to decide between them. The word tarabust is itself disputed between the group of that which belabors and the group of that which drums. Between the rabasta group (the noise of quarreling, the belaboring group) and the tabustar group (hitting, talabussare, tamburare, the family of resonators, of drums). Either vociferous human coitus. Or percussions of hollow objects. Acoustic obsession is unable to distinguish in what it hears between what it ceaselessly wants to hear and what it cannot have heard. An incomprehensible noise that belabors. A noise that could either be quarreling or drumming, panting or blows. It was very rhythmic. We come from this noise. It is our seed.

Pascal Quignard, The hatred of music, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, p. 39

A1 Flow 7:02
A2 Pulse 9:42
A3 Loop 2:38
B1 Sample 9:24
B2 Gust 6:57
B3 Loop 1:21

Benoît Moreau – composition, organ, electronics
Laurent Estoppey – saxophone
Immanuel Heitor Idéalen – guitar
David Meier – drums

Antoine Etter, Phonotope Studio – recording and mastering
Flo Kaufmann – lacquer cut
Benoît Moreau, Laurent Schmid – graphic design
Atelier Obscur, Renens – screen printing
MEK Vinyl – vinyl pressing

The title Tabustar derives from a passage in Pascal Quignard’s The Hatred of Music, in which the unstable word tarabustis pulled between rabasta—the noise of quarrelling or belabouring—and tabustar, associated with hitting, resonators and drums.

The edition consists of 200 copies on blue-and-black marbled vinyl, with a two-colour screen-printed cover and an offset-printed inner sleeve.

A CD edition was released in parallel by Thödol Records.

Rabasta is a project initiated by Swiss composer and musician Benoît Moreau. The name encompasses his solo performances as well as collaborative formations. On Tabustar, Rabasta takes the form of a quartet with Laurent Estoppey on saxophone, Immanuel Heitor Idéalen on guitar, David Meier on drums, and Moreau on organ and electronics.

Speckled-Toshe is an independent publishing platform for artist records and sound editions. Working in close collaboration with artists, musicians, composers, writers and designers, each release is conceived as an editorial work in which sound, texts, images and design form an integrated whole rather than separate components.

O’Tilli

Donnimaar

O’Tilli

Donnimaar

O'Tilli unfolds as an acoustic fiction in which voices, environmental sounds and instrumental textures form a shifting landscape of memories, myths and imagined places. Rather than following a linear narrative, the record constructs a listening experience in which sound becomes a space for orientation, association and transformation.

Speckled Toshe 2025, SPT24-4

blue marbled vinyl without paper label

O’Tilli forms part of Donnimaar, Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s ongoing artistic project spanning music, performance and visual art. The album draws on songs and narratives from the oral traditions of West Jutland documented in the nineteenth century by the Danish folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen, including material transmitted by the artist’s great-great-great-great-grandmother Johanne Tygesdatter. Anchored in this ethnographic archive, the work approaches these texts not as historical artefacts but as living material capable of continual transformation.

Rather than reconstructing a traditional repertoire, Kølbæk Iversen develops new musical works from the historical texts. Sung in the original West Jutland dialect and realised for solo voice, choir and strings, the four compositions allow the language itself to shape melody, rhythm and vocal expression. The accompanying Riso-printed songbook reproduces the original texts alongside English translations, making the linguistic source material an integral part of the publication.

The songs evoke a world populated by women, mermaids and other transformative figures whose stories often resist the Protestant, national-romantic framework within which they were collected. Rather than presenting folklore as a fixed cultural inheritance, O’Tilli reveals voices that remain unruly, contradictory and unexpectedly contemporary.

Donnimaar is a shapeshiftress. Throughout the project, historical voices, mythical figures and contemporary musical practice continually pass into one another, allowing the songs to remain in motion rather than settle into historical reconstruction.

Side A

1. Hustru og æ Man’ hans Mue’r (12:35)

Lead – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Choir – Katinka Fogh Vindelev

Melody – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Lyrics Traditional recorded in Midwest Jutland in the 1870s by Evald Tang Kristensen

Jutlandic reinterpretation from the Standard Danish: Michael Ejstrup

Choral arrangements and mix: Katinka Fogh Vindelev

2. Æ Hawwfrååw hon danser o Tilli (09:21)

Lead – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Choir – Katinka Fogh Vindelev

Melody – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Lyrics – Traditional recorded in Midwest Jutland in the 1870s by Evald Tang Kristensen

Jutlandic reinterpretation from the Standard Danish: Michael Ejstrup

Choral arrangements and mix: Katinka Fogh Vindelev

Side B

1. Agenetå i æ Bjææ’r (25:04)

Lead –Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Strings – Torleik Mortensen and Andreas Tykjær Restorff

Melody – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Lyrics –Traditional recorded in Midwest Jutland in the 1870s by Evald Tang Kristensen

Jutlandic reinterpretation from the Standard Danish: Michael Ejstrup

String arrangements: Torleik Mortensen and Andreas Tykjær Restorff

Mix: Torleik Mortensen and Andreas Tykjær Restorff

Bonus track to download: (Download here with your corresponding code)

3. Adeluds i æ Bjææ’r (09:50)

Lead –Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Choir – Katinka Fogh Vindelev

Melody – Marie Kølbæk Iversen

Lyrics: Traditional recorded in Midwest Jutland in the 1870s by Evald Tang Kristensen

Donnimaar (Marie Kølbæk Iversen) – composition, melodies, lead vocals
Katinka Fogh Vindelev – choir, choral arrangements
Torleik Mortensen, Andreas Tykjær Restorff – strings, string arrangements

Traditional songs documented in West Jutland in the 1870s by Evald Tang Kristensen
Michael Ejstrup – Jutlandic reinterpretation from Standard Danish

Recorded at Jens Benz Studio, Copenhagen

Katinka Fogh Vindelev – mixing, Side A and bonus track
Torleik Mortensen, Andreas Tykjær Restorff – mixing, Side B
Cedrik Fermont – mastering

Martin Bubandt – cover photography
Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Laurent Schmid – graphic design
Actum – risograph printing
Nordsø Records, Copenhagen – vinyl pressing

The songs are based on traditional material documented in West Jutland by the Danish folklorist Evald Tang Kristensen in the 1870s. Among them are songs passed down by Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s great-great-great-great-grandmother.

