Cover Art: Karen Tortato / Wendelin Büchler
Special double groove cut 7” + digital download
(includes 7 free ringtones, composed by Laura Mello)
limited to 300 copies
Corvo Records, 2018
Buy it directly from the artist
Ringing Still Life is a 7″ concept-album. It contains specially composed ringtones, field recordings and silence in two double grooves. What is a double groove?
A double groove on a vinyl record is when a side of the record has two separate grooves running parallel to each other. Normally, a vinyl record has a single continuous groove that spirals from the outer edge to the center, playing one track or a sequence of tracks in order. With a double groove, the needle can land on either of the two grooves when you drop it, meaning you could get one of two different tracks playing randomly when you start the record. It’s like a surprise every time you play it!
The medium where I discovered what I would later learn to call hörspiel accompannied me throughout my childhood. At that time, I had a huge collection of children´s stories on 7″ vinyl, including pretty well done musical arrangements. Thus, I wanted to honor the format that surely influenced my further musical path, bringing together in one single concept two technologies that refer to different times: ringtones and vinyl records.
The double groove cut enhances the game with a chance operation: either you reach the groove with only ringtones in it, or you hear ringtones and field recordings. The material for the ringtones was generated in many steps within some years, played during a jam session recorded at the ELAK-Studios in Vienna, and other random recordings from the time, processed and re-composed later on.
The field recordings belong to another collection of mine which includes sound landscapes from many places I have been. Ringing Still Life is a sounding bridge between different media, times, places and my first work on vinyl.
Reviews (excerpt)
Laura Mello is a Brazilian born sound artist currently based in Berlin. For her first vinyl outing she chose a double-tracked 7″, which means there are two grooves on each side, and whichever one the needle happens to end up following will determine what you hear. Two of the grooves feature ringtone-based sounds she has created over the years, the other two mix field recordings and other things in with these tones, making for a fairly chaotic (and quite lovely) racket. Pretty sure I’ve now heard all four tracks (by fiddling around quite a bit) and I think I prefer the flow of the multi-sourced collages to the ringtone bits, which tend toward the episodic. But it’s all pretty whacked.
— The Wire, Byron Coley
“It might not be too far-fetched to suggest Mello is aiming to help us “read” the modern world as a gigantic story-book, pages unfolding live in real time, with their own random musical outbursts.”
— The Sound Projector (UK)
