{"title":"Powell","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"on-the-feet-of-a-wind","title":"On the Feet of a Wind","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn the feet of a wind is a wild assemblage of carbonated synthetic music from Powell and a sister record to \u003ci\u003eFlash Across the Intervals\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eMultiply the Sides\u003c\/i\u003e — two albums already released in 2020. Recalling Xenakis, Parmegiani and Hecker but with the smile \/ smirk of vintage Powell, the record is released via a folder, a new music and film platform created by Powell, Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs that bundles up music, film, image, text and other forms of madness into folders that are shared \/ expanded online.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe release is accompanied by a ‘Hi-sensitive’ film directed by Amstad and Eknæs entitled ‘flares, currents’. The film contains a recombined live version of ‘rise, world unfold’, the musical series that concludes this album. A folder is a collection of disorienting works of experimental film, ambiguous texts, and other assorted media set to the most brazenly strange and formlessly mesmerising musical structures of Powell’s career. It’s also a work of artistic assemblage, without fixed notions of time. Tarkovsky once described his filmmaking as “sculpting in time,” and a folder exists in a similar kind of “zone;” it is a project continuously added to, subtracted from, abstracted, and injected into the glut of cyberspace like a slow moving pathogen that refuses to be defined or categorised. Shunning titles in favour of oblique category markers, films like aƒ34 present a mosaic of images of biological forms and sublime landscapes set to super-synthetic, carbonated compositions. All of this signals an artist liberated from the confines of the narrow branding signifiers an electronic musician can find themselves in. While it is aware of its place in cyberspace, this project also connects to something primordial and awesome. “Xenakis talked about creating universes with sound,” says Powell, “and we are all free to create our own worlds in life, art — whatever. This is what happened to me in a way: I have been in this world for three years or something, and I don’t really want to leave. The folder is a refuge.’ \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"A Folder","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50447313011019,"sku":"1106273","price":19.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/d5708105-1c95-4d59-a199-a7650ca3232b_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727075793"},{"product_id":"piano-music-1-7","title":"Piano Music 1-7","description":"\u003cp\u003eVia his own Diagonal Records imprint, his work on XL Recordings and, most recently, the opening of audio\/film platform A Folder [afolder.studio], Powell has firm footing in the contemporary electronic landscape. During a wry and obstinate musical life he has twisted myriad synthetic forms into shapes that explore and expand upon the districts of post-punk, techno, noise + computer music, and in the the last year alone he has released four albums of hi-def abstractions, each inspired by a formalisation of music proposed by Iannis Xenakis.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs an extension of this intense period of work\/research\/play with stochastic functions [using probabilities to compose music], various processes emerged that Powell then began to apply to more traditional musical events. Where ordinarily in his work the probabilities and relationships are used to define parameters such as wave-shape, folding, FM, filter modes etc., he now began to use them to create musical formations and visual scores that could be played back using any software\/MIDI instrument [one of these can be seen on the rear cover of the LP release]. While mapping out this cartography of relations, he used a basic Grand Steinway sampler as a placeholder instrument; the longer the process went on, though, the more he began to embrace the acoustic properties of the synthetic piano and make it the bedrock for this new constellation of work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePiano Music 1-7, subtitled 'Music for Synthetic Piano and Assorted Electronics', consists of seven different synthetic islands strung together into a single composition. All were composed using the aforementioned processes that allowed Powell to play a piano, even if he never learned to do so with his hands. After all, 'In writing electronic music,' Robin Mackay once wrote, 'you also have to direct the invention of new tools.'\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Editions Mego","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50454110863691,"sku":"1130318","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/0b68f161-6add-41c3-adf6-6fd352de8d45_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727181030"},{"product_id":"26-lives","title":"26 Lives","description":"\u003cp\u003eStunning document of a one-off performance by Powell and London Contemporary Orchestra at Barbican Centre, London.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCaptured from a three-hour multi-channel recording of unheard music.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUnique acoustic rendering of a unique moment in time.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePerformed in January 2022 alongside works by Jon Cage, Alvin Lucier, Micah Levi\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFirst music on Diagonal after a brief pause for growing up and babies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpecial edition PMS 910c art by Guy Featherstone. Mastered by Russell Haswell.