Touch is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 audio-visual organisation, operating the Touch label. It is the main arm of the London-based multimedia publishing company Touch, established in 1982. They also are a UK-based music publisher, with such composers as Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi is a multi-instrumentalist who in major plays electric guitar and drums, with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969 to a Jewish family originally from Iraq....

, Leif Elggren

Leif Elggren

Leif Elggren , is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm.Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual...

, Christian Fennesz

Christian Fennesz

Christian Fennesz is an Austrian guitarist active in electronic music, often credited on albums simply as Fennesz....

, Soliman Gamil

Soliman Gamil

Soliman Gamil was an Egyptian composer and qanun player. In 1963 he began to experiment with the use of Egyptian traditional musical instruments in his compositions for films and theater, in an effort to evoke the sounds of Ancient Egypt....

, Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir is a classically trained Icelandic Cellist who has played and recorded with the bands Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as her solo project Lost in Hildurness...

, Geir Jenssen, Stephan Mathieu

Stephan Mathieu

Stephan Mathieu is a German musician and sound artist whose work is based on digital and analog processing techniques. He lives and works in Saarbrücken, Germany.-About:...

, Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock is a composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.-Biography:...

, BJNilsen (alias Hazard), Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane is an electronic musician from New Zealand, based in London since 2000. He was in the New Zealand trio Thela, then went on a solo career, as well as co-founding the Sigma Editions record label.-Overview:...

, Peter Rehberg

Peter Rehberg

Peter Rehberg is an author of electronic audio works.He has collaborated with: Jim O'Rourke, Christian Fennesz, Dennis Cooper, Gisèle Vienne, Stephen O'Malley , Tina Frank, Matmos, Tujiko Noriko, Kevin Drumm, Marcus Schmickler, Michaela Schwentner , Matt "Skitz" Sanders, Russell Haswell, Florian...

, Carl Michael von Hausswolff

Carl Michael von Hausswolff

Carl Michael von Hausswolff is a composer, visual artist and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. His main tools are recording devices used in an ongoing investigation of electricity, frequency, architectural space and paranormal electronic interference...

, Chris Watson

Chris Watson (musician)

Christopher Richard Watson is a Sheffield-born musician and sound recordist specialising in natural history. He was a founding member of the musical group Cabaret Voltaire, and Watson's work as a wildlife sound recordist has covered television documentaries and experimental musical collaborations.-...

 and Jana Winderen on their roster.

They are the home of notable artists such as Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi is a multi-instrumentalist who in major plays electric guitar and drums, with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969 to a Jewish family originally from Iraq....

, Biosphere

Biosphere (musician)

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen , a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track "Novelty...

, Fennesz

Christian Fennesz

Christian Fennesz is an Austrian guitarist active in electronic music, often credited on albums simply as Fennesz....

, Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir is a classically trained Icelandic Cellist who has played and recorded with the bands Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as her solo project Lost in Hildurness...

, Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Paris. Ikeda's music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of "raw" states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing...

, Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck is an English multimedia composer, magician, choreographer, woodsman and taxidermist. He is perhaps best known for his work Vinyl Requiem with Lol Sargent which won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993...

, Chris Watson

Chris Watson

John Christian Watson , commonly known as Chris Watson, Australian politician, was the third Prime Minister of Australia...

 and BJNilsen (alias Hazard), Jana Winderen amongst others.

History

Touch was initiated in 1981 by graphic designer Jon Wozencroft

Jon Wozencroft

Jon Wozencroft is a graphic designer, author and instructor.Wozencroft founded Touch, an independent multimedia publishing company...

 and established in 1982, along with Andrew McKenzie (until 1996), Garry Mouat and Panni Charrington, with the assistance of music publisher Mike Harding. Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding still run the company.

They initially issued cassette magazines, featuring a diverse array of artists such as New Order

New Order

New Order are an English rock band formed in 1980 by Bernard Sumner , Peter Hook and Stephen Morris...

, Jah Wobble

Jah Wobble

Jah Wobble is an English bass guitarist, singer, poet and composer. He became known to a wider audience as the original bass player in Public Image Ltd in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but left the band after two albums...

