The Spaces Contained In Each
Restock 2023. Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello are sound artists working at the nexus of sculpture and acoustics. They are professional listeners, embedding themselves in the auditory and relishing that which is encompassed in their horizon of listening. It's a shared horizon, then, that is at the core of The Spaces Contained in Each. Recorded as part of their joint residency on Governors Island in New York, this edition documents their installation work created for the unique acoustics of the i…
The Last Days Of Reality
Restock 2023. Room40 release The Last Days Of Reality, featuring Decibel performing the works of Lionel Marchetti and Cat Hope. "I first met Lionel Marchetti in Australia in 2010. Decibel were touring our Alvin Lucier program, and Lionel was on the same bill performing a live performance set manipulating electro-acoustic materials with dancer Yoko Higashi. I was so taken with Lionel's performances that I asked him if he would write a piece for Decibel. I didn't realize that he hadn't done someth…
Documental
Restock 2023. Tokyo quartet Minamo occupy a privileged place in the Japanese music scene.They remain one of the few ensembles to consistently produce work that simultaneously refines and expands upon their existing themes and aesthetics. Their largely improvised interactions have produced a collection of recordings that benefit equally from considered listening amongst the groups members and a willingness to stray from the path without warning.Documental, their new edition (a follow up to ‘A Pat…
Temporacha
Restock 2023. I visited Saya and Ueno at the Majikick house in June last year to catch-up, hang out and chat about what another record from them on ROOM40 might feel like. I'd come fresh from RM40 HQ in Brisbane, working with Lawrence on Noriko's 'U' and was packing a clutch of his recent solo stuff. The house was fascinated with 'Studies for Stradbroke' a CDr released on Wind Measures of hydrophone recordings made in the gorgeous natural lakes on Stradbroke Island, just off the coast of Queensl…
Vakning
Tip! "Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing holds for anyone, any time or anything.
As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper thin crust, the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable.
There are moments though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the surface of the planet si…
Nowhere
2023 Stock. New Rome, the latest project from Polish composer Tomasz Bednarczyk, presents Nowhere. In the late 2000s, Bednarczyk emerged with a trilogy of electronic records that set pastoral-tonality against grainy smears of pulse and rhythm. His previous Room40 editions Summer Feelings and Painting Sky Together were lilting, melancholic affairs, littered with a deeply personal approach to music making that felt as therapeutic as it did artistic. In hindsight, they were records that stamped out…
LP1
LP1 is the debut edition from London based artist Mirko Vogel. Recorded across almost three years, the record is a sprawling mass of ambient texture, remote harmony and uneasy pulse. Initially born out of extended periods of intense touring with Cut Copy, the earliest recordings were an antidote to the nature of repetition on the road. In the blur of travel, Mirko found a particular pleasure in an attempt to slow or pause time through sound. Moments of this hazy slowness have lingered and found …
Improvisações Cristalizadas
*300 copies limited edition* Unreleased but perfectly formed "hidden" album, recorded in 1989-90 by Nuno Rebelo on the wake of his "Sagração Do Mês De Maio" double LP (composed in 1988 as soundtrack to the third Manobras de Maio fashion event in Lisbon). The tracks convey a sense of investigative curiosity regarding computer composition and they sound wonderfully artificial. Titles as "Moon OK", "Tiny Space Ships" or "Dança Das Creaturas Elásticas" ("Elastic Creatures Dance") embody this idea of…
Circus Parade
Tip! A reflection on the absurdity of life with its paradoxical contrapositions: light and darkness, peace and despair, joy and sadness, all mixed together in a chaotic and ridiculous "circus", where, inexplicably, we all find ourselves in. The undeniable overwhelming beauty of it all is a constant source of puzzlement and delight where laughter always finds its way.
