Clap. An Anatomy of Applause is a compilation of original works by a group of musicians and composers brought together by Andrea Stillacci and Unsounds. The project goal is to highlight the radically different forms and meanings that the sound of applause can take according to its context. The principle was to work from original recordings of each artist’s choice, with sources ranging from the thunderous applause celebrating Maria Callas’ last public appearance to the crowds cheering at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and to transform them into musical compositions.

The artists on this double album represent a variety of styles and practices within the experimental fields, at the intersection of the curator's and the label's artistic visions. The participants have delved into the dynamics, the grain, the pathos of the applause, in a reversed act of appreciation. The works are unified in the album as they wholeheartedly respond to the voice of the public. A dialogue that remains a vital force, that of the connection of the public with the artists, and vice-versa.

A limited edition double LP with original works by Eraldo Bernocchi + Maurizio Bianchi + Barbara Ellison + Terence Hannum + Ji Youn Kan + Fani Konstantinidou + Yannis Kyriakides + Andy Moor + Moor Mother + Massimo Pupillo + Scanner (Robin Rimbaud). Also available as a digital album : see link below.

Tracklist

1. Andy Moor - Perseverance (7:16)
2. Ji Youn Kang - 27 April 2018 (7:19)
3. Moor Mother - Clap Piece (2:30)
4. Eraldo Bernocchi - The Solitude of Pens (5:19)
5. Fani Konstantinidou - Eπεuφημισμóς (5:44)
6. Yannis Kyriakides - Farewell Concert (7:14)
7. Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) - The Fall, The Freedom (7:20)
8. Maurizio Bianchi - M. B. Claps (4:06)
9. Terence Hannum - Precious Element (3:24)
10. Barbara Ellison - Plauditory Phantoms #01 (10:02)
11. Massimo Pupillo - In Memory Of Punk Rock (7:27)

Excerpts

Andy Moor - Perseverance

Ji Youn Kang - 27 April 2018

Yannis Kyriakides - Farewell Concert

Scanner - The Fall, The Freedom

Graphic design by Isabelle Vigier, featuring a photograph by Ljubodrag Andric, 2021. (photos Isabelle Vigier)

About the artists

Eraldo Bernocchi is an Italian composer, arranger, producer and guitarist with more than 100 album releases to his name, now based in London. Starting his career in the late 70’s as a guitarist in independent punk bands, in the mid ’80’s Eraldo co-founded the conceptual audio project Sigillum-S and has since collaborated with international artists such as Bill Laswell, Harold Budd, Nils Petter Molvaer, Russell Mills, Toshinori Kondo, Thomas Fehlmann, Markus Stockhausen, Robin Guthrie, Colin Edwin, Prakash Sontakke, Chihei Hatakeyama and many more. He has also composed film music for Academy Award winner Gabriele Salvatores and produced numerous art installations with Petulia Mattioli, as well as other artists including Russell Mills and Harold Budd. In 2008 Eraldo founded RareNoise Records, a new London based label, which aims to showcase a wide range of experimental and cutting edge music. www.eraldobernocchi.com

Maurizio Bianchi is a pioneer of industrial music and seminal figure within the Noise and Power Electronics scenes originating from Milan. He wrote about music for Italian magazines before commencing release of his own recordings on cassettes under the name of Sacher-Pelz in August 1979. He has worked with many legendary acts within the industrial and noise scenes including Masami Akita aka Merzbow, Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions and William Bennett of Whitehouse/Cut Hands. His acclaimed album Symphony For A Genocide was released on Nigel Ayers' Sterile Records label in 1981, followed by releases on Come Org and Gary Mundy of Ramleh’s Broken Flag Records. Bianchi underwent a hiatus from recording music until 1997 when he returned to music on EEs'T Records and has since enjoyed over a hundred releases and collaborations, continuing to record to this day. www.menstrualrecordings.org/maurizio_bianchi.htm

Barbara Ellison (Ireland) is an award-winning composer whose work explores ideas of ghostly presence in a variety of sonic and visual realms. Her works have been presented worldwide in live performances, installations and audio compositions, including her latest album release CyberSongs (Unsounds Records) and the three-hour Cyber-Opera: A trans-human opera in three acts. She was active in The Netherlands for several years, collaborating with the Trickster collective for the epic HerOpera which was performed at the Paradiso, Amsterdam, in 2020. Her music has featured on radio shows such as BBC’s Late Junction, SilenceAndSound, SoundProjector, Dublin Digital Radio and Touching Extremes amongst others and she co-ordinated the Sonic Mmabolela artist residency with Francisco Loṕez in South Africa during 2013-2019. In 2020 her book Sonic Phantoms: Composition with Auditory Phantasmatic Presence, co-authored with Thomas B.W. Bailey (Bloomsbury Press) was published to critical acclaim. barbaraellison.com

Terence Hannum is a Baltimore based visual artist, writer, electronic music producer and member of Avant-Metal trio Locrian. Hannum takes the ambient genre and makes his own eerie reduction of it. His album Via Negativa was described as "plunging the listener into his own darkness and you can’t help but succumb to the trance. It would amply fit among the best horror movie soundtracks." (Sly Vinyl) He also works under the alias Axebreaker and has released several solo albums experimenting with minimal electronic and drone sounds. www.terencehannum.com

Ji Youn Kang is a Korean composer and sound artist based in The Hague, Netherlands. A number of he musical pieces have been based on the rites of Korean Shamanism, many of them written for Wave Field Synthesis System playback on 192 loudspeakers, exploring the relationship between musical and physical spaces. She has composed live electronic pieces for both traditional and non-traditional instruments and solo instruments to works for a large orchestra, exploring the primitive, empowering rhythmical elements and sound sources that are the foundations of Korean ritual music. Her pieces have been performed in many different events and festivals including La Biennale di Venezia in Italy, the Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Rewire Festival, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt in Germany, Sonar in Spain and Synthesis in France. She is currently a tutor at the Institute of Sonology, giving a course on 'Spatial music composition for WFS system'. jiyounkang.com

