Dinzu Artefacts

11/08/2024

DNZ108
Aki Onda
99 Cent Dreams

“These sound fragments were recorded with a portable cassette recorder between 1998 and 2003 in and around the Lower East Side (LES), an area in New York City that extends roughly from Canal Street up to 14th Street and from the Bowery (3rd Avenue) to the East River. In the formative years of my cassette practice, I had a habit of walking around with my recorder and capturing very short snippets of sound – at times less than a second, as if taking a photo – as well as some longer segments of deep listening. These recordings carved a dense collage on the magnetic tapes, and I am presenting the sounds here with the same editing style as I captured them almost 20 years ago.”

– Aki Onda

11/07/2024

DNZ107
Mattie Barbier
paper blown between the spaces in my ribs

(lamentations) for éliane is a long form work for prepared euphonium that Barbier has created over the last four years utilizing under explored avenues of instrumental modification and acoustic irregularities inspired by the work of Éliane Radigue and John McCowen.

In paper blown between the spaces in my ribs, they explore intersections of vanishing sonic ecologies, sonifications of the interior world of untouched instruments, and a search for the safety and stability of constructed memories. The piece completes a series of works about longing for home and was created for Lampo.

“Time is of no importance. All that counts is the duration necessary for a seamless development. My music evolves organically. It’s like a plant. We never see a plant move, but it is growing continually. Like plants, immobile but always growing, my music is never stable. It is ever changing”

– Éliane Radigue. Time is of no Importance

Cover art photography by

10/22/2024

DNZ30
Matthias Urban
SiAl

Field recordings from Iceland 2013 - 2016

“Austrian sound artist Matthias Urban crafted the two 20-minute, side-long tracks on SiAl out of field recordings he made in Iceland a few years ago. His source sounds are often recognizable, filled with running water, chirping birds, and wafting wind.
What makes SiAl so compelling is the way Urban sequences those sounds, creating a subliminal narrative where each aural event feels like a new chapter in a story. There’s a stretch on side two that builds palpable drama out of what sounds like mucky footsteps tromping through a swamp. It’s odd to feel suspense without even knowing exactly what’s going on, but Urban’s work on SiAl has that kind of sneaky power.”
- Bandcamp Daily
“These recordings were captured over a four-year period, but they come across as a single adventure: a trek into the wild, away from humanity, at the mercy of the elements. Urban returns with stories to tell, and blends them into an exquisite aural novel: a book on tape without words.”
- A Closer Listen

08/29/2024

DNZ106
Lea Bertucci
Hold Music

Hold Music is a pair of expansive long-form loop pieces for alto saxophone and electronics, intended to be listened to on infinite repeat. Entrancing and prismatic, constantly spiraling, this is a music that adapts to any listening situation – equally well-suited as accompaniment to daily activities as it is rewarding to the concentrated listen.

Originally commissioned by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the Volumes Festival in 2023.

08/29/2024

DNZ105
Marco Baldini
Fuochi

Featuring the 1885 pipe organ of Chiesa di San Martina a Maiano and using musical materials derived from Vincenzo Galilei’s Fronimo (1581), these pieces articulate the evocative possibilities of sustained tones and low tessituras. The protracted durations of these skeletal structures foreground their lush and often unexpected harmonic progressions, each moment revealing a world of subtle mystery and drama.

Cover art photography

08/28/2024

DNZ104
Henry Fraser
Breath Line

Henry Fraser bores into the sound of the double bass to explore the endless patterns of its otherwise hidden contours. The instrument acquires its own dynamic landscape, its own body, and its own mode of perception – opening a space of acute, granular perceptivity in which presumed boundaries are blurred: between center and periphery, sonic and tactile, instrumentalist and instrument, performer and listener.

06/08/2024

DNZ103
a0n0
Exploders_We

A wild and beautiful journey into the ecstatic regions of noise. Unfettered distortion ceaselessly billows and unfurls, harmonized and melodized in all sorts of unexpected ways. The momentum is undeniably forward in every direction, while the jarring suspensions that momentarily intervene to restrict the sound’s movement serve ultimately to unleash its sublime energy all the more fiercely.

Cover art photography by

06/08/2024

DNZ102
Michelle Lou & Stefan Maier
Live at UCSD

Lou’s constantly shifting cloud of spectral densities and angular textures are juxtaposed by Maier’s throbbing drones and pointillistic interjections. Unremitting and inexorable, constantly transforming sound passes through multiple states, reaching thresholds of intensity only to change phase yet again. In this live recording, Lou and Maier explore the material excess of sound, endlessly proliferating, in a state of unruly becoming.

06/07/2024

DNZ101
Billy Gomberg
Nanahari Edit

The undulating waves and patterns of electronic sound are layered with field recordings that capture the incidental textures of daily life – together ushering in a mesmerizing sound world: elegiac, yet playful, and utterly sensuous. This world blossoms within the blurred space connecting interior and exterior life, wherein each sound recasts the other and each entanglement suggests hidden dimensions of experience.

