Dimidium Oraculi

Side A, Michael’s side / 13’50”

• Delphic Response (Lower Drop mix) / 6’21”
• Last Signal (Somerset reimagined) / 7’29”

Side B, Adi’s side / 13’33”

• Future Cartography Re-Mapped (Newton mix) / 7’01”
• Half-Life Extended (Newton mix) / 6’32”

Four tracks, two on each side of a long friendship: twenty-seven minutes of new music.
Delphic Response (Lower Drop mix) is chiselled by David Lewin’s sonic modelling around Newton’s voice. Last Signal (Somerset reimagined) — an instrumental from 2013 never cut into vinyl — is reborn with Matthew Bourne’s piano wandering free jazz over the original melody and Somerset Ward’s bass clarinet, and at the end finds a voice it never had.

On the other side, Future Cartography Re-Mapped (Newton mix) turns the free jazz of the original into an epic electronic ballad, and Half-Life Extended (Newton mix) puts the whole poem back together over new music, leaden and spectral.

© + ℗ 2026 Adi Newton & Michael Somerset Ward under exclusive license to Rizosfera Arm Comm Europe.
Published by Mute Song Limited / BMG Management Rights

Photo: Simon Kane (Portrait of Adi & Michael for Rizosfera website)

DIMIDIUM ORACULI :: Adi Newton & Michael Somerset Ward

For the first time, Adi Newton and Michael Somerset Ward sign a complete work together as authors. Four tracks, close to half an hour, released alongside No Ordinary Raconteur, Somerset Ward’s album of which Dimidium Oraculi is the dark twin. It is also the tenth work of Armcomm Europe, and it celebrates its five years. But its bearing is not festive: it is oracular.

“At Delphi the Pythia sat on the tripod, above a cleft in the earth from which vapours rose. She spoke in the name of Apollo, whom the Greeks called Loxias, the Oblique: words always true, never plain. Those who climbed to the sanctuary for an answer came down with a riddle. Heraclitus put it most exactly: ‘the Lord whose oracle is at Delphi neither speaks nor conceals, but gives a sign’. Dimidium Oraculi means ‘half of the oracle’. The title does not say which half, nor does it promise that the other exists. The oracle does not resolve: it raises the
stakes. The two faces of the record are each sovereign over one half only, each unaware of what the other knows. One gives a sign, the other listens, and the other way round.”

— from the Dimidium Oraculi booklet

THE DARK TWIN

Dimidium Oraculi does not come from No Ordinary Raconteur: it comes after it, in the space it leaves. This is why it is never offered on its own — that is not a condition of sale, it is the shape of the record. The two albums call to one another and answer in hints, in unsaid sentences, in stories recomposed obliquely, with more questions than answers.

The four tracks grow out of material that already has a history: the poem Half-Life, scattered in four fragments across No Ordinary Raconteur; Delphic Response, from the same vinyl; Future Cartography, from Threnodies and Ad Hocs; Last Signal, from Newtones. Here they are remade, not revisited. Four sonic sculptures.

TWO SIDES, TWO FACES

The vinyl has no side A and no side B: two unnumbered halves, one Michael’s side and one Adi’s side, as the runout inscriptions say. On the labels, two paintings by Adi Newton: the Non-Euclidean Portrait of Michael Somerset Ward 2 (2026) and the self-portrait Mirrored Head Study 2 (2022). The same hand, two gazes. Each side belongs to the choices of the man portrayed on it.

FIVE YEARS, TEN WORKS

Five years of Armcomm Europe, since January 2022: the partnership between Adi Newton, producer and artistic director, and Rizosfera, producer of polymedia and transmedia works. Ten releases. Dimidium Oraculi celebrates them, and it does not go through distribution: it is made for the community that follows Armcomm Europe and Rizosfera. Inside it is the energy of five years of work. Dimidium Oraculi is not a conclusion. It is a threshold.
Cross it.

VINYL

Michael’s Side

Label: Non-Euclidean Portrait of Michael Somerset Ward 2 (2026), painting by Adi Newton.
Themes and development chosen by Michael Somerset Ward.

01. Delphic Response (Lower Drop mix)
Composers: Somerset Ward, Newton, Lewin
Voice: Adi Newton
Sonic modelling: David Lewin (The White Whale)

The record opens with the piece that sets its tone and its measure. Delphic Response began on the vinyl of No Ordinary Raconteur, the Michael Somerset Ward album released alongside Dimidium Oraculi. Michael calls the collaboration Clock DVA-continuity, as though the “deviated” group had passed unharmed through a temporal cavity, from Advantage straight to Dimidium Oraculi, with funk and jazz glittering over analogue synthesisers. Somerset Ward describes it in his own words: “how I felt DVA could have developed — electronic, but with a beating organic heart.” Here the Clock DVA-continuity returns in the Lower Drop mix, and the booklet gives the exact formula: “reimagined in the industrial throat of The White Whale”. David Lewin’s sonic modelling chisels it and carries it further down, towards the dark; at the centre stands Adi Newton’s voice, “black as night”. This is the Delphic response that gives the record its shape: always true, never obvious. Everything is interpretation — the oracle offers one half, the rest is examination of conscience and introspection.

