Alphabet 1968
Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour printed inner sleeve exclusive to this edition.
Coh Bâle
Tip! *Limited edition of 300 copies.* This new album compiles several songs made in the years following Black To Comm's classic "Alphabet 1968" album. Originally released on the seminal Type label in 2009 (and to be reissued on Cellule 75 this year) "Alphabet 1968" combined the sound of vintage shellac and vinyl loops with broken electronics and field recordings, the press release mentioning disparate influences "ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann". In a beautiful o…
Fabrique
Restock 2023. In 2001, on a rainy November Sunday afternoon, a performance took place on the Brisbane Powerhouse Turbine Platform. It was a crowded affair, some 600 people turning out for DJ Olive Meets I/O3, a performance since released as 'Powerhouse Sessions' (EDRM400). Whilst the actual shape of the series was yet to take form, this event was the genesis for a series of events curated by Lawrence English.Titled Fabrique, the series ran for eight years and produced 40 events - each celebratin…
For Those Who Hear Actual Voices
Restock 2023. 'Someone a long way off, or in the next street on a still day, or in the office across the hall in the rain, might be playing something that sounds a bit like music.'
Revers Ouest*
Restock 2023. "THIS IS THE STORY OF A MAN MARKED BY AN IMAGE OF HIS CHILDHOOD …OR PERHAPS IS IT THE STORY OF THIS WOMAN COMING HERE TO MEET A BELOVED STRANGER, AT THE GRANGE-AU-LOUP STREET? OR MAYBE THEIRSTORY?” - SEBASTIÉN ROUX
The Spaces Contained In Each
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 island's St. Co…
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…
Stéme
Restock 2023. Between his reputation as swift shifting improviser, concréte composer and turntable deconstructionist, Marseilles based artist ERIKM has earned himself an enviable position in the European music community. With Stéme, his most ambitious and fully realised compositional work to date, he devolves and recontextualises the boundaries between sound source and sound media.In essence, Stème originates from a selection of ten one minute long sound pieces burned on a CD which was deliberat…
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 …
Wilderness of Mirrors
2023 stock. Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. This album has been two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A. Baker's novel, The Peregrine. It is English's most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, "wilderness of mirrors," draws its root from T.S. Eliot's elegant poem "Gerontion." During the Cold War, the phrase became ass…
Cruel Optimism
Cruel Optimism is a record that considers power (present and absent). It meditates on how power consumes, augments and ultimately shapes two subsequent human conditions: obsession and fragility. This pyramid is an affective ecology of the (ever)present moment. This edition owes its title and its origins to the wonderful text of the same name by American theorist Lauren Berlant. I had the fortune to come across her writing almost a half-decade ago. In Cruel Optimism, I found a number of cri…
Elegant & Detached
2023 stock. This is the second full-length album from U.S. sound installation artist Richard Chartier aka Pinkcourtesyphone. Pinkcourtesyphone is an echo of an unfamiliar voice. Pinkcourtesyphone remembers two things you hold up to your face as a conduit to forgotten love. Pinkcourtesyphone permeates like a syrup-y dream. Pinkcourtesyphone is many things from many places. Pinkcourtesyphone is elegant and detached. This is the second full-length call from the Pinkcourtesyphone-line; a loquacious …
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.
Jasper Sits Out
From Lawrence English: "A few years ago, my dear friend and bandmate Jamie Stewart and I were talking about Swans. I started to mention how much I admired the utterly personal approach to guitar that Norman Westberg had developed on those early records and moreover how that had blossomed out so richly on this latest incarnation of the band. During the course of the conversation Jamie mentioned a CDR that Norman had passed to him, which collected a few pieces of solo work that Norman had been wor…
Mirror
2023 Stock. Drawing deeply on the earliest recorded period of Japan’s history, the Kofun era, Chihei Hatakeyama’s Mirror meditates on the importance placed on reflection during this age. The mirror was a source of great inspiration, not only as a metaphor for the sun, but also for its ability to shift and reflect light from one location to another. This act of transplanting light, considered almost magical by many during that time.
Similarly, this idea of reflection spurred Hatakeyama to underta…