Network Friction release date: March 6
EV017: Network Friction by Aries House Zaes
Good afternoon,
Aries House Zaes’ Network Friction will be released on March 6, 2026 on digital / streaming and 12” vinyl formats. The pre-order is currently live on the Editions Verde Bandcamp page.
About the album:
While Zoom and other online streaming platforms let us appear together online, the vast network infrastructure between us inevitably introduces delays, skips, and other temporal distortions. We usually try our best to ignore these shortcomings when we connect virtually, but Network Friction harnesses them to create unique rhythms.
The work originated in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, when three sound artists on three different continents attempted to share beats with one another online. Realizing that the “failures” of the network that connected them were themselves aesthetically interesting, Aries, House, and Zaes conceived of an installation for a virtual exhibition, streaming looping beats from custom lathe-cut records to a virtual listening space where they combined in unexpected ways.
Produced and exhibited by Swissnex San Francisco, the virtual work later incorporated physical listening spaces, and it appeared at the 27th Geneva International Film Festival’s Geneva Digital Market in 2021, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF) in 2022, and Musikfestival Bern in 2024.
Following these exhibitions, the artists reimagined the installation as a recorded performance. Like with the installation, the artists utilized their virtual connection as a temporal device to alter their pre-produced rhythm loops, but this time they followed a score that choreographed each performer’s precise actions—controlling tone arms, switches, and other functions of the turntable—resulting in a faster, musicalized, and rigorously structured performance.
In close collaboration with Editions Verde in New York and mixing/mastering engineer Benoît Piccand in Bern, the sonically rich rhythm piece made of locked vinyl grooves and temporal network artifacts is now released as EV017. It will be sold digitally and in a limited edition of 300 vinyl copies, emphasizing the sonic contrasts between analog media and digital distortions.
The visual artwork was created by Bern-based graphic designer Sandra Schmid (schmiderei.com). The line structures were originally drawn by hand using analog techniques and subsequently processed through xeroxing, transforming them into layered, rhythmic compositions that echo the musical dynamism of quasi-synchronous beats.
The artists have also produced a peer-reviewed article that explores the broader ideas of the work, which can be found here: www.mast-journal.org/vol-4-no-2-2023
— About Aries House Zaes —
Since 2020, Annie Aries, Brian House and Marcel Zaes have collaborated primarily online, working across continents. Their practice began as a “beat diary,” where they published weekly rhythm loops that reflected their emotional, technological, and geographic states. Over time, their conversations shifted toward the question of what it means to exhibit a beat—removing rhythm from its musical context and presenting it in a gallery or installation setting, especially online. Their collaborative work oscillates between the musical and the gallery, always challenging notions of time as a device both human and technological. Rhythm has become their core arena to investigate how technologies and humans are always linked—often in unspoken ways. As a collective, they contribute to the discourse on the socio-cultural significance of technological rhythm.
Annie Aries creates music with a custom-built modular synthesizer, exploring the interplay between generative approaches and live improvisation. Her work seeks minimal yet complex textural sound worlds, reflected also in the rhythms she contributed to Network Friction. Annie works and lives in Bern/Switzerland.
Brian House develops rhythms using custom software that simulates ecological and geophysical phenomena. His recent solo release, Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, was one of Bandcamp’s “Best Field-Recordings of 2025” and was called “a notable document in terms of its conceptual and technological ingenuity” by The Wire. Brian lives and works in Amherst MA.
Marcel Zaes investigates how humans are increasingly intertwined with their technologies; and his artistic work renders these relations sonic. His music was recently presented at Shanghai Cadillac Concert Hall (2024) and at the Pingshan Art Museum, Shenzhen (2025). His album Parallel Prints (Editions Verde) with the NYC ensemble Yarn/Wire was described in Bandcamp’s “Best Contemporary Classical” for February 2022 as “lumpy, hypnotic, random, and driving, sometimes all at once.” Zaes is based in Vienna/Austria.
For now,
Jordan