The LP includes a risograph-printed lyrics insert and a download code for the bonus track Adeluds i æ Bjææ’r.

Donnimaar is the musical persona of Danish visual artist Marie Kølbæk Iversen. Through Donnimaar, she works with voice, sound and composition as extensions of her broader artistic practice.

Speckled-Toshe is an independent publishing platform for artist records and sound editions. Working in close collaboration with artists, musicians, composers, writers and designers, each release is conceived as an editorial work in which sound, texts, images and design form an integrated whole rather than separate components.

Michael Jarrell – Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV, Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus)

Michael Jarrell

Michael Jarrell – Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV, Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus)

Michael Jarrell

Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV / Nachlese Vb brings together two works that reveal Michael Jarrell's long-standing practice of musical rethinking. Rather than returning to earlier material, each Nachlese opens a new path through it, allowing familiar ideas to unfold in different instrumental, vocal and temporal constellations.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe, 2025, SPT24-C3

Transparent-white marbled vinyl LP, EAN7640149285505

For more than three decades, Michael Jarrell has developed his music as an evolving network of interrelated works. Ideas are neither abandoned nor repeated; they are revisited, transformed and redirected, each new piece opening another trajectory through material that continues to generate unforeseen possibilities. Within this practice, the Nachlese cycle occupies a particular place. Borrowing Goethe’s term for a “re-reading” or “reconsideration,” these works return to earlier compositions not to refine them, but to reveal other paths they already contained.

Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV and Nachlese Vb exemplify this way of thinking. Although one centres on the violin and the other on the voice, both explore how musical ideas change when heard from another perspective. Rather than producing variants, Jarrell allows the material to branch, acquiring new colours, new temporalities and new relationships between soloist and ensemble.

Listening to these works is less an experience of thematic development than of continuous transformation. Musical gestures return altered, resonances linger beyond their immediate context, and the distinction between foreground and background remains fluid. The music unfolds through subtle shifts of perspective, inviting a mode of listening attentive to change rather than resolution.

Issued as part of the Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe series, this publication presents two works that illuminate Jarrell’s compositional practice from complementary viewpoints. The LP offers not simply a recording of performances, but an editorial constellation in which different branches of a single musical imagination can be heard in dialogue.

Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV
Pour violon et ensemble
(Side A, 00:18:57)

Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus)
Pour soprano et ensemble
(Side B, 00:19:30)

Michael Jarrell – composition
Emilio Pomàrico – conductor
Ensemble Contrechamps – performance
Maximilian Haft – solo violin
Yeree Suh – soprano

Susanne Peters – flute
Valentine Collet – oboe, English horn
Megumi Tabuchi – clarinet
Azra Ramic – bass clarinet
Pierre Fatus – bassoon, contrabassoon
Charles Pierron – horn
Julien Wurtz – trumpet
Vincent Bourgeois – trombone
Serge Bonvalot – tuba
Thierry Debons, Sébastien Cordier – percussion
Antoine Françoise – piano, celesta
Anne Bassand – harp
Madoka Sakitsu-Lapeyre, Jesús Manuel Larez León – violins
Vincent Hepp, Anne-Laure Dottrens – violas
Martina Brodbeck, Francisca Santos, Luis Parente – cellos
Jonathan Haskell – double bass

Michael Jarrell, David Poissonnier – artistic direction
David Poissonnier – sound recording and mixing
Damien Pousset – accompanying text
Alan Bogana – artwork
Frédéric Alstadt, Mont Analogue – mastering and lacquer cut
Elisa Charles, Simon Aeschimann, Laurent Schmid – production
Austrovinyl – vinyl pressing

Recorded live on 1 October 2023 at Victoria Hall in Geneva.

The cover images are stills from Alan Bogana’s video installation Crystal Fire (2015). They were selected for their relation to the role of light and darkness in both compositions.

The LP brings together Paysages avec figures absentes – Nachlese IV (2009), for violin and ensemble, and Nachlese Vb (Liederzyklus) (2012), for soprano and ensemble.

Michael Jarrell

Michael Jarrell is a Swiss composer based between Geneva and Vienna. He studied composition with Éric Gaudibert in Geneva and Klaus Huber in Freiburg. His work encompasses solo and chamber music, orchestral compositions, concertos and music theatre, often exploring processes of memory, transformation and the return of musical material. Jarrell has taught composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and at the Haute école de musique de Genève.

Emilio Pomàrico

Emilio Pomàrico is an Italian-Argentinian conductor and composer born in Buenos Aires. His work is closely associated with contemporary music, both as an interpreter and through his own compositions. He has conducted numerous orchestras and specialised ensembles, collaborating extensively with composers on the development and performance of new works. His repertoire also extends to major works of the twentieth century and the classical orchestral tradition.

Maximilian Haft

Maximilian Haft is a Belgian-American violinist, composer and researcher based in Switzerland. His work centres on contemporary music, experimental performance and collaborative forms of composition. He has been violin soloist with Ensemble Contrechamps since 2015 and is a founding member of Ensemble Proton Bern. Alongside performing and premiering new works, he develops projects that engage with transcription, technology and the material history of recorded sound.

Yeree Suh

Yeree Suh is a South Korean soprano whose repertoire ranges from Baroque music to works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She studied in Seoul, Berlin, Leipzig and at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis. Particularly active in contemporary music, she has worked with leading orchestras, ensembles and conductors in performances that place precise vocal control and close attention to text at the centre of her practice.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a collaborative series developed by Speckled-Toshe and the Ensemble Contrechamps. The editions present newly commissioned or recent works by contemporary composers, reconstructed as autonomous vinyl publications. Rather than documenting concerts, each release is conceived as an editorial project in which sound, text and visual material form a new constellation.

