★Room40
Audiodrome
Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser. Formed in the early 1980s, Phauss operated amidst of generation of uncharacteristic Swedish artists concerned with reshaping the edges of practices in sound, light, performance and vision. It was a monumentally fertile period for Sweden in that a confluence of factors allowed artists to dedicate themselves to the relentless excavation of ideas, drilling down to the absolute core of their interests and ways of making. Von Hausswolff and Pause…
Follower
Black Vinyl. For more than three decades now Sydney pianist and composer Chris Abrahams has developed a singularly iconic body of work. Known widely for his work with trio The Necks, Abrahams solo works have carved out an entirely otherworldly realm in sound. His explorations of organ, electronics, and piano capture a restless curiosity and timbral interrogation that only deepens with each of his releases. With Follower, his compositional language further expands. Melodies cascade with a cinemat…
Shadow Phase
Limited Edition Clear Vinyl. "Most of this record was created in the shadow of Covid and deep in the maw of Melbourne’s 2020 long winter lockdown. It is a meditation on the nature of connection. Restricted to a 5km zone, one of the only people I saw outside my family during this time was my old friend and teacher, Ania Walwicz. We met in the overlap between our zones on the waterfront near Docklands to walk and talk on bright, cool winter afternoons. Those conversations became large in my though…
The Prey And The Ruler
"The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa’s performance that day did just that. It was a monstrous portent of things to come. A promise, in sound, of the energetic force that has since come to mark them as one of the truly unique and visionary musical pairings from South East Asia. This project, The Prey And The Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid 2021. As t…
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…
Na Margem Sul
Haunted ice-cold electric guitar minimalism, shimmered and expertly restrained, 'Na margem sul' is a recording of David Grubbs and Manuel Mota's first public performance as a duo. They've been working together for over a decade - 2018's "Lacrau" is a particular highlight - but it's taken them this long to actually play together in front of an audience. Grubbs admits that although they've met countless times, they rarely talk about playing. From David Grubbs: "This recording documents Manuel Mota…
Petra (Tape)
Tip! Milanese sound artist Alberto Boccardi explores eerie electro-acoustic interstices reflecting his time spent in Cairo, and move back home to Italy, for Room 40. ‘Petra’ unpackages the artist’s mind in quiet, spectral designs after spending five years in the humid swelter and febrility of the Egyptian capital. Recording in a Milan studio he set up years before, Boccardi embraces silence after so long without, prizing his studio’s relative familiarity and controlled settings as a space to ru…
Agitas Al Sol
Rafael Anton Irisarri’s works from Room40 have always dwelled in a place of pressure. His low fre-quency excursions have charted out a unique voyage into a territory in which texture and density are equally matched to create a visceral, but ultimately comforting zone of entanglement. At the same time as completing his Solastalgia edition, Irisarri recorded Agitas Al Sol. Like its sibling work, this album is an enveloping sonic drift that traces across the unsteady topographies of the anthro-poce…
Of Which One Knows
Of Which One Knows is a collection of works by Natalie Beridze that sