Touch40

One of the leading curatorial platforms for contemporary field recording practices, Touch has spent the last 40 years releasing work exploring the sounds hidden in hard-to-reach places. Releases include Norwegian artist Jana Winderen’s recordings of creatures beneath the arctic ice, field recordist Chris Watson’s recordings of multiple layers of the Namib Desert, and many others. Touch will be represented by artists Patrick Shiroishi and Bana Haffar.

In 2022, UK-based imprint and publisher Touch celebrates 40 years of activity spanning numerous record releases, audio-visual productions, and live events. Bana Haffar is a meandering electronic musician, field recordist, and bass player. She has released music with Touch, Vent, and Make Noise records and composed for Grammy-winning percussion quartet Third Coast Percussion. Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer based in Los Angeles who is perhaps best known for his extensive and incredibly intense work with the saxophone. Over the last decade he has established himself as one of the premier improvising musicians in Los Angeles, playing solo and in numerous collaborative projects. Shiroishi may well be considered a foundational player in the city’s vast musical expanse.

Chris Watson has been recording hard-to-reach places for decades. A founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, Watson has since developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals and habitats from around the world. For the weekend of April 29 through May 1, Indexical will reconfigure its top-of-the-line Meyer Sound audio system into a multichannel listening setup, presenting Watson’s recent work “Namib” in immersive, spatialized audio.