Formally Haywire
*100 copies limited edition. Totally sold out at source. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing.* The latest mysterious musical missive from these soundohm faves, NYC's psychedelic improv free rock explorationists No Neck Blues Band, a reference whenever we need to describe some sort of tribal freeform psychedelia or jazzy abstract drift, or dirgey home-brewed free form minimalism, or pretty much any stop in between, these guys are the modern mas…
Live at the Stone
*100 copies limited edition. Totally sold out at source. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing* Thurston Moore (guitar) Bill Nace (guitar) and Samara Lubelski (violin). Presenting a series of psychedelic textural works, Lubelski creating vibrant and reiterating structures that Nace uses as a foundation for swells and expressive emanations; hypnotic and mesmerizingArt by Spencer HerbstSilkscreen By SIWA prints
School of Elea
100 copies limited edition. Housed in high quality card stock with art silk screened by Alan Sherry at SIWA Printing * Swirls of guitar artifacts, collateral noise, percussive events, and synthetics all processed, looped, layered and mystified in improvisations by No-Neck Blues Band members Pat Murano (aka Decimus) and Dave Shuford (aka D. Charles Speer & The Helix). Scary textures and ticklish surprises. In some distant future? No, you say. Now, there’s a logic in being skeptical about seers, b…
Requiem for a Dying Animal
In outer space, music does not exist. Only in a thin layer of atmosphere, wrapped around the planet earth, humans can live and breathe. With all their power and creativity, they have exploited and eradicated an unspeakable amount of fellow animal beings. As Arvo Pärt once put it: also with music, you can kill – because with music, you touch the medium of life, the air itself. In this sense, music is not condemned to express the inner life of homo sapiens. Instead, humans are affected by music, b…
Stupidamutaforma
Fera's sought out tape debut 'Stupidamutaforma' (2020) is finally reissued on 2xLP remastered by Matt Bordin and with new artwork.
Continuous Hole
Continuous Hole, a collaborative album by Drew Daniel (Matmos) and John Wiese. The fruit of over ten years of home recordings in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Baltimore, “Continuous Hole” melds improvisation and musique concrète composition into a uniquely sweaty document of labor-intensive rhythm. A finger puzzle of reconciled opposites: lockstep structure and constant flux. Many of the tracks reflect the unique blending of the disparate backgrounds of its creators: on “Abhorred Shears”, “Slee…
Tanzania 2
8 years almost to the day after releasing his unique re-interpretation album of his field recordings made in the late 90's in Tanzania, Kink Gong is back with another volume of bushmen madness. Here’s what Kink Gong aka Laurent Jeanneau has to say about his end of millennium trip:
"My experience in Tanzania is now over 20 years and most of the so called remix was started in Tanzania and left unfinished, then eventually retouched in Vienna, Paris, Shanghai, Kunming, Dali or Vientiane. 20 years la…
Syntheticopia
Space is the place - at least, it's the place uppermost in the mind of midwest US label Past Inside The Present owner Zakè and his sonic partner Ossa - location given as the north pole according to his Twitter - as they embark on collaborative 10 tracks. The fact that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA to you and me - has supplied them with celestial sound emissions for the tracks is a bonus. But ultimately, the real headline factor once it's actually on your turntable is t…
Celestial Railroads
Emotional Response and Ocean Moon come together for a special collaborative release, where Seahawks take the music of Woo on a journey to the inner sanctum. Immersive, psychoactive and phased to perfection. For those who know not the music of WOO, prepare to behold a rare and magical incarnation of transcendent beauty.
Perhaps Seahawks most spaced out voyage since Vision Quest One: Spaceships Over Topanga Canyon, ‘Celestial Railroads’ is a psychedelic odyssey that goes way beyond the norm. Like …
Komachi
** Limited repress in standard black vinyl edition ** Meitei considers himself an old soul, often preoccupied with the customs and rituals of the past. Recently Meitei lost his beloved 99-year-old grandmother, a woman who he considered to be one of the last remaining people to have experience and understanding of traditional Japanese ambience. His music and art is driven by a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he believes is drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness wi…
New Future City Radio
New Future City Radio is the first duo collaboration of longtime creative partners Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek. In a hyperactive 40-minute, 18-track suite that runs like a boombox mixtape, the two prolific multi-media artists contemplate community, transformation, and the future through the programmatic format of a pirate radio station for the people. These two artists have worked together from the peak days of the late 90s / early 00s Chicago music scene up through the present day, which has seen…