Fani Konstantinidou is a composer, sound artist and music researcher interested in the sonic imprints of cultural, cross-cultural, and social identities. Her work is an exploration of urban and rural sonic environments, spoken language, culturally associated musical instruments, and computer generated sounds. With her music she explores the potential and the antitheses between analogue versus digital, producing shifting sonic textures that vary between drones, noise, arrhythmic melodies and atonal rhythms. Inspired by the influence of space and time in music, she creates and recreates timelines of sonic events and parallel soundscapes. She is one of the founding members of New Emergences Foundation, a platform advocating on diversity in electronic music and sound art, by highlighting the presence and absence of women, LGBTQ+ communities and all under-represented voices. www.fanikonstantinidou.com

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Cyprus and has been living in the Netherlands since 1992. As a composer and sound artist he looks for ways of creating new forms and hybrids of media that problematize the act of listening and is often drawn to the relation between perception, emotion, language and how they define our experience of sound. In the last years his work has explored this concept through the use of systems of encoding information into sound, synthesizing voices and projecting text to music. Yannis has written over a hundred compositions, comprising mostly theatre, multimedia and electroacoustic works for chamber groups and large ensembles. Together with Andy Moor and Isabelle Vigier he founded the CD label for new electronic music Unsounds. He is a founding member of the ensemble MAZE, and teaches composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in The Hague. www.kyriakides.com

Andy Moor began his musical career in Edinburgh, Scotland playing guitar with the Dog Faced Hermans. He moved to the Netherlands to join the internationally acclaimed agit-prop post-punk group The Ex with whom he has remained a member for over thirty years. More recently Andy has collaborated with Cypriot composer, Yannis Kyriakides; French sound poet, Anne James Chaton and Lebanese saxophonist, Christine Abdelnour and has also worked composing soundtracks with Iranian filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi. His latest projects include a quartet called Lean Left and The Heretics project with Anne James Chaton and Thurston Moore. The end of 2021 also saw Andy begin work as a live DJ and radio producer leading to work with Amsterdam based Echobox Radio with whom he broadcasts a monthly live show. Entitled Blueprints For A Blackout these are archived on Mixcloud. soundcloud.com/andymoor

Moor Mother is a musician, poet, visual artist, workshop facilitator and activist from Philadelphia. She is one half of the collective Black Quantum Futurism, co-leads the group Irreversible Entanglements and has performed at numerous festivals, colleges, galleries and museums around the world. She dubs her approach “Black Quantum Futurism”; exploring sound’s potential to evoke memories as a vehicle for navigating time. Thus her music sustains a constant, complementary tension between the hushed, folkloric mantras and defiant Afrofuturist litanies she shares, her sound drawing freely from noise, jazz, blues and beats while respecting the practice of each mode. Her latest album is an ambitious anthropological undertaking, looking to map out a history of Black classical – music of the jazz continuum – that stretches into the future as well as the past. In the fall of 2021, Ayewa began serving as an assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music. www.moormother.net

Massimo Pupillois an Italian bass player, multi-instrumentalist, composer and improviser, best known for being one of the founding members of Zu with whom he has released over fifteen albums. Throughout his work he has maintained an open and multidisciplinary approach that has led him to work with some of the most acclaimed figures in today's art world: Romeo Castellucci, Chiara Guidi (Societas Raffaello Sanzio), Berlin-based American choreographer Meg Stuart, performance and contemporary dance group Dewey Dell, to name but a few. Musically he has collaborated with a similarly impressive roster of influential figures in the international experimental music scene such as Thurston Moore & Jim O' Rourke (Sonic Youth), Stephen O’Malley (Sunno), David Tibet (Current 93), Thighpaulsandra (Coil), Brian Chippendale (Lightning Bolt), FM Einheit (Einstürzende Neubauten), Damo Suzuki (CAN), Mick Harris & Mark Greenway (Napalm Death), Gordon Sharp (Cindytalk & This Mortal Coil) alongside free-improvisation artists including Peter Brotzmann, Toshinori Kondo, Paal Nilssen Love, Mats Gustafsson, Ken Vandermark and Tony Buck (Swans). Massimo has released more than 70 albums and played an impressive 3000 shows worldwide. www.zuism.net/massimo

Scanner, British artist Robin Rimbaud, has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings since the 1980s, connecting a bewilderingly diverse array of genres. His adventures are brilliantly strange – from scoring 1000 dancers in Trafalgar Square London for the Olympics, creating permanent soundtracks in a London house, Riga Airport and a working morgue in Paris, to scoring the world’s first VR ballet with Dutch National Ballet. He first visited Berlin in 1985, both East and West, and ran his club, The Electronic Lounge, there in Friseur in 1996. scannerdot.com

Andrea Stillacci worked as a contemporary art critic and DJ before embarking on a career in advertising and communication following his 2007 ‘Stillacci Soundsystem’ 12” which featured design by Peter Saville. In 2016 he produced the "Heretics" art project, collaborating with Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth), Andy Moor (The Ex) and the contemporary poet Anne James Chaton. Heretics has subsequently been performed in theaters all over the world, most recently in May 2022 at Venice Palazzo Grassi. It is released on Unsounds records. His interest in industrial culture goes way beyond the musical aspect having a particular focus on the visual and communicative territories of the movement. In addition to curating the 'Clap' project Andrea is also producer of the forthcoming book "Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music (1969-1995)" by Nicolas Ballet.

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