★Room40
Memory night
Chris Abrahams' Memory Night is his third edition for Room40 - Play Scar and Thrown preceding this album. Widely recognised as the pianist for Australian liminal improvisation trio The Necks, Chris Abrahams' solo work etches out an entirely different universe. It's a place that is entirely his own, unashamedly unique and at times startling - yet always alluring. On Memory Night, Abrahams' expands his sonic palette, building on the uneasy frontiers of the highly regarded Play Scar. Never content …
Dead silence
In 2012, Room40's open frame festival probes this idea of dead silence. asking what role does silence play today across music and art spectra. We bring together a range of artists whose work can be seen to reflect on this idea of absence and presence. Moreover these artists raise questions around the positioning (in political, social, geographic, environmental and other realms) of silence and also what use we might have for it looking into the future - both methodologically and in actuality. The…
Liquid Architecture 13 - Antarctic Convergence
Liquid Architecture 13: Antarctic Convergence has been conceived by the curators as a way of investigating the philosophical, social and environmental ramifications of the growing human presence in Antarctica through the activities of a diverse set of artists who have produced works from first hand encounters of the continent. Specially curated by Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis, this program draws on a range of Australian and international artists who have undertaken fieldwork in v…
Vaporware / Scanops
Limited Vinyl Edition - 500 copies only* Having been reasonably quiet on the release front - by his standards - since last year's 'Elegy For Beach Friday' collection on Spectrum Spools, Chris Madak aka Bee Mask turns up on Lawrence English's Room40 imprint with a fine new edition that finds him testing out a new framework for his approach to electronic composition - one that has, we're pleased to report, really enriched and developed his sound. With the help of vocal loops recorded by Aut…
Wege
Wege translates as 'path' and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums' four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Be…
Narrow
Steinbrüchel’s Narrow is an album of reduction and transformation. Like much of Steinbrüchel’s recorded work, the genesis of Narrow stems from a singular idea concerned with the notion of ‘static development’. Working with a limited palette of source material Narrow’s elegance is in its varying perspectives on related sonic materials. The title track is the nexus here - a somewhat more organic sound palette than heard previously in Steinbrüchel’s work - Narrow is a subharmonic oceanic-like compo…
The Oansome Orbit
The Oansome Orbit is the latest work from Australia’s electronic godfather Pimmon (known to friends as Paul Gough). Over the past decade and a half, Pimmon has carved out a unique space for himself amidst through producing a series of masterfully executed excursions into abstract electronic sound. With this new edition, he strikes out at some of his most harmonic territory to date, merging washes of rich tone against irregular grids of texture. The results are wholly individual and utte…
The Peregrine
LP version. Room40 presents a reissue of Australian sound artist Lawrence English's acclaimed 2011 album The Peregrine, inspired by John Alec Baker's 1967 nature writing classic of the same name. "I first discovered The Peregrine when I was visiting my friend David Toop in London. He had the book on his desk and I picked it up and randomly turned to a page. It was an exquisite description of an Owl silently hunting. I was struck by the detail and evocative sense of listening in the writing. It w…
The Luminous Ground
Limited edition of 320 copies, mastered and cut by LUPO at D&M. Includes free download code for FLAC or MP3 redeemable from the label** John Chantler offers his most substantial solo recordings in over seven years. Housed in lustrous, silk-screened sleeve, 'The Luminous Ground' glows with a deeply instinctive feel for bewildering, alien harmonics and psychoactivated tunings arising from processes of modular synthesis. A pulsing and glimmering collision of oscillated tone, filtered texture…
Zone Sensible 2 - Dundee 2
For the best part of a decade, Éric La Casa's attention to sonic phenomena has resulted in some of the finest contemporary Musique Concréte to come out of France. A listener of the highest order, La Casa's methodology for sound recording allows for a versatile examination of both urban and natural environments and it is these interests which are captured on this new edition for Room40. With an ability to find unique perspectives on his sound subjects La Casa's site specific works 'Zone Sensible'…
A Field for Mixing
'Richard Chartier's monochromatic aesthetic has come to define an audio culture surrounding minimalism. His craftsmanship, working predominately with sounds that exist at the edges of perception is a powerful, albeit subtle statement about notions of space and sound density. With A Field For Mixing', chartier brings the physicality of space directly into his compositional practise. Recording a variety of small and large spaces in Australia, Japan and the USA (amongst other locations), chartier …
Plastic Materials
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010 Over the past decade, Marina Rosenfeld's work has come to represent one of the most progressive approaches to experimental sound emanating from New York. Rosenfeld is equally known as a composer for large-scale performances and groundbreaking turntablist. Her sonic palette - entirely drawn from hand-crafted dub plates she imprints with blips of vinyl static, bursts of instrumental noise, conversation, and other audio detritus - evokes both the ecstatic electronic artifice…
May
May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner. Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner's concert performances. Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner's live work explores the intersection between piano and digital music technology. For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more …
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…
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…
U
Tujiko Noriko joins with collaborators Lawrence English and John Chantler for ‘U’, a record of orbiting themes, esoteric lyrical wordplays and warm analog-infused song-forms. Following on from the acclaimed ‘Blurred In My Mirror (ROOM40), ‘U’ is a record of phases and exchanges between Paris and Brisbane over a three year period. A record of extended technique and unconventional process, U is most of all a swelling passage through the rare and exotic reality Tujiko Noriko evokes through her curi…
Basis
'Basis' is based on recordings of acoustic instruments. All sounds were processed and layered into compositions by Steinbrüchel. Through this processing Steinbrüchel revealed hidden structures and melodies and isolated them, creating new melodic and organic textures without losing the soul of the original. These seven tracks reveal a new side in his music. Tonal harmonics have never before played such an important role and each track contains layers of subtle shifting and interweaving melodies, …
Norberg
Recorded at the Norberg Festival (Sweden) amidst the mineshafts and cluttered buildings strewn throughout parts the city, this 21 minute live piece summarises much of what makes Tim Hecker’s music so vital and compelling. Adept at counter-pointing the most ferocious of distorted platters with smooth beds of ambient sound and potent melodic overtones, Tim Hecker creates music with a vast depth. On Norberg, this depth seems almost endless, as layer upon layer of sound are compiled into a swelling …
11 Easy Pieces
Since 1995, Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has etched out a varied musical existence, from solo keyboard studies to an extensive body of collaborative work. His solo works, which span delicate ambient keyboard excursions through to site specific live documents and most recently song based explorations, have mapped out a focus of tone, duration and 'situations' for sound. On 11 Easy Pieces, his first widely available solo LP, Craig offers an intimate yet robust collection of works recorded on a…
Audible Geography
Geography is an ongoing force shaping our understandings of the environments around us and, in turn, experiences ongoing transformation and development. Considering not only the natural world, but also culture, economy and politics in diverse settings and across many scales, contemporary geography acts as a glue - integrating disparate research streams and continuing to provide insights into our relations with space and place. On Audible Geography, 11 sound artists were asked to consider the sco…