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LP
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SOD 140LP
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$28.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 8/29/2025
Students of Decay presents The Dip, a new full-length recording by Berlin-based artist and composer Thomas Ankersmit, marking his debut with the label and sixth album to date. Comprised of two expansive, sidelong pieces composed entirely on the Serge Modular synthesizer, it signals a subtle yet significant shift in Ankersmit's trajectory, imbuing the hyper-physical, psychoacoustic intensities of his live performances with introspective, atmospheric, and even melodic elements. Primarily known for a site-responsive approach to sound, often realized in the moment of performance, Ankersmit's turn toward the studio in the last few years has opened up a new dimension within his practice. It is in this quiet rupture that The Dip emerged, a study in internality and suspended states, rich with cinematic undercurrents and ghostly spatial suggestion. Here, electricity itself feels transfigured -- becoming supple, even organic -- within an environment shaped entirely by analog signals. Over the past two decades, Ankersmit has established himself as one of the foremost practitioners of the Serge, the notoriously idiosyncratic and expressive instrument that has remained central to his work. On The Dip, he harnesses its potential not for brute force or disorientation, but for spaciousness, resonance, and lyrical abstraction. Without resorting to additional processing or effects, he draws out tones that feel simultaneously raw and refined, articulated and blurred -- intricate structures that seem to breathe and evolve of their own volition. The result is a kind of auditory hallucination, a "cinema for the ears," wherein impressions, emotional arcs, and imagined topographies unfold. Each side of The Dip plays like a single gesture unfolding in time -- a spatial narrative constructed through vibration, density, and the movement of air. The Dip follows acclaimed works on PAN, Touch, and Shelter Press, and reaffirms Thomas Ankersmit's position as one of the most focused and probing voices in contemporary experimental music. Quietly radical and meticulously constructed, it is less a departure than a deepening -- a descent into a more private sonic world, where the boundaries between perception, memory, and pure signal dissolve.
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CD
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TO 093CD
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Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin. Since 2006, his main instrument, both live and in the studio, has been the Serge analog modular synthesizer. Acoustic phenomena such as sound reflections, infrasonic vibration, otoacoustic emissions, and highly directional projections of sound have been an important part of his work since the early 2000s. In the winter of 2011-2012, Ankersmit was invited by the CalArts electronic music studios, Los Angeles, where the Serge was originally developed in the early 1970s, to record new music with their heavily customized and recently restored "Black Serge" system. In addition to conventional analog synthesis techniques (FM, AM, ring modulation, filtering, enveloping and panning under voltage control), Ankersmit used various kinds of waveshaping, distortion and feedback (both internally as well as via a microphone and speaker setup in the studio); oscillator-generated frequencies at the upper and lower limits of auditory perception; a patch matrix to control quick transitions; a homemade circuit-bending type interface to create momentary interruptions to the signal flow, and the scraping of a contact microphone. Aside from recording, editing, and a few instances of reverb, no digital technology was used. The music is finely tuned and highly detailed, yet also visceral and raw. Marked by sharp perceptual contrasts, the piece shifts between dense formations of electric noise, to fields of micro-events moving with an intuitive logic, and feedback-drones of overwhelming intensity. The sounds have a real-world physicality, bringing to mind swarms of locusts, distant storms and creaking machinery, rather than "synthesizer music." The piece was premiered in North America at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles and in Europe at Berghain, Berlin, for the MaerzMusik Festival. The music is originally quadraphonic and mixed to stereo for this release. Figueroa Terrace is Ankersmit's first full-length solo studio release. Thomas Ankersmit: Serge analog modular synthesizers, contact mic. Recorded at CalArts, Valencia and in Los Angeles, December 2011-February 2012. Thanks to Kye Potter, Kevin Drumm, Valerio Tricoli, Darrel Johansen, Kevin Fortune, and everyone at CalArts. Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering. Artwork and photography by Jon Wozencroft.
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CD
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ASH 8.8CD
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Ash International presents a live recorded performance by Thomas Ankersmit in Utrecht from late in 2007. Live In Utrecht is his first official CD album release. Thomas Ankersmit is a 30 year-old saxophonist, electronic musician and installation artist born and raised in the Netherlands and now primarily based in Berlin who combines abstract, intensely-focused saxophone playing with hyper-kinetic analog synth and computer improvisation. He also creates installation pieces that use sound, infrasound and "modifications to the acoustic characters of spaces" that disrupt the viewer/listener's perception of the exhibition space and their presence within it. He frequently works together with New York minimalist Phill Niblock and Sicilian electroacoustic improviser Valerio Tricoli, and as well as other collaborators, mostly for live performances, including Tony Conrad, Maryanne Amacher, Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm and Borbetomagus. Thomas Ankersmit: Serge analog modular synthesizer, computer, alto saxophone. Pre-recorded saxophone and reel-to-reel parts composed by Valerio Tricoli, with source material by Ankersmit.
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