Les Mortes

Benoît Moreau

Les Mortes

Benoît Moreau

Les Mortes is a large-scale composition for three ensembles with distinct musical identities. Built through continual acts of recomposition, it returns to recurring gestures and musical materials that reappear in constantly changing forms.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe, 2023, SPT23-C1

Double LP, red vinyl, EAN7640149285192

In Les Mortes musical ideas, literary fragments and remembered gestures return throughout the work, each time subtly transformed, opening new relationships rather than reaffirming what has already been heard. The music unfolds less through linear development than through processes of displacement, return and variation.

Fragments from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 form one of the work’s underlying threads. Rather than functioning as a narrative source, they become part of a broader compositional fabric in which language, instrumental writing and silence circulate around one another without settling into fixed meanings.

Conceived for live performance and subsequently reconfigured as a double LP, Les Mortes does not document the concert from which it originated. Instead, the publication reconstructs the work as an autonomous edition whose sequencing and duration become part of its musical form.

Side A
Fragments  3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 25 · 31 · 32 · 33 · 34 · 37 · 38

Side B
Fragments  39 · 3 · 32 · 1 · 2

Side C
Fragments  4 · 110 · 8 · 9 · 38

Side D
Fragments  11 · 5 · 9 · 34

Benoît Moreau – composition, organ, electronics, editing and assembly
Roberto Bolaño, La Gale, Benoît Moreau – texts

Ensemble Contrechamps
Simon Aeschimann – guitar
Serge Bonvalot – tuba
Laurent Bruttin – clarinets
Sébastien Cordier – percussion
Noëlle Reymond – double bass

Rabasta
Laurent Estoppey – saxophone
David Meier – drums
Benoît Moreau – organ, electronics
Immanuel de Souza – guitar

110
La Gale – vocals
Luc Müller – drums

Christophe Egea – sound engineer
Samuel Albert – recording and mixing
Frédéric Alstadt – mastering and lacquer cut
Ariel Garcia – research and compilation of literary fragments, leaflet layout
Thibault Messerli – illustrations
Laurent Schmid – overall visual concept and graphic design

Recorded live at Les 6 Toits in Geneva on 3 and 4 November 2022.

The four sides of the double LP were edited and assembled by Benoît Moreau from these recordings. Rather than reproducing the original performances, they constitute a new version of the work, in which fragments are reordered, repeated and brought into different relationships.

Fragments from Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 form part of the work’s textual material.

Benoît Moreau

Benoît Moreau is a Swiss composer and musician based in Lausanne. His work moves between written composition, improvisation, song, theatre and multidisciplinary projects. He frequently develops music through collective working processes and collaborations with performers from different musical backgrounds. Alongside composing for ensembles and the stage, he performs on organ and electronics, both solo and with Rabasta.

The ensembles

Les Mortes brings together three ensembles with distinct musical identities: a quintet drawn from Ensemble Contrechamps, Rabasta, and the duo 110. Contrechamps approaches the work through contemporary instrumental practice; Rabasta brings together organ and electronics, saxophone, guitar and drums; 110 is formed by vocalist La Gale and drummer Luc Müller. Their contrasting approaches are treated as compositional material rather than merged into a single ensemble.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a collaborative series developed by Speckled-Toshe and the Ensemble Contrechamps. The editions present newly commissioned or recent works by contemporary composers, reconstructed as autonomous vinyl publications. Rather than documenting concerts, each release is conceived as an editorial project in which sound, text and visual material form a new constellation.

Joyfully Waiting – The Disc

Joyfully Waiting

Joyfully Waiting – The Disc

Joyfully Waiting

Joyfully Waiting – The Disc translates the online sound platform Joyfully Waiting into the form of an artist's record. Bringing together works by fourteen artists alongside newly commissioned printed material, the publication reimagines a web-based collection as a physical object whose sequencing, materiality and duration propose another way of listening.

Speckled Toshe / Joyfully Waiting 2023, SPT23-1

LP, Limited, numbered edition of 250 copies, slightly marbled red vinyl,

Joyfully Waiting has evolved over many years as an online platform for sound works by contemporary artists. Curated by Nathalie Rebholz together with Jeanne Graff, the project is published in successive editions, each usually bringing together seven to ten contributions by different artists. These groupings are rarely given a common title or accompanied by an overarching commentary. Instead, the selection and juxtaposition of the works establish the context in which they are presented.

The Disc takes this editorial practice into another medium. Fourteen contributions from Joyfully Waiting were selected and arranged across the two sides of an LP. The principle of bringing individual works into relation remains, but the record changes the conditions of their presentation. Here, the works are given a fixed sequence and a duration determined by the two sides of the LP.

The record is accompanied by an essay by Jazmina Figueroa and a series of printed inserts. These introduce text and printed material into a project whose individual online editions are primarily articulated through the works themselves and the way they are grouped.

The Disc makes a particular selection from a project that continues to grow and gives it the finite form of a record. The curatorial principle remains closely related to that of the online editions; what distinguishes The Disc is that this particular selection now has a fixed sequence and a physical form.

Tracklist

Side A

  1. 綬草 Spiranthes Sinenis Pers Ames (The field twittering series) – Galaxia Wang (2:46)

  2. HDHD – Sandar Tun Tun (1:32)

  3. Coffee + Mushrooms, Meadow Session – Seth Price (4:43)

  4. Eroica 7 – Chino Amobi (1:54)

  5. Neither Or Not Either – RM (2:03)

  6. Between Tails Forever – Soraya Lutangu Bonaventure & Mohamed Almusibli (3:45)

  7. Bubble Radiation – Jan Vorisek (2:36)

Side B

  1. Waiting with Antoni@ – Arttu Palmio (3:18)

  2. Now, that I become resident in my own life, 3rd of June – Marion Neumann (2:37)

  3. Oui ou non (Oiseau de lyre series) – Galaxia Wang (2:24)

  4. Yum – Jim Fletcher (1:12)

  5. I love you – Jeanne Graff (3:22)

  6. Sound Object & Feeding Birds – Aline Zeltner (1:58)

  7. TextContact II (Die Flamingos, Rilke) – The Operator & Stanislav Iordanov (0:57)

  8. Troisième discours – L’Acte pur (Andreas Hochuli & Tristan Lavoyer) (2:45)

Nathalie Rebholz / Joyfully Waiting – curatorial concept and selection
Jazmina Figueroa – accompanying essay, Songs about Waiting
Guy Meldem – cover image
Cedrik Fermont – mastering
Laurent Schmid –graphic design

Joyfully Waiting – The Disc brings together key positions from the web-based project joyfully-waiting.ch, now gathered on one physical object.