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Diagonal","offers":[{"title":"Clear LP","offer_id":50466959098187,"sku":"2013075","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/cover.ki_1_a2259921_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727332917"},{"product_id":"sport-1","title":"Sport","description":"\u003cp\u003eEver since Oscar released his debut 12\" \u003ci\u003eThe Ongoing Significance Of Steel And Flesh\u003c\/i\u003e on his own Diagonal imprint back in 2011, people have been getting pretty damn excited about this dashing young, good looking man and the warped electronic music he makes. After a series of killer releases, some on point remixes, water melons, wooing women, drunken nts shows, buzz cuts, rave sticks, lighters, a quick wrestle with Steve Albini and posting his e-mail address worldwide he's finally dropped his debut long player \u003ci\u003eSport\u003c\/i\u003e and it's a gold medal winner easy. With it he's managed to squeeze together his incredible skills into a set of electronic post-punk delights full of weird and wonderful noises and rhythms, on point vocals and jerky beats. It really sounds like nothing else out there at the moment which is why you need it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"XL","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP | x2","offer_id":50484111704395,"sku":"405632","price":27.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"CD","offer_id":50484111343947,"sku":"405631","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/b900aeb1-796b-40a9-b7f2-da9b8ee13c6b_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727581646"},{"product_id":"flash-across-the-intervals","title":"Flash Across the Intervals","description":"\u003cp\u003eThis is the first new Powell LP since 2016’s \u003ci\u003eSport\u003c\/i\u003e on XL Recordings, and the first music available physically since his 2018 collaboration with Turner-Prize winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans. Oscar [Powell] wanted it known that this is not intended as a definitive album, the realisation \/ release of some bold new statement, a singular mark of identity or triumphant elucidation of years of valiant work. Rather, it is simply 35 minutes of music segmented from an overall flow of stuff, a variable torrent of hyper-synthetic composition brought about by entirely other things — circumstances that relate in no way to a previous life led within an occasionally toxic bubble of taste, music, entertainment and ‘community’. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis ‘album’ thus functions as a message in a bottle: cast from unknown coordinates, it maps some of these connections, not least in its close relationship with the visual work of Michael Amstad and Marte Eknæs. Their imagery inflates this sleeve; the music inflates their films. What emerges from the fog is a luminous three-headed constellation of melodic lines in non-sensical interplay with one another. Here on record, spinning at a speed of your choosing and with eyes closed and no imagery to hand, the feeling persists of a deep decentring, music discontinuously carbonated by a different geography of relations, the depths of which this music begins to explore.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"A Folder","offers":[{"title":"Black | LP","offer_id":50490384744779,"sku":"1098499","price":24.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/0e65be30-a1e2-4ee6-bd6b-99d8032112d9_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1727660583"},{"product_id":"we-do-recover","title":"We Do Recover","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eWe Do Recover\u003c\/em\u003e, the new album from Powell and his first album proper on his own Diagonal Records, is a vitalising record of recovery and a statement of reassurance. The music is intensely emotional and lean, and forms a uniquely expressive story that opens up new ground in the artists's bizarre continuum of synthesised sound — this time triggered by experiences of grief and addiction.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe suicide of one of his life-long friends in 2024 was a life-changing loss which eternally altered Powell's life, and consequently his music. A period of recovery followed, one accompanied by the assembling of this album from hours of music made between 2018 and 2025. \"After my friend's death I felt I went into a tailspin, but really, I was already in one,\" he says. \"I found myself unable to handle anything – my way of coping was always to run away and escape. I realised it was going to kill me, so I made some changes. It made me see the music I had been making through a different lens, one that mirrored my experience of recovery. It's not linear, it's often difficult, but there is beauty there if you look hard enough. I wanted it to be a message of hope, if only for myself.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePowell has existed of late in an intensive mode of creation that utilises stochastic processes (probabilistic events) and a particular sonic palette. But where previous releases – such as the many prongs of his a ƒolder project, or the hyper-synthetic Piano Music 1—7 on Editions Mego – interrogated and developed formal processes for synthesised sound, on \u003cem\u003eWe Do Recover\u003c\/em\u003e the processes are subsumed as tools for expression. What unfolds is an extended suite of minimal music that articulates and traces an intensive period of upheaval, pain, and hope; tight envelopes of sonic architecture are led astray; energies explode beyond bounds previously set. We can feel the collapse of control, and an overflowing sense of something starting anew. It is, in turn, surprising, baffling and beautiful.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Diagonal","offers":[{"title":"2LP - Black","offer_id":53379128328523,"sku":"R9403-1330","price":36.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/2000x2000bb_79ddbbe1-786f-43bc-8a29-8a1bcc8947d4.jpg?v=1757783353"}],"url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/collections\/powell.oembed","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}