'I met SUGAI KEN a few years ago in Tokyo, outside the Dommune radio studios. His personality and music, a very special brand, touched me. His music is a coded vision of a dream world. A trade that is progressive yet traditional - in the most positive sense of the word. Recently out of the blue, Sugai San sent me a collection of personal field recordings he made of folklore groups and public performances in Tokyo, Toyama, Kanagawa, Kyoto, Tottori, … The close listener already knows that Sugai San’s aesthetics speak of a great knowledge of these performing arts. An open invitation: “the traditional local performing arts in the 21st century intrinsically conceive “fragility” as they are vulnerable to extinction. The Japanese local performing arts that appear in this recording is no exception, endangered by the declining birth rate and aging population which are typical to the country. (SUGAI KEN)” I bring the original recordings into conversation with new elements (corresponding field recordings and or additional percussion and strings, performed by Antwerp musicians Jeroen Stevens and Roman Hiele) like a ‘monomane’ - tr. imitating – sound game. But when i throw these old and new figurines together on the podium, the objects immediately disappear in the cracks of the stage wood. Thus only the understament of the suggestion remains. And relentlessly the significance of every movement now becomes a question. Furthermore, what’s in focus? The manipulation? Or the content? Or are we zooming in on the aspect of archiving ~ preserving? Dubious. In KAGIROI – tr. heat haze - people coexist for a moment severely carved in time like a high contrast still of dancing flames. When you bring this composition home, it will never boil yet merely evaporate. And when you gaze at the clouds of condensed droplets inside your own darkness, on a soft volume, You complete our puzzle.  . -Lieven Martens --- SUGAI KEN - field recordings, liner notes Lieven Martens - collage, additional sounds and field recordings Jeroen Stevens - additional percussion Roman Hiele - double bass, mastering Kohei Oyamada - liner notes translation Jeroen Wille - artwork --- Edições CN, 2021

Imagine yourself as a grape in a Belgian glasshouse, is the theme of this quietly immersive suite conjured by Christina Vantzou (CV) and Lieven Martens (Dolphins Into The Future) for the latter’s Edições CN  The musical component of a broader project incorporating poetic texts and photography, ’Serrisme’ conveys the cyclical experience of table grapes growing in vast glasshouses in the Flemish countryside. It was commissioned by the Flemish Heritage Fund to artfully document a peculiar culture that has existed for around 150 years, and has supplyied sweet little orbs to mouths from Russia to UK and USA.  The grape growing industry there is now a paler shade of what it once was, but the remaining glasshouses offer Vantzou and Martens a rich atmosphere and range of textures to work with. Maybe best known for his tropical dream sequences as Dolphins Into The Future, Lieven Martens plays to his strengths in evocative field recording for the first half, variously placing us under rain on glass and  between snipped vines for a nuanced evocation of the glasshouses’ day-to-day sounds.  Beloved for her work solo, with The Dead Texan and recently with a run of dead strong CV & JAB recordings; Vantzou takes a more impressionistic approach to the subject with two slow burning ‘Glisten’ beauties. Both working around he 10 minute mark, they offer amply room to drift with long, sustained glassy tones encouraging sublime states of mind, with strings and choral touches that suggest a sort of fading glamour of an old world viewed from outside. --- Serrisme is: a musical illustration - by Christina Vantzou, sound registrations - by Lieven Martens, a long poetic text - by Jan Matthé, analogue photographs - by Christophe Piette, and the usual perfect design - by Jeroen Wille. --- Edições CN, 2021

Poole Music is thrilled to announce its inaugural commission, the Habu, the latest full-length from Belgium’s Lieven Martens. For the better part of two decades, Martens has been expanding his Aloha-bedecked musical vision, transitioning from the basement tape environments of his Dolphins into the Future project to the rich compositional tapestries of more recent post-exotica modernist works. The Habu represents a true culmination of these identities in one of his most ambitious works to date. The album’s three pieces cast an omniverous net that explores those fragile tendriles between imagined and real, natural and fabricated, unity and chaos; concrete sounds enabling abstract inner landscapes. With the ecstatic revelry of Marco Polo returning to his queen, Lieven brings us gems from all corners of the navigable world: tales of an impossibly guilded Portugese palace, a fertility tonic conjured from a poisionous serpent, a simulacrum of Honolulu. At a moment when the world is more geographically isolated than it has been in generations, Martens’ the Habu is a welcome odyssey, a Charybdian travelogue of the psyche. About face. --- Poole Music, 2021