Touch

About

In the liminal spaces of London's experimental music scene during the 1980s, Touch was less a label and more a collaborative organism. Between 1981 and 1990, it sculpted a catalog of 34 releases, predominantly on cassette — a format that mirrored the tactile, process-driven ethos of the artists it embraced. The medium dictated the message, with 22 cassette releases rendering the ephemeral into something tangible. Touch was a conduit for the interdisciplinary: Hafler Trio's fractal soundscapes, Soliman Gamil's exploration of Egyptian aural traditions, and the conceptual musings of Jean Baudrillard. Touch's catalog reads like a map of the era's experimental frontier. "A Thirsty Fish" and "Open In Obscurity" resonate with the urgency of exploration, their sounds a synthesis of inquiry and abstraction. The label's LPs, though fewer in number, provided a larger canvas for sonic experimentation — Jon Wozencroft’s visual artistry often accompanying the auditory. The label's commitment to multimedia formats was pioneering, with its singular VHS release suggesting a curiosity for visual as well as auditory experiences. Touch's publications — part magazine, part artifact — complemented this, expanding the auditory into the realm of the visual and textual, a triadic expression of creativity. Operating in the shadows of the mainstream, Touch carved out a significant niche within the London underground, a scene as much about the exchange of ideas as it was about sound. Its releases were not merely products but dialogues, each one a conversation piece within the continuum of experimental music.