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Substation
Apart from being recognised as two of Australia's leading improvising musical forces, Clayton Thomas and Robin Fox are also acknowledged for their unrelenting experiments and divergent acoustic approaches in relation to their instrument of choice. Over the past 3 years, Robin Fox has developed some of the most powerful live processing tools in Australia through his research with MAXMSP. Clayton Thomas on the other hand has expanded his performance styles, moving between blistering free jazz expl…
Approach
In 1985, Mangaka Yoshihisa Tagami penned Grey. Now, seemingly all but forgotten, it remains historic as it led the vanguard of manga translated and serialized in the west. Approach is Lawrence English's homage to the lasting impression the manga left on him as a 13-year-old. After rediscovering it in 2021, he was struck by how internalized some of the manga's themes had become and was compelled to create a soundtrack as a form of distorted mirror to its pages. What results is an intensely episod…
Memory Fragments
Pierce Warnecke presents a chasmic solo debut LP with Memory Fragments for Room40 offering his most expansive, personalised vision of electro-acoustic abstraction. Nine tracks cover a broad spectrum of tones within his chosen subset, from doomy keys and cinematic drone panoramas thru curdling dissonance and prickling glitch textures subtly playing with notions of deferred gratification and unpredictability. One to check if you’re into Tim Hecker or KTL. “Based in Spain, composer and visualist Pi…
Current
Richard Chartier’s sound installation and recorded pieces evoke a state of aural awareness. Working with a variety of minimal structures and refined sound sources, Chartier has been responsible for some of the most austere audio works of recent years. Aesthetically refined and creatively provocative much of his work has focused on the edges of perception, both in frequency range and amplitude. On Current, his latest work to be released in conjunction with his performances in Australia and Japan …
Wakool
Recorded over a series of four Sunday afternoons, Wakool is an interrogation into an expanded range of techniques and gestures applied to instruments including banjo, electroacoustic guitar, bandura, and eukolin. In part an antidote to laborious studio process, this project privileges live stereo recordings without additional overdubs, processing or equalization. The varied and spontaneous nature of David's effortless playing across an eclectic range of instruments was recorded transparently to …
A Trail of Laughters
Room40 presents A Trail of Laughters by Siavash Amini. A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels. More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more …
Classical Mechanics
Observing visual and auditory patterns of slowly moving objects, induces a comforting sense. Whether random or organised, complex or simple, intentional or incidental, seen, felt or listened to, most physical movements carry a reassuring message; the receiver is alive, earth is in orbit exerting a gravitational force upon all matter and time has a constant flow which can be measured through the periodic succession of physical phenomena.
It was upon these fundamental principles that visual artist…
Psyco Analysis
Super Tip! *400 copies** Originally released in the late 70s, Vittoria Corona aka Corviria's 'Psyco Analysis' remains today one of the most obscure and mysterious titles inside the vast catalogue of Edizioni Leonardi, from the points of view both of its musical content and of its realization.Musically, in fact, we are facing a collection of short dark-tinged and gloomy compositions for piano and synthesizers, characterized by a slow and unrelenting pace, a perfect soundtrack for a thriller/noir …
The Collection
From Nicola Ratti... "These recordings were made during a relatively long period of time, not continuously, over several months in my studio. Nothing was been planned in advance, not any idea of album or approach. Nevertheless I easily recognize myself in this material, moreover I recognize my working space itself. It's like taking a picture, or make a painting, of your personal room where all your stuff is well placed and, among them, their identities as sound sources and acoustic possib…
Pain Avoidance Machine
In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge. I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with its own …
47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing
Eugene Carchesio's renown as a visual artist has unjustly eclipsed his extraordinary output as a soundmaker. Since the mid 80s, the Brisbane artist has steadfastly proliferated a sack full of barely released cassettes and cdrs under the D.N.E. moniker.Twenty years ago, he emptied his wallet to press 250 copies of the appropriately titled LP 47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing'. Then compact discs arrived. The local pressing plant closed and the master tape went with it. Copies were circulated to frie…
At The Still Point Of The Turning World
Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes's new offering At The Still Point Of The Turning World, borrows its title from T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton". It is a record of restless motion, lilting and pulsing with a sense of gentle determination. Born out of a period of mutual loss, the works carry a bittersweet sentiment. Bitter in the sense of loss; sweet in the sense of lingering memory and influences recognized of those departed. It is also a record that, like the poem from which it takes its title, m…
White Shadows in the South Seas
It's difficult to know how to summurise the meandering journey that has been the life and times of Mike Cooper. Having just celebrated his 70th year of mischief making here's what we can tell you... A young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in London beat cult film 'That Kind Of Girl'. His first band The Blues Committee played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed. Cooper was central in launching several o…
Moon Field
On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, mark the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase. Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Mood Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chose…
Six Pieces
* Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, printed in monochrome with a full colour artist edition fold out poster featuring the photographic work of Joel Westendorf * ctive action has incorporated itself into an imagining of how we might reshape our understanding of community.” Kristof Hahn is perhaps best know for his role in Swans, where his work on lapsteel guitar has provided a critical and unsteady sense of tonal variation and glissandi. On Six Pieces, Hahn draws upon the legacy of his time to…
132 Ranks
132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played…
Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains
On Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains, Tokyo's Chihei Hatakeyama evokes an instrumental poetic grace that marks him out as one of the icons of his generation. Drawing upon a broad swath of aesthetic references, he seamlessly melts glacial ambient drifts with richly harmonic guitar strata that echo the gliding motions of My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Cocteau Twins. Never resolving to clear melody, his interest in unrestrained harmonics creates a depth to his compositions and moreover a pr…
Jubilee
* Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, printed in monochrome with a full colour artist edition fold out poster featuring the photographic work of Joel Westendorf * On Jubilee, Los Angeles based artist Robert Takahashi Crouch conjures a profoundly personal vibrational landscape. The edition, which is a mediation on, and suture for experiences of conflict and violence, Jubilee merges longform low-frequency drone work against a reductive sense of harmony. It is a record of hushed intensity, punctu…
Painting Sky Together
Wroclaw based sound artist Tomasz Bednarczyk has a penchant for capturing the emotion in moments of stasis. It's this acute sense of expanding fleeting moments and exploring their detail that informs the sonic palette of his latest full length recording Painting Sky Together. Akin to his acclaimed debut edition 'Summer Feelings' (Room40), which elegantly documented a uniquely Polish experience of summer replete with distantly warm bursts of piano, and crisp glitch ridden pulses, Painting Sky Tog…
Illustrations For Those Who
Polish producer Tomasz Bednarczyk returns to Room40 with Illustrations For Those Who, his first full length edition in almost a decade. Across the late 2000s, Bednarczyk created a series of acclaimed ambient recordings that married the unsteadiness of archival technologies with an extensive palette of pastoral timbres. These recordings quietly set a particular tenor of work for a new generation of Middle Eastern European ambient composers. Following these recordings, however, Bednarczyk's energi…