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@touchactivities

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Touch - Celebrating over 40 years of activity...

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Saudi Arabia-born, now Los Angeles-based sound artist Bana Haffar has released a new nine-track album titled ‘Ancient Future’.

Centred on sample creation, manipulation and transformation through modular synthesis, the record develops @sinusoidaltendencies' ongoing interest in reshaping recorded material through modular systems, with sounds repeatedly recombined and altered across the album. Its compositions move between dense, interconnected passages and more open stretches.

The artist presents ‘Ancient Future’ as an attempt to give that idea sonic form, using the modular synthesiser as both an instrument and a tool for morphological transformation. The album continues a practice rooted in improvisation, synthesis and the physical behaviour of sound.

Alongside the digital release, ‘Ancient Future’ is also available as a limited-edition CD housed in a large-format DVD package.

Read more and check out the album in full at the link in our bio. ☝️

Lead photo: @pachaplus_02
Artwork & photography: Jon Wozencroft by @touchactivities

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6 days ago

New record Ancient Future is out now ✨ Link in bio or find it wherever you listen to music.

Thank you @touchactivities for officially planting it in the family garden! Thank you @makenoisemusic and @moogsynthesizers for your powerful instruments. special shout out to my beloved Morphagenes, Rene2s, and Mother 32s. Thank you Phil Rochefort @phi.officiel for final mixing touches. Thank you to my interdimensional partner in sound and light @jimbrown52 getting us to Guinea and to all our friends in Baro. Thank you to @jendreamers for grounding creative support 🍵🐈

Music is medicine 💞 liftoff ✈️

✨✨✨✨ by @touchactivities

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7 days ago

"Ancient Future" by Bana Haffar is out today! Please join her for the official listening party this evening at 19.30BST! Link in bio!

'Using her modular rig to manipulate a litany of samples and generate labyrinthine oscillations, Bana Haffar follows 'intimaa'' with a voyage across the past, present and future, scraping cultural traces into a complex, fragmented narrative.

Opening the album with what sounds like a garbled radio transmission, Haffar immediately gets down to business on 'Sun Dog', laying down a dense tangle of chopped oud patterns before diverting the flow with her cascading synth arpeggios and psychotropic portamento wiggles. She makes a salient connection between ecstatic music of the past and the new age ecstasy that guided the kosmische set as they probed "Eastern" philosophies and alternative lifestyles in the 1970s. And across the record, it's these links - "interconnected sound matter" that "moves between islands of respite in a sea of incomprehensibility" - that guide her, not any particular sound or genre.

Precise, experimental sound design and complex rhythms provide the backbone for 'Babylon Chop' and even here, Haffar finds a way to pull back to another time zone, introducing string sounds that hark back to the romantic era and cutting in dialog snippets that muddy the picture even further. She offers us a breather on 'The Beginning of the River' with dense, harmonic drones and hits her stride on 'The Concrete Ventures of Long Daydreaming', sailing a live hand drum rhythm into a reflecting pool of echoing, ritualistic abstraction.' - Boomkat by @touchactivities

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8 days ago

We were humbled & honoured being able to cooperate with ORF @radiokulturhaus and their "Organ in Focus" programme for another outstanding night featuring icons and future icons only 💜

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2026 DAY 4 - 10. September ORF RadioKulturhaus
feat.

- Fennesz
- Claire M Singer
- Hampus Lindwall
- Chloé Ryo

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all pics (c) Philippe Gerlach
@philippegerlach

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@ryo.chloe
@hampuslindwall
@clairemsinger
@_fennesz

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that was...

UNSAFE+SOUNDS 2026
04+08-13 September, Vienna AT https://unsafeandsounds.com/ taken in Vienna, Austria by @touchactivities

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9 days ago

Listening Party for Bana Haffar's new album "Ancient Future" takes place this Friday, 9th October at 7PM BST.

Link to listening party and album in bio.

'A lot of modular synth stuff is intentionally blissful, trying to suffuse you in a peach-colored haze and align your chakras. Haffar’s music is more aggressive than that; sometimes it reminds me of Autechre, or like the distant, muffled explosions at the beginning of Blade Runner. Her synths are often groaning with frustration and poorly contained anger. The first single, “Like Branches,” does have a gentle and drifting quality that nods to Pink Floyd or The Orb, but don’t be fooled. There’s a lot more grit to this record than that.' - Philip Freeman, Burning Ambulance by @touchactivities

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10 days ago

"Vinyl Requiem 33.3"

Philip Jeck & Lol Sargent’s landmark 180-turntable work returns to Union Chapel 33.3 years after its 1993 premiere.

Link in bio.