, Deux Filles, John Foxx

John Foxx

John Foxx is an English singer, artist, photographer and teacher. He was the original lead singer of the band Ultravox before being replaced by Midge Ure, when he left to embark on a solo career in 1979...

, Ludus

Ludus

Luduș is a town in central Romania in Mureș County, 44 km south-west from the county's capital Târgu Mureș.Six villages are administered by the town: Avrămeşti , Cioarga , Ciurgău , Fundătura , Gheja and Roșiori .-History:* 1330 - First mentioned as Plehanus de...

, Robert Wyatt

Robert Wyatt

Robert Wyatt is an English musician, and founding member of the influential Canterbury scene band Soft Machine, with a long and distinguished solo career...

, Current 93

Current 93

Current 93 is an eclectic British experimental music group, working since the early 1980s in folk-based musical forms. The band was founded in 1982 by David Tibet .-Background:Tibet has been the only constant in the group, though Steven Stapleton has appeared on...

, Virginia Astley

Virginia Astley

Virginia Astley is an English singer-songwriter most active during the 1980s and 1990s. From the start of her songwriting career in 1980, Astley took her inspiration from many sources. Her classical training influenced her as did a desire to be experimental with her music...

, Einstürzende Neubauten

Einstürzende Neubauten

Einstürzende Neubauten is a German post-industrial band, originally from West Berlin, formed in 1980. The group currently comprises Blixa Bargeld , Alexander Hacke , N.U...

, David Cunningham, and many more. The magazine series published the first recordings by Eithne Ní Bhraonáin, later known as Enya

Enya

Enya is an Irish singer, instrumentalist and songwriter. Enya is an approximate transliteration of how Eithne is pronounced in the Donegal dialect of the Irish language, her native tongue.She began her musical career in 1980, when she briefly joined her family band Clannad before leaving to...

 (in 1983, two pieces called An Gaoth Ón Ghrian (The Solar Wind) and Miss Clare Remembers were released on the Travel cassette). Many cassettes also contained "field recordings" and sound collage works.

In the early cassette period up to the digitisation of music in the mid-80’s, sounds by artists such as New Order

New Order

New Order are an English rock band formed in 1980 by Bernard Sumner , Peter Hook and Stephen Morris...

, Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire (band)

Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...

 and The Residents

The Residents

The Residents is an American art collective best known for avant-garde music and multimedia works. The first official release under the name of The Residents was in 1972, and the group has since released over sixty albums, numerous music videos and short films, three CD-ROM projects and ten DVDs....

, were paralleled by visual work and writing by Neville Brody

Neville Brody

Neville Brody is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director.Neville Brody is an alumnus of the London College of Printing and Hornsey College of Art, and is known for his work on The Face magazine and Arena magazine , as well as for designing record covers for artists such as...

, Jon Savage

Jon Savage

Jon Savage , real name Jonathon Sage, is a Cambridge-educated writer, broadcaster and music journalist, best known for his award winning history of the Sex Pistols and punk music, England's Dreaming, published in 1991.-Career:...

, Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys was a German performance artist, sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social...

 and many others. As the industry went through its usual elaborate cycles of self-annihilation and rebirth, Touch adapted to incorporate new technologies with the old, underscoring the power and necessity of editing and presentation to bring the best out of each production.

Now working extensively with Fennesz, Chris Watson

Chris Watson

John Christian Watson , commonly known as Chris Watson, Australian politician, was the third Prime Minister of Australia...

, Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck is an English multimedia composer, magician, choreographer, woodsman and taxidermist. He is perhaps best known for his work Vinyl Requiem with Lol Sargent which won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993...

, Biosphere

Biosphere (musician)

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen , a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track "Novelty...

, BJNilsen, Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane is an electronic musician from New Zealand, based in London since 2000. He was in the New Zealand trio Thela, then went on a solo career, as well as co-founding the Sigma Editions record label.-Overview:...

, Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir is a classically trained Icelandic Cellist who has played and recorded with the bands Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as her solo project Lost in Hildurness...

 and Jana Winderen and many others, Touch celebrated its 20th year in 2001 with a UK CMN-backed tour, including sell-out dates in Brighton, Bristol, Glasgow, Newcastle, Salisbury and the QEH in London. The transitions from analogue to digital, from camera-ready artwork to broadband file-sharing and from 1/4” masters to website downloads are only the surface manifestations of the great changes that have taken place in recorded music over the last 20 years.