04/14/2024

DNZ100
Chantal Michelle
ℎ− 2− ℎ− − 2 ℎ−

Chantal Michelle’s latest work is an immersive composition across four movements, originally presented as a multi-channel installation and reworked for stereo. As with her previous release on Dinzu, Michelle exquisitely captures the raw, elemental processes of the natural world – here evoking the layered, grainy textures of geological formations. The track’s titles both denote these geological processes and describe the composition’s sonic behaviors and trajectories, conceptualized as a metaphor for the breakdown of love.

Michelle is joined by Joanna Mattrey (viola) and Lea Bertucci (alto saxophone), whose instruments chart melodic paths across these textures. These melodic figurations do not function as structural markers in the piece, nor do they merely elaborate the underlying texture; instead, they offer an alternate perspective of its dimensions: emerging as a kind of after-image of the seemingly static object, or the object’s memory of its own dynamic state of becoming.

ℎ− 2− ℎ− − 2 ℎ− is a standout accomplishment in Chantal Michelle’s ever-growing oeuvre.

Chantal Michelle – composition, feedback, synthesis
Joanna Mattrey – viola
Lea Bertucci – alto saxophone

Mixed by Chantal Michelle & Rupert Clervaux
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi

Cover art by Matthias Urban

12/14/2023

Hello!
Things have been super busy over here wrapping up the end of the year and working on 2024 releases.
From now until midnight New Years Eve please enjoy 15% off anything on the Dinzu Bandcamp page with discount code "2024"

Merch from Dinzu Artefacts

11/08/2023

DNZ99
Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy
New Rudiment Candidates For Snare Drum

With a microscopic focus on the snare drum, Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy extracts and manipulates its sound in a variety of tunings whilst maintaining a precision and simplicity of method and form. This exercise is a common one for the artist, in which he limits both the instruments used and the techniques with which its sounds are processed — in this case using only reverb and hard EQ-ing to engineer the final outcome. Even with these self-imposed restrictions, there is a playfulness and freedom that emerges from its textured layering of atmospheric tones and lively, aperiodic percussion.

Cover art photography by

11/07/2023

DNZ98
Niko-Matti Ahti
Looking For A Ruler

A strange and alluring admixture of guitar and sine tones, electronics, and field recordings. The sounds have a crystal-like clarity that allows for the perception of their depths and distances. Its episodic form is structured by a compositional spine — with its irregular vertebrae both cohering its shape and allowing it flexibility. As its title suggests, Looking For A Ruler is involved in the construction of space, the stitching together of a world wherein perspective is always a composite: of the concrete materiality of sound and its abstraction, of the ‘real’ acoustic space and its fictional elaboration — these are arranged, assembled, and held in a tight, suspenseful dialogue.

11/06/2023

DNZ97
salad
Riverside Ishiyama

Embracing the impermanency of the world and its ever-fluctuating dynamics, salad offers an intimate portrait of life and the sounds that animate it. Riverside Ishiyama opens a window into a typical Japanese apartment, rich with the activities of daily life and the delicate interactions between a new mother and child. The tinkering and whirring of these subtle, incidental sounds commingle with birdsong and the bustling city outside — altogether engrossing the listener in a calm and joyful atmosphere where each mesmerizing moment is a celebration of life and an affirmation that everything is precisely as it should be.

Cover art photography by

09/15/2023

DNZ96
Aki Onda
Transmissions From The Radio Midnight

Starting around 2006, Aki Onda began taking his Sony TCM F59 cassette Walkman on his various trips around the world and made a habit of listening to the radio into the late hours of the night upon returning to his hotel room. He scanned through frequencies and jumped around programs to hear the juxtaposition of different languages sometimes catching two or three frequencies at once overlapping.

Onda remembers “There was no greater joy than the moment in which I would begin to hear these languages, which were foreign to me, not as words but as aural texture. Was I enjoying text-sound compositions with alien words? Perhaps it was the abstract fusing of these lingual sounds. It was, at the very least, something akin to sound poetry.”

For this album, he’s selected some of his favorite segments from the recordings made in ten-or-so countries over the span of roughly a decade. All of the fragments are presented just as they were captured. Since frequency behavior is often unpredictable, and since the act of catching waves was done manually, the recordings capture all sorts of incidental sounds, including various kinds of static noise and radio interference.

“The radio is like an ocean of languages. It continuously projects a million chatterings happening simultaneously all over the world. This album captures and presents a tiny drop of this ocean, while the ocean itself flows onward — enormous, endless, infinite — for as long as the medium itself lasts. Isn’t that amazing?”

– Aki Onda

09/06/2023

Transmissions From The Radio Midnight
New work from Aki Onda
Pre-order your copy on Bandcamp now
https://dinzuartefacts.bandcamp.com/album/transmissions-from-the-radio-midnight

05/31/2023

Nighttime radio music, solo drum excursions, and the return of a mysterious Japanese duo, and more.

03/31/2023

Distance Between Us by Eventless Plot is officially out today digitally and on limited edition vinyl.

2 track album