The record is accompanied by Songs about Waiting, an essay by Jazmina Figueroa, and a loose collection of printed contributions produced in different formats and on different supports.

Limited, numbered edition of 250 copies on marbled, semi-transparent red vinyl.

 

In Songs About Waiting, Jazmina Figueroa reflects on the emotional and philosophical dimensions of waiting through a personal narrative set in an airport. Using Fugazi’s Waiting Room and Genesis P-Orridge’s Frozen Velocity as auditory companions, she explores waiting not merely as delay or suspension, but as a state charged with ambiguity, resistance, and potential transformation. Through poetic and critical language, the essay dwells on waiting as both burden and agency—a space of soft endurance, affective suspension, and sonic revelation.

Curated by Nathalie Rebholz, Joyfully Waiting is an evolving collection of sound works by contemporary artists. The project exists primarily as an online listening platform and periodically takes other forms, including editions and exhibitions. Joyfully Waiting – The Disc translates a selection from this collection into a vinyl publication with accompanying printed materials.

Joyfully Waiting is an independent platform for sound works by contemporary artists, initiated by Nathalie Rebholz. Bringing together online publication, exhibitions and physical editions, the project explores listening as a shared artistic and editorial practice.

22 Miniatures en hommage à Eric Gaudibert

Vimbayi Kaziboni, Ensemble Contrechamps, Orchestre de la Haute école de musique de Genève

22 Miniatures en hommage à Eric Gaudibert

Vimbayi Kaziboni, Ensemble Contrechamps, Orchestre de la Haute école de musique de Genève

22 Miniatures en hommage à Éric Gaudibert gathers twenty-two composers around a shared point of departure rather than a shared musical language. Each miniature proposes a distinct response, allowing the publication to unfold as a constellation of independent voices connected through attention rather than resemblance.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe 2023, SPT23-C2

turquoise vinyl

22 Miniatures en hommage à Éric Gaudibert brings together twenty-two individual compositions as a collective tribute to the Swiss composer. The participating composers were connected to Gaudibert in different ways, through teaching, collaboration or other encounters with his work and musical practice. Each was invited to contribute a short piece.

The resulting miniatures differ considerably in musical language and in their relation to Gaudibert. Taken together, they do not attempt to construct a unified portrait of the composer. The collection retains the individuality of the twenty-two contributions and the different relationships, memories and musical responses from which they emerged.

Their brevity gives each contribution a concentrated form. On the LP, the twenty-two pieces are arranged as a sequence across two sides, placing contrasting compositional approaches directly alongside one another. The homage is thus heard not as a single statement about Gaudibert, but through a succession of distinct works by composers whose paths crossed his.

The participating composers are Khaled Arman, Ensemble Batida, Nimrod Ben Zeev, Cédric Bosson, Thomas Bove, Brice Catherin, Musheng Chen, Victor Cordero, Arturo Corrales, Fernando Garnero, Vincent Gillioz, Francisco Huguet, John Menoud, Nikolay Mihaylov, Benoît Moreau, Marcelo Ohara, Tigran Stambultsyan, Dragos Tara, Ludovic Thirvaudey, Lingling Yu, Tao Yu and Daniel Zea.

A1 Lingling Yu : Conversation au-delà, pour orchestre

En pensant au cher professeur Eric Gaudibert, Son œuvre «Trivium» (pipa, flûte à bec et percussion) résonne dans mes oreilles.

—

A2 Victor Cordero : L’envers des Destinées, pour violons, altos,violoncelles, contrebasses et percussions

Qu’est-ce que Eric entend dans le vibrato ? Le chatouillement incantatoire d’un effet purement acoustique ou bien une ressource lyrique encore teintée d’une patine romantique ? Délicieuse ambiguïté.

—

A3 Dragos Tara : Deslizar, pour ensemble

C’est grâce à Eric Gaudibert que j’ai découvert Fernando Pessoa. Avec le temps, j’en suis venu à me demander si Pessoa, le poète insaisissable et toujours en mouvement, n’était pas un hétéronyme d’Eric Gaudibert.

—

A4 Benoit Moreau : Hypnose des Airs, pour cor et ensemble instrumental

La stratégie de composition propose ici à l’ensemble de passer 60 secondes sous hypnose. Le corniste lit une partition que l’ensemble tente d’imiter au plus proche, en utilisant librement les sons propres à chaque instrument, avec une immédiateté qui empêche toute réflexion. Une réflexion sur le contexte de jeu qui prend racine dans l’héritage et les pensées expertes en la matière d’Eric Gaudibert.

—

A5 Thomas Bove : Jamais trop tard pour tendre la main, pour ensemble

L’idée pour Mr. Gaudibert m’est apparue au piano : une partie modale et l’autre en douze tons. J’ai ajouté la flûte, puis successivement les violoncelle, viole et basson, en improvisations libres.

—

A6 Khaled Armann : Croisé des Temps, pour ensemble

Mes travaux de composition prennent tous leur source dans l’immense creuset des musiques afghanes traditionnelles, tant ce creuset est en fait constitué d’une mosaïque d’expressions riches de plusieurs millénaires. Cette musique est une source inépuisable de par sa richesse, sa variété et elle reste pour le moment peu exploitée.

—

A7 Tigran Stambultsyan : Image de vie / instant d’éternité, pour orchestre

Le format d’une pièce très courte m’a donné l’idée de donner l’image de vie comme juste un instant d’éternité mais qui peut parler avec l’éternité. Le noyau thématique dérive d’un motif transformé d’un chant des montagnards d’Arménie, mon pays. Le développement réunit les particularités de la musique arménienne avec les éléments de la technique occidentale de la composition.

—

A8 Arturo Corrales : Beyond, pour guitare électrique solo

Cher Éric,
Des harmoniques pour toi.

D’ordinaire doux et légers, ici

violents et primitives.
Ils chantent comme des cris en haut,

à chaque fois plus haut.
Et quand on touche la limite, encore

plus haut, plus loin, au-delà.
Merci pour tout, maestro.