Artists

Artists affiliated include, alphabetically: Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi

Oren Ambarchi is a multi-instrumentalist who in major plays electric guitar and drums, with longstanding interests in transcending conventional instrumental approaches. He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1969 to a Jewish family originally from Iraq....

, Thomas Ankersmit

Thomas Ankersmit

Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and installation artist based in Berlin and Amsterdam. Initially an improvising saxophonist, his activities expanded to include live electronic music and installation pieces based on architectural acoustics and infrasound...

, Biosphere

Biosphere (musician)

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen , a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his "ambient techno" and "arctic ambient" styles, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His track "Novelty...

, Fennesz

Christian Fennesz

Christian Fennesz is an Austrian guitarist active in electronic music, often credited on albums simply as Fennesz....

, Soliman Gamil

Soliman Gamil

Soliman Gamil was an Egyptian composer and qanun player. In 1963 he began to experiment with the use of Egyptian traditional musical instruments in his compositions for films and theater, in an effort to evoke the sounds of Ancient Egypt....

, Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Guðnadóttir

Hildur Ingveldardóttir Guðnadóttir is a classically trained Icelandic Cellist who has played and recorded with the bands Pan Sonic, Throbbing Gristle and Múm, as well as her solo project Lost in Hildurness...

, Robert Hampson

Robert Hampson

Robert Hampson is an English musician and composer, known primarily as a guitarist in the band Loop, which he co-founded in London in 1985 with his then girlfriend Becky Stewart . Loop recorded three albums, the last of which made the U.K...

, Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in Paris. Ikeda's music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of "raw" states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing...

, Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck

Philip Jeck is an English multimedia composer, magician, choreographer, woodsman and taxidermist. He is perhaps best known for his work Vinyl Requiem with Lol Sargent which won the Time Out Performance Award in 1993...

, Nana April Jun

Nana April Jun

Nana April Jun is one of the personae of Christofer Lämgren , a Swedish artist who works with text, audio, image and installation.-The Ontology of Noise:...

, Jacob Kirkegaard

Jacob Kirkegaard

Jacob Kirkegaard is a sound artist born in 1975 in Denmark, living in Berlin, Germany. In early 2006 he graduated at the Academy of Arts and the Media in Cologne, Germany. Jacob is exploring sound in art with a scientific approach...

, Francisco López

Francisco López (musician)

Francisco López is an avant-garde experimental musician and sound artist.He has released a large amount of sound pieces with record labels from more than fifty countries and realized hundreds of concerts and sound installations worldwide; including some of the main international museums, galleries...

, Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock is a composer, filmmaker, videographer, and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium.-Biography:...

, BJNilsen (alias Hazard), Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane

Rosy Parlane is an electronic musician from New Zealand, based in London since 2000. He was in the New Zealand trio Thela, then went on a solo career, as well as co-founding the Sigma Editions record label.-Overview:...

, Rafael Toral, Mika Vainio, Chris Watson

Chris Watson (musician)

Christopher Richard Watson is a Sheffield-born musician and sound recordist specialising in natural history. He was a founding member of the musical group Cabaret Voltaire, and Watson's work as a wildlife sound recordist has covered television documentaries and experimental musical collaborations.-...

, Jana Winderen and others

External links

• Touch - official site News, artists, catalogue, reviews, etc.
• Touch Shop - official online shop (records, books)
• Touch Radio Streaming internet audio broadcasts
• Touch Music Touch's publishing division
• Discography of Touch at Discogs
  Discogs
  Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com, are owned by Zink Media, Inc., and are...
  
  
• Jon Wozencroft profile at the Royal College of Art
  Royal College of Art
  The Royal College of Art is an art school located in London, United Kingdom. It is the world’s only wholly postgraduate university of art and design, offering the degrees of Master of Arts , Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy...
  
  
• Jon Wozencroft article on Joy Division in Issue 10 TATE ETC. Summer 2007