Listening Center

Behind The Sky proudly presents Portals: A Kosmiche Journey through Outer Worlds and Inner Space. Featuring enough analog and modular synths to build a rocketship, Portals features 13 tracks of berlin school inspired electronic music from legends of synthesis like Steve Roach, Ian Boddy and Steve Moore, as well as music from new school wizards of the electron like d’Voxx, Polypores and Listening Center.

Lovingly curated by Behind The Sky label head Bluetech, this 2xLP compilation is a love song to unabashedly melodic analog synthesizer music of cosmic proportions and the utopian science fiction of the 70s.

The ferric, retiring twin of the preceding Diaphanous Structures ventures further along an increasingly contemplative and minimal path, equipped with tape loops, sounds on sound, 16mm optical film loops, and accompanied by the familiar undulations of wow and flutter.

April 9 – release day! Reviews by Adrian Pannett and Mat Smith here and here at Concrete Islands and Further Evidence.

Pre-orders are now open for Retrieving, awaiting release on June 24th. The limited edition vinyl LP with design by Nick Taylor is available in the UK and Europe from shops such as Norman Records and Piccadilly Records. It is also available to order, bundled with a download, in the US from the Listening Center/Temporary Tapes page. and will be available to stream and download from most major digital outlets.

Listening Center’s 2012 debut album, available on vinyl for the first time.

Our debut album, Example One, is being reissued by the wonderful London-based label, Polytechnic Youth in a vinyl edition of 500. It is available now in European shops or you can order direct from Polytechnic Youth, and will be available to order from the Listening Center bandcamp page in a couple of weeks.

Here’s a nice review from Adrian Pannett at Delusions of Adequacy.

Listening Center’s re-constructed audio montage addresses the recordings of the Royal Danish Ballet production Uropa, which include the dialogue and narratives of refugee performers and dancers, along with Mikkel Hess’s score. Much of the audio was fed into tape loop systems, which informed the integrations of disparate elements of the piece from successive performances. Dislocated voices speak to us, now heard, now muffled or obscured by radio static; some untouched passages simply tell their own story.

Help us help others by donating to the UROPEAN Red Cross collection here: egenindsamling.rodekors.dk/rodekors/8-7150

Stream below, or download here:

“Maybe The Sweet Honey Pours is made up of discrete short poems sequenced to resemble parts of a long poem composed during a single train ride from NYC to Toronto one midwinter day. In the work, I set out to explore the relationship between sequentiality and narrativity, and the potential unity this would afford poems otherwise deemed fugitive: works-in-progress, thought experiments, guesswork, shards, remnants.”
-Paolo Javier

“Beginning An Expedition & Timestream are essentially early Listening Center tracks transferred from a wavering four track cassette recorder; From An Unknown Source is just that, it was found on a tape one day – I have no recollection of making it or where it originated.”
-Listening Center