—

A9 Nimrod Ben-Zeev : Le Pommier de la Rue Tabazan, pour orchestre

Grande fresque hepta-phonique en forme de fantaisie féerique pour grand orchestre (sans mandoline) en partie inspirée par le tableau éponyme de Charlotte-Galathée de Westerweller.

—

A10 Ludovic Thirvaudey : Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen/Un pop-up musical pour Éric, pour orchestre

Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen est basé partiellement sur le chœur de la cantate BWV 12 de Johann Sebastian Bach. Le sous-titre Un pop-up musical pour Éric… évoque la construction par superposition de 7 brèves pièces, jouables successivement mais créées simultanément ce soir, tel un livre de pop-up refermé.

—

A11 Cedric Bosson : Rassemblement, pour ensemble

Des individus, des personnalités diverses qui se rencontrent, qui se rassemblent. Des séquences qui se superposent comme des samples ou des loops en électro.

—

B1 Musheng Chen : Nine Bracketed with ONE ( 九九归一), pour orchestre

«Dans la culture chinoise, le chiffre ‘neuf’ est considéré comme le chiffre le plus élevé, suggérant le plus grand et le plus significatif. Il est généralement associé et désigné comme le chiffre sacré du ‘ciel’. La pièce se compose de neuf mesures au total. Le public a pu entendre neuf cloches, neuf tambours, neuf tons principaux ainsi que neuf dynamiques musicales à l’écoute.»

—

B2 Vincent Gillioz : Caché, pour orchestre

L’être humain, pour survivre, a appris à se cacher. D’abord dans des cavernes, puis derrière des paroles, des sourires, des habits, des titres, et ce soir, des notes de musique.

—

B3 Marcelo Ohara : Folha seca Le macro du micro, œuvre électroacoustique

Dans cette pièce j’explore la captation faite par 3 couples stéréophoniques en configurations standardisées, disposées en parallèle : AB / ORTF / XY. La source sonore se balade dans cet espace microphonique et est captée et transformée selon les caractéristiques de chaque couple. La superposition et le jeu entre les prises stéréophoniques créent des images dynamiques et multidimensionnelles de l’objet sonore.

—

B4 Tao Yu : Hommage à Eric Gaudibert, pour orchestre

Dix ans, morts et vivants s’obscurcissent et se séparent. Je n’essaie pas de me souvenir, mais l’oubli est difficile. – Poésie de Sushi ‘’Jiang Chengzi’’ (1037-1101) Cette œuvre, composée uniquement de traits, qui revient finalement au portrait de M. Eric Gaudibert, vise à offrir aux musiciens une manière plus libre d’exprimer leur hommage en musique.

—

B5 Nikolai Mihaylov : Mouvements, œuvre acousmatique

Dans mes souvenirs, Éric est toujours associé à l’élégance, la clarté et l’équilibre. Pour cette miniature acousmatique, j’ai utilisé des sons synthétiques, ainsi que des sons enregistrés des instruments à cordes, des percussions, et des bois, en faisant de petits jeux de mouvement harmonique. Dans l’ordre et les choix de ces mouvements, j’ai essayé de garder le même esprit que j’avais pendant mes études avec Gaudibert.

—

B6 Brice Catherin : Musician’s Voice, pour orchestre

Musician’s Voice est basée sur la mise en valeur des idiosyncrasies des interprètes. Il s’agit pour le compositeur, non plus d’imposer du matériau, mais de proposer des façons d’organiser les savoir-faire spécifiques de chaque interprète.

—

B7 Francisco Huguet : Piano micro-hyperbola, œuvre électroacoustique

Un geste ludique et fugace sur un piano imaginaire pour célébrer l’essentiel, le vertige de l’ailleurs, et l’héritage d’un esprit libre et généreux.

—

B8 Ensemble Batida : Quieto, pièce pour ensemble libre dirigé

Quieto est la première miniature d’un cycle composé par l’Ensemble Batida, élaboré autour d’actions musicales collectives et de gestes instrumentaux chorégraphiés.
Suite à un concert auquel il a assisté, Éric Gaudibert adresse un email à l’une des musiciennes de l’Ensemble Batida et évoque la piste d’un procédé compositionnel agençant les aspects sonores et visuels. La pièce est basée sur cette structure : un élément à dominante visuelle, un élément à dominante sonore et enfin la superposition de ces deux éléments, et leur interaction.

—

B9 Fernando Garnero : TE#3 (avec I.S, pour E.G), pour orchestre

Cette œuvre s’insère dans une série d’études de transcription/transduction/traduction en musique d’objets ou procédés divers. Je traduis ici une série de techniques audio-numériques pour les rendre applicables à une écriture orchestrale.

—

B10 John Menoud : Go on G, pour piano et orchestre

DO WHAT THOU WILL SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW
LOVE IS THE LAW, LOVE UNDER WILL

« A good magician never explains »

—

B11 Daniel Zea : ERIC CARA DE TIGRE, pour ensemble et bande magnétique

Quelques mois après son décès, Éric est apparu dans mon rêve. Il avait l’air très calme, souriant. Il nous inondait de sa sérénité. Quand enfin j’ai pu le regarder face à face, son visage était celui d’un tigre; mais en même temps, c’était aussi le sien. Cette vision a déclenché mes pleurs. Je me suis réveillé en sanglots, et je n’ai pas pu m’arrêter pendant plusieurs minutes. C’étaient des larmes de joie.