02. Last Signal (Somerset reimagined)
Composer: Newton
Piano: Matthew Bourne
Electric bass clarinet: Michael Somerset Ward
Voice: Adi Newton

The oldest piece on the record. An Adi Newton instrumental recorded in 2013 at Adi’s home studio in Truro, Cornwall, over three days in which only the two of them were present, and, as the booklet recalls, “never cut into vinyl”. Somerset Ward has reimagined it from the ground up: almost nothing of the original survives except the melody, and everything else is poetry — new, enchanting, languid. Around that single thread he has built a new organism: Matthew Bourne’s grand piano, recorded specially for this record, the electronics, and the bass clarinet, amplified by effects, rising “out of the mist, like a voice from a cleft in the rock”. At the end, for the first time, the piece has a voice: a spoken part by Adi Newton — the tail of the Half-Life poem, lost in the starred vault — which the original did not have. The piece first appeared on Newtones, Adi Newton’s first solo album, released in 2022 by Armcomm Europe. It is the clearest example of the sonic sculpture that runs through the whole record: not a remake, but a stripping back to the bone and a rebuilding around what is left.

VINYL

Adi’s Side

Label: Mirrored Head Study 2 (2022), self-portrait by Adi Newton.
Themes and development chosen by Adi Newton.

03. Future Cartography Re-Mapped (Newton mix)
Composer: Newton
Voice: Adi Newton

Future Cartography already has a long history. It appeared on Threnodies and Ad Hocs (Discus Music, 2024) by Mzylkypop, and as track 13, a bonus track on the No Ordinary Raconteur CD: a journey in four movements between free jazz and film noir, built by Michael Somerset Ward around Adi Newton’s text, running along a steep track between Bernard Herrmann, Taxi Driver, the caves of Saint-Germain and Manhattan. On Dimidium Oraculi the piece is turned completely on its head. Newton rewrites the music: the wild jazz withdraws and gives way to an epic, evocative electronic ballad. The voice remains, but the non-conformist map is another one. The booklet says it in a single line: “remapped by those who no longer have maps”. In the credits, next to Newton, a mysterious entry appears: audio cartography. The piece is the powerful sonic cartography of a physical and existential extension of being — no longer an atlas of places, but a geography of resonances.

04. Half-Life Extended (Newton mix)
Composer: Newton
Voice: Adi Newton

On No Ordinary Raconteur, Half-Life is the prose poem Adi Newton wrote for the project: four parts scattered across the two sides of the vinyl, each with a sound design of its own, forming the poetic backbone of the album. On Dimidium Oraculi the poem returns whole and is declaimed without interruption, from beginning to end. The music is entirely new, composed by Newton: leaden, electronic, spectral, no longer four landscapes but a single environment. Dark and epic. The darkness that grows unsettling after sunset. Shapes without outlines, celestial alcoves, refractions of distant stars. What was met in fragments on No Ordinary Raconteur is here put back together. The booklet text calls it “an electronic requiem”. It closes the vinyl, and closes the circle opened by No Ordinary Raconteur with the words “No time to lose… Half a life spent in dreams…”.

“The dark twin of No Ordinary Raconteur is here among us.”

RizoStream

The digital edition on RizoStream comprises six tracks, free for anyone who buys the physical editions: the four vinyl tracks, plus two different versions of pieces from the vinyl, exclusive to the platform:

• 05. Last Signal (RizoStream version)
• 06. Future Cartography Re-Formed (RizoStream version).

CREDITS

Musicians

• Adi Newton — voice, electronics, audio cartography
• Michael Somerset Ward — baritone sax, electric bass clarinet
• with David Lewin — sonic modelling, electronics
• Matthew Bourne — piano

Compositions

• 01. Delphic Response (Lower Drop mix) — Somerset Ward, Newton, Lewin
• 02. Last Signal (Somerset reimagined) — Newton
• 03. Future Cartography Re-Mapped (Newton mix) — Newton
• 04. Half-Life Extended (Newton mix) — Newton

Lyrics and Words by Adi Newton
Half-Life, prose poem by Adi Newton

Artwork

• Layout: Gabriele Fantuzzi
• Booklet text: Paolo Davoli
• Cover and paintings: Adi Newton — Mirrored Head Study 2 (2022),
• Non-Euclidean Portrait of Michael Somerset Ward 2 (2026)
• Pictorial and graphic concept: Adi Newton
• Concept: Paolo Davoli

Production

• Mastering: Giuseppe Ielasi
• Booklet printing: Simone Forte — Edizioni San Lorenzo
• Folder printing: Alberto Fontana — Gi & Gi
• Vinyl pressing: Mother Tongue

Publishing: Mute Song Limited / BMG Management Rights
© + ℗ 2026 Adi Newton & Michael Somerset Ward under exclusive license to Rizosfera Arm Comm Europe.

Not distributed · available exclusively online from the Rizosfera Europe and Rizosfera America websites, together with No Ordinary Raconteur (ARMEU009).