Acousmatique Recordings is a San Francisco-based label started in 2017 by the sound artist and synthesist Jack Hertz. Hertz, real name, Jack Hurwitz, is an insanely prolific musician with–by our count–sixty long-players out since 2010 on various labels like Treetrunk Records, Buddhist On Fire, and Aural Films. Utilizing analog machines, effects processing, and field recordings to create a “sonic middle ground between the real and the artificial,” Hertz explores “the mystery of life” in his ambient and drifting compositions.
As a label, Acousmatique Recordings will focus on genres like Musique Concrete, Immersive Audio, Acousmatic, Electroacoustic and West Coast. Things kicked off last year with Ear of God by Hertz, a 40-track compilation of his five-album musique concrete series, Eye of God. Released in celebration of electronic music pioneer Pierre Henry‘s 90th birthday, Acousmatique promises future releases in tribute to the French composer. This year, though, the label has gotten things started with the release of PBK and John Wiggins‘ Where Pathways Meet (Complete Sessions 1998-2001).
PBK is the experimental musician Phillip B. Klingler, whose work as an Expressionist/Surrealist painter in the 80’s led him to begin working in the realms of sound. Since that time he has explored abstract music thru approaches that involve noise, ambiant, and concrete, while also collaborating with sonic artists like Minoy, David Prescott, Asmus Tietchens, Wolf Eyes, as well as the NYC musician John Wiggins. Wiggins was part of the home-taping underground in the 80’s, and a 1987 RRRecords release compiling his LP’s Anagenic and pARTicle mUSic seems to have caught the attention of Klingler early on, with the musician explaining, “…I was a huge fan from my first days in the cassette underground.”
These days Wiggins is an Emmy award-winning film and television soundtrack composer–even writing the theme for Howard Stern’s cable television show. In the 90’s though, Wiggins would help PBK explore his interest in improvisation and free jazz. Klingler recounts,
“I wanted to create a sort of futuristic jazz music, very synthetic sounding, but organic in construction, and I had been working for some time on this idea. John helped me to realize my ambitions for this…”
Their sessions together would eventually yield 2008’s Where Pathways Meet (The Sound Genetic), six untitled tracks of abstract sound exploration.
Acousmatique Recordings’ new iteration of Where Pathways Meet is billed as the Complete Sessions, compiling collaborations from the artists work between 1998-2001. At times sounding like that “future jazz” Klingler once referred to, while at others like a mysterious score to an imaginary film only dreamed of, this is indeed a music truly hard to define. Look for Where Pathways Meet (Complete Sessions 1998-2001) to be a limited edition release issued in a run of 50 on factory made CD-R, with specially designed 4-panel packaging.