Vimbayi Kaziboni – conductor
Ensemble Contrechamps – performance
Orchestre de la Haute école de musique de Genève – performance

Ensemble Contrechamps
Susanne Peters – flute
Valentine Collet, Marta Sanchez Paz – oboes
Laurent Bruttin – clarinet
Simon Demangeat – bassoon
Charles Pierron, Clémence Lion – horns
Nenad Markovic – trumpet
Stephen Menotti – trombone
Serge Bonvalot – tuba
Joshua Hyde – saxophones
Thierry Debons, Sébastien Cordier – percussion
Antoine Françoise – piano, conductor
Anne Bassand – harp
Simon Aeschimann – guitar
Rada Hadjikostova, Jésus Larez – violins
Hans Egidi, David Schnee – violas
Martina Brodbeck – cello
Noëlle Reymond, Jonathan Haskell – double basses

Orchestre de la HEM
Violon – Rachel Bitz, Estelle Chen, Lucie Cointet, Joan Esteve Melero, Gianfranco Garofalo, Andrea Gonzalez, Margarida Maia, Rachel Mesguen, Lucas Pereira Domingues, André Reis, Timeea-Dorina Rosca, Callia Roulland, Sergio Serrano Sánchez, Maksym Synytskyi, Martha Szulek, Vasilisa Nelyubina
Alto – João Álvares Abreu, Ruth Bosboom, Gabriel Canneva, Julian Enciso Guzman, Valentin Gerthoffer
Violoncelle – Laure Magnien, Michelle Lafont, Kamil Mukhametdinov, Francisca Santos Luís Parente, Clément Stauffenegger
Double basse – Emma Folcher Massat, Kívia Santos
Flûte – Gala Kossakowski Baladrón, Tomás Pereira Celeste
Hautbois – Davide D’Agostino, Edmée Lefèvre
Clarinette – Alberto Blanco García, Luz Sedeño
Basson – Joana Daniela Barbosa Da Rocha, Eliott Poithier
Cor – Roger-Arnaut Castéret, André Costa, Gengyan Wei
Trombone – Louis Aspord Bugnon, Simon Lasserre, Raphaël Favre, Agata Bellanza (trombone basse)
Percussions – Ismael Azidane Chenlo, U Lai Chan, Lauren Hayet
Piano solo – Ivett Gyöngyösi
Harpichord – Juliette Dournaud

Christophe Egea – sound engineer
Samuel Albert – recording and mixing
Frédéric Alstadt – mastering and lacquer cut
Vincent Barras – poem
Anastasia Mityukova – illustrations
Laurent Schmid – visual concept and graphic design

The twenty-two miniatures were commissioned from composers whom Éric Gaudibert had accompanied and supported during his life. Conceived ten years after his death, they formed part of a series of events bringing together several of the institutions he had helped create or transform.

Recorded on 17 December 2022 at Victoria Hall in Geneva.

The edition includes a poem by Vincent Barras and illustrations by Anastasia Mityukova.

22 Miniatures en hommage à Éric Gaudibert brings together works commissioned from twenty-two composers whom Gaudibert accompanied during their artistic development. Written ten years after his death, the miniatures reflect the breadth of his influence rather than attempting to define a single musical legacy.

Éric Gaudibert

Éric Gaudibert (1936–2012) was a Swiss composer, pianist and teacher. After studying in Lausanne and Paris, he settled in the Geneva region in 1975. His work encompasses solo, chamber and orchestral music, opera, choral and electroacoustic composition. Through his teaching and his involvement in Geneva’s musical institutions, he played an important role in the development of several generations of composers in French-speaking Switzerland.

Vimbayi Kaziboni

Vimbayi Kaziboni is a Zimbabwean-American conductor and curator whose work centres on contemporary music. He has conducted orchestras and specialised ensembles internationally and has led the premieres of numerous new works, often working closely with composers. In 22 Miniatures en hommage à Éric Gaudibert, he conducts Ensemble Contrechamps and the orchestra of the Haute école de musique de Genève.

Contrechamps | Speckled-Toshe is a collaborative series developed by Speckled-Toshe and the Ensemble Contrechamps. The editions present newly commissioned or recent works by contemporary composers, reconstructed as autonomous vinyl publications. Rather than documenting concerts, each release is conceived as an editorial project in which sound, text and visual material form a new constellation.

The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable

Parker Williams

The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable

Parker Williams

The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable brings together a sequence of texts attributed to Parker Williams in a work where writing, voice and fiction continually shift their positions. Interpreted and set to music by soprano Claire Michel de Haas, the publication transforms language into a vocal composition in which literary and musical forms become inseparable.

Speckled Toshe, 2022, SPT22-1
Clear transparent Vinyl, 12”
Cover Art: Individually painted covers by John Armleder.
225 numbered and signed copies with 12 pages booklet containing the lyrics.
All lyrics by Parker Williams, except ‘Nothing’s Left’ by Fitzgerald Warth Fallsworthy

The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable was developed by John Armleder and Claire Michel de Haas around a selection of unpublished texts attributed to Parker Williams and Fitzgerald Warth Fallsworthy, two heteronyms created by Armleder. Both fictional authors have appeared at different moments in his work, extending questions of authorship into invented identities and literary production.

Claire Michel de Haas developed the musical setting of the texts, composing and performing the vocal parts. The writings are not simply read or recited: their words become the material for melody, rhythm and vocal phrasing, giving each text its particular musical form.

The record brings these fictional writings and Michel de Haas’ compositions together in a publication conceived jointly with Armleder. For the edition, Armleder painted each record cover individually, making every copy a variation within the edition.

The resulting publication combines texts by Armleder’s fictional writers, compositions and vocals by Michel de Haas, and an individually painted cover by Armleder.

A1 Un Monde Qui Pouvait Te Sembler Familier 0:57
A2 Che Fare 1:00
A3 504 3:38
A4 Nothing’s Left (Text by Fitzgerald Warth Fallsworthy) 4:32
A5 Work Art In Progress 2:46
A6 Ne Dites Pas Non 2:34

B1 The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable 1  5:12
B2 La Chapelle Du Souvenir 7:32
B3 The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable 2  6:10

Parker Williams, John M Armleder, Speckled-Toshe – record concept
Parker Williams – texts
Fitzgerald Warth Fallsworthy – text for Nothing’s Left
Claire Michel de Haas – musical settings and vocals
John M Armleder – individually painted covers
Eleonora Polato, Masé Studios, Geneva – recording
James Plotkin – mastering
Flo Kaufmann – lacquer cut

The texts were written by Parker Williams and his shifting fictional identities, then interpreted and set to music a cappella by Claire Michel de Haas in exchange with their author; or authors.