All profits from the event will go to The Philip Jeck Foundation (@thepjf2), supporting artists working in experimental and creative arts.

33.3 years after 180 Dansette record players transformed Union Chapel into a monumental architecture of sound and image, Philip Jeck and Lol Sargent’s Vinyl Requiem returns to the place where it began.

Presented by The Philip Jeck Foundation and Union Chapel, Vinyl Requiem 33.3 celebrates one of the defining works of the late British experimental artist Philip Jeck (1952–2022) and the extraordinary collaboration that brought it into being.

The evening will return the original 1993 performance to Union Chapel through a full-scale projection of the 55-minute film of Vinyl Requiem, followed by a Q&A with people central to the work and Jeck’s creative life. It will also mark the launch of Touch’s limited-edition double-vinyl edition of Vinyl Requiem. taken in Union Chapel by @touchactivities

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18 days ago

Now available to pre-order: "Ancient Future" by Bana Haffar. CD + DL.

Official Listening Party Oct 9th 7PM BST.

Links to both in bio.

'Ancient Future is a stop on an ongoing quest of sample creation, manipulation, recombination, and morphological transformation through the modular synthesizer.

Densely interconnected sound matter moves between islands of respite in a sea of incomprehensibility, grasping but not yet arriving.

The ancient future is a place. It is the meeting point between the light piercing through the dark, fragmented state of our present reality.

This album is an attempt to materialize this place in sonic form.' by @touchactivities

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19 days ago

New album coming out on beloved Touch on October 9th ✨🪄

Pre order link in bio
https://banahaffarreleases.bandcamp.com

thank you to Mike Harding and Jon Wozencroft for making this happen 🩵 by @touchactivities

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a month ago

Last Thursday in Vienna @radiokulturhaus @unsafeandsounds with @_fennesz ♥️

📷 @ran.mos taken in ORF RadioKulturhaus by @touchactivities

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a month ago

On the 4th November Philip Jeck & Lol Sargent’s landmark 180-turntable work Vinyl Requiem returns to Union Chapel 33.3 years after its 1993 premiere

The evening will return the original 1993 performance to Union Chapel through a full-scale projection of the 55-minute film of Vinyl Requiem, followed by a Q&A with people central to the work and Jeck’s creative life. It will also mark the launch of Touch’s limited-edition double-vinyl edition of Vinyl Requiem.

For more info and tickets follow link in bio.

All profits from the event will go to The Philip Jeck Foundation, supporting artists working in experimental and creative arts.

📷 Kevin Low taken in Union Chapel by @touchactivities

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a month ago

"..If you look out to the furthest edges of the universe—which we can’t with our eyes, but people can with radio telescopes—you can map it in radio waves. You can hear it in the static of an old TV set or radio. It’s around, it’s tangible. That’s where it’s been totally mind-blowing to me. Things like that found their way in..."

Bandcamp Daily: Jem Finer and John Matthias on the Strange Magic of “Almost Starlight”

By Jon Buckland

Links to article and album in bio. by @touchactivities

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a month ago

OUT TODAY: "Almost Starlight", the extraordinary new album by Jem Finer (@thepoguesofficial - hurdy-gurdy) and John Matthias (@john_matthias_music - violin).

TONIGHT: Official Listening Party, 7pm BST. Links to everything in bio.

'Touch is quick to assure that "Almost Starlight" isn't your average "modern classical" album and we'd agree. Finer's hurdy-gurdy playing links the music more to early music if anything, but as they explain - it's more easily understood as an album that spies electronic music through an acoustic lens, using string instruments to follow the trail left by synthesizers. 'Slow Dance at the End of Time' is a good place to start; we get to hear the unique character of Finer's instrument immediately and also the impact the church has on the sound as it absorbs the pitchy wails. It's minimal music, but not minimalism exactly - Finer plays defined sequences that Matthias replies to, bringing in cellist Jay Auborn (a regular collaborator) to flesh it out even further. And their simple, effective phrases hang in the atmosphere, sailing through musical history, referencing Michael Nyman, Arvo Pärt, Alice Coltrane, Cluster, Eno and Jean-Michel Jarre.

The way Matthias and Finer synchronize their instruments harmonizes with the Berlin school at times, mimicking the interlocking sequencer patterns that characterized the kosmische sound. And elsewhere, they drift into completely different territory, investigating the texture of their bowed sounds on 'Moscas' and assembling a network of rattly rhythms on 'Fire Eat Wood'. 'Almost Starlight' is a record that sounds uniquely aware of its own anachronisms, breathing the air of contemporary music and early music often simultaneously to cannily avoid the repetition that often blights these projects. Nicely done.' - Boomkat by @touchactivities

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a month ago