Each copy is housed in a unique, hand-painted cover by John M Armleder. The paintings are original works; all copies are individually signed and numbered.

Limited edition of 225 copies on clear vinyl, accompanied by a twelve-page booklet containing the complete texts.

The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable was developed by John Armleder and Claire Michel de Haas. The publication brings together texts attributed to Parker Williams and Fitzgerald Warth Fallsworthy, two heteronyms created by Armleder, with music and vocals by Michel de Haas. She developed the musical concept, composed the music and performed the vocal parts, while Armleder conceived the publication and painted each record cover individually.

John Armleder

John Armleder is a Swiss artist based in Geneva. A co-founder of the Ecart group and closely associated with Fluxus, his practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation, performance, sound and publishing. Collaboration, appropriation and the displacement of artistic identities recur throughout his work, alongside an interest in the conditions through which artworks are produced, presented and circulated.

Claire Michel de Haas

Claire Michel de Haas is a Geneva-based vocalist, musician and artist. Her practice brings together voice, composition, performance and collaborative artistic projects. In The Botanical Speedboat Experience Inevitable, she transformed texts written by John Armleder under two heteronyms into a sequence of vocal and musical compositions.

A-Sides is a series of artist records developed within the research project A-Sides at HEAD – Genève. Conceived around the vinyl record as a medium for artistic research, the project brought together artists, musicians and researchers in editions where listening, publication and exhibition became part of a shared editorial practice. Several of the editorial and conceptual approaches explored in A-Sides later became integral to the direction of Speckled-Toshe.

Furnica

Olga Kokcharova

Furnica

Olga Kokcharova

Furnica originates from a field recording that gradually turns against its own means of production. As ants invade the recording device, environmental sounds become increasingly intertwined with electronic interference, until the system ultimately falls silent. The work transforms an unforeseen encounter between living organisms and recording technology into an autonomous sonic composition.

Speckled Toshe 2022,  SPT21-1

One sided 12′ black vinyl disc in a folded, screenprinted grass cardboard cover.

Furnica begins with a simple act of listening. While recording the sounds of an anthill, Olga Kokcharova’s recorder is gradually invaded by ants. As they enter the device, its electronic components begin to fail, producing glitches that increasingly displace the surrounding soundscape until the recording abruptly collapses into silence.

The malfunction was accidental. Kokcharova decided to retain the damaged recording, allowing the ants’ interference with the equipment to become part of the work itself. What begins as an environmental recording is gradually altered by the activity of the very organisms being recorded.

The one-sided LP presents this process as an uninterrupted sequence. Sounds from the anthill give way increasingly to glitches and electronic instability as the recorder deteriorates, until the device ceases to function. The duration of the record follows this transformation without reconstruction or correction.

Furnica thus documents not only the sounds surrounding an anthill, but what happened to the recording apparatus while those sounds were being captured. The recorder is no longer a neutral means of observation: its physical presence in the environment becomes audible in the recording itself.

A1, (one sided), Furnica,  11:57

Olga Kokcharova – concept, field recording and composition
Pali Meursault – accompanying text
Lucile Durpraz – translation
Giuseppe De Giacomi – cover design and screen printing (Hùrdega stamperia d’arte)
Cedrik Fermont – mastering
Flo Kaufmann – lacquer cut

Furnica originated from a field recording made by Olga Kokcharova at an anthill in the forest. During the recording, ants entered the device and gradually damaged its components. The resulting glitches increasingly overlay and displace the sounds of the forest until the system collapses and the recording falls silent.

The one-sided 12-inch record is housed in a twelve-page, multi-folded cover, screen-printed on grass cardboard. It includes an accompanying text by Pali Meursault in French and English.

Olga Kokcharova

Olga Kokcharova is a sound artist and composer based in Geneva. Her practice encompasses electroacoustic composition, field recording, installation, performance and radio. Working with recorded environments, acoustic phenomena and spatial conditions, she examines how listening shapes our perception of places and the relations that unfold within them. Her projects often develop through site-specific research and collaborations across sound, visual art and performance.

Speckled-Toshe is an independent publishing platform for artist records and sound editions. Working in close collaboration with artists, musicians, composers, writers and designers, each release is conceived as an editorial work in which sound, texts, images and design form an integrated whole rather than separate components.

Staircase Mystery

Karl Holmqvist

Staircase Mystery

Karl Holmqvist

Staircase Mystery presents language as sound, rhythm and structure. Drawing on newspaper headlines, fragments of conversation and pop lyrics, Karl Holmqvist recomposes found language into spoken works that move between poetry, performance and visual art. Recorded in Geneva and Berlin, the LP brings together four readings in which repetition, ambiguity and voice continuously shift the meanings of familiar words.

A-Sides/Speckled Toshe 02, www.a-sides.ch and HEAD-Genève, 2020, SPT20-AS2

LP, black vinyl

Rather than conveying fixed meanings, Karl Holmqvist’s works expose language as something unstable and performative. Quotations, slogans, everyday speech and song lyrics are displaced, repeated and recombined until familiar expressions begin to oscillate between sense and sound. Rhythm gradually takes precedence over narrative, while repetition opens language to unexpected associations.

Read in the artist’s characteristically restrained voice, these recordings continue Holmqvist’s long-standing exploration of the territory between concrete poetry, visual art and spoken performance. His delivery avoids theatrical expression, allowing the slightest shifts in rhythm, emphasis and repetition to become central compositional elements.

Selected by the artist, the four recordings were made between the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and Holmqvist’s Berlin studio. Together, the four recordings unfold as a single listening experience, their differing rhythms, repetitions and vocal cadences continually echoing across the two sides of the record.

Staircase Mystery – 13:39
The Man Who Sold The World – 02:07
Declare Independence – 06:54
Addition Addiction – 03:58

Karl Holmqvist – concept, texts, text selection and voice
Recorded at Centre d’art contemporain (A1, A2), Genève and in Karl Holmqvist’s studio in Berlin (B1, B2)
Cover – Karl Holmqvist
Laquer cut – Flo Kaufmann

Staircase Mystery was recorded in two sessions: Staircase Mystery and The Man Who Sold the World at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and Declare Independence and Addition Addiction at Karl Holmqvist’s studio in Berlin.

The selection was made by the artist. The Geneva recordings were subsequently complemented by a second session at Holmqvist’s studio in Berlin.

Karl Holmqvist

Karl Holmqvist is a Swedish artist and writer based in Berlin. Working with language across poetry, performance, publications, painting, installation and video, he draws on quotations, song lyrics, slogans and everyday speech. Through repetition, rearrangement and shifts between written and spoken forms, his work examines how language circulates and how meaning changes through voice, rhythm and context.

A-Sides is a series of artist records developed within the research project A-Sides at HEAD – Genève. Conceived around the vinyl record as a medium for artistic research, the project brought together artists, musicians and researchers in editions where listening, publication and exhibition became part of a shared editorial practice. Several of the editorial and conceptual approaches explored in A-Sides later became integral to the direction of Speckled-Toshe.

L’Appétence

Anne Le Troter

L’Appétence

Anne Le Troter

L'Appétence explores the voice as a space where intimacy, desire and social conventions are continually negotiated. Developed in collaboration with a group of ASMR practitioners, the work was first conceived as an audio installation before being reconfigured as an autonomous publication for vinyl, where listening itself becomes the site of the work.

A-Sides / Speckled Toshe 2020, SPT20-AS3

LP, blue translucent vinyl

The two works on this record have different origins. Blue is based on a research by Anne Le Troter concerned with biography, fiction, and fulfilled and unfulfilled dreams. L’Appétence was developed in collaboration with a group of ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) artists, drawing on voices and the particular vocal techniques associated with ASMR.

Both works were originally developed for audio installations. For the record, Le Troter returned to this material and extensively reworked it. Voices, words, breathing, pauses and repetitions were cut, rearranged and assembled into new sequences. The resulting pieces are not simply transfers of the installations but compositions shaped through editing and montage.

Although their source material differs, both pieces are constructed through the same intensive process of editing. Le Troter cuts and rearranges recorded speech into sequences in which repetition, interruption, rhythm and the placement of individual fragments determine how the voices are heard.

Side A: Blue (version augmentée, 2019) – 17’35

Side B: L’appétence (2016) – 9:53

Anne Le Troter – concept, composition, editing and mixing

Final ASMR
Made in France ASMR
Miel ASMR
Mr Discrait
Sandra Relaxation ASMR
The French Whisperer
– collaborating ASMR artists

Anne Le Troter – cover concept
Antonin Horquin – photography
Cedrik Fermont – mastering

Both works were originally developed as sound installations and subsequently reconfigured by Anne Le Troter for the record.

Blue emerged from a cycle of writing concerned with biography, fiction, and fulfilled or unfulfilled dreams. L’Appétencewas created in collaboration with a group of ASMR artists and explores the forms of language produced through their practices.

Anne Le Troter

Anne Le Troter is a French artist based in Paris. Working across sound installation, performance, literature and poetry, she examines how speech takes shape within particular social and professional groups. Her projects often begin with recorded voices, which she edits, repeats and recomposes into sound works that draw attention to the rhythms, physical qualities and collective structures of spoken language.

A-Sides is a series of artist records developed within the research project A-Sides at HEAD – Genève. Conceived around the vinyl record as a medium for artistic research, the project brought together artists, musicians and researchers in editions where listening, publication and exhibition became part of a shared editorial practice. Several of the editorial and conceptual approaches explored in A-Sides later became integral to the direction of Speckled-Toshe.

JE D’EAU

Hannah Weinberger

JE D’EAU

Hannah Weinberger

Je d'EAU extends Hannah Weinberger's sound practice into the format of the artist's record. Composed from voice, field recordings and subtle electronic transformations, the work unfolds as an acoustic environment in which listening becomes a way of navigating space, proximity and duration.

A-Sides / Speckled Toshe 2020, SPT20-AS1

LP, black vinyl, red cover. The edition was published in two series: one with a pale green cover for the Centre d’art contemporain Genève, and this one with a red cover.

Je d’Eau brings together voices, environmental recordings and electronic sound in a continuous composition extending across the two sides of the record. Some of the material was originally recorded for Oceano de Amor, a film by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann, for which Hannah Weinberger created a sound piece.

For Je d’Eau, these voices become part of a composition in which recorded and electronic sounds recur in changing combinations. The record does not separate the material into individual tracks, but develops as a continuous sequence, with repetition and transitions providing much of its structure.

The connection to Oceano de Amor also belongs to the context in which the record appeared. The film was screened at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in parallel with Weinberger’s exhibition we didn’t want to leave, on the occasion of which Je d’Eau was published.

The title moves between je, jeu and eau, without resolving these possible readings into a single meaning.

Side A  20:23

Side B  20:05

Hannah Weinberger – composition, field recordings and voice
Alexa Karolinski, Ingo Niermann – film, Oceano de Amor
Nicholas Bussmann – mastering
Ronnie Fueglister – graphic design
Volker Zander – production management

Produced by Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève and HEAD – Genève, Haute école d’art et de design, as part of A-Sides – Audio Editions by Artists.

Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève:
Andrea Bellini – director
Marie Debat – general project coordination
Carole Jauffret – communication

With the support of Société Générale Private Banking Switzerland.

The vocal material was originally recorded for Oceano de Amor, a film by Alexa Karolinski and Ingo Niermann from 2019.

The record was published on the occasion of Hannah Weinberger’s exhibition we didn’t want to leave, presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève from 8 November 2019 to 5 January 2020.

Hannah Weinberger

Hannah Weinberger is a Swiss-American artist based in Basel. Working with sound, video, installation and performance, she develops compositions in response to particular spaces and social situations. Her installations often distribute sound across an exhibition space, allowing it to shift as visitors move through it. Collaboration and the relation between individual and collective experience are recurring elements of her practice.

A-Sides is a series of artist records developed within the research project A-Sides at HEAD – Genève. Conceived around the vinyl record as a medium for artistic research, the project brought together artists, musicians and researchers in editions where listening, publication and exhibition became part of a shared editorial practice. Several of the editorial and conceptual approaches explored in A-Sides later became integral to the direction of Speckled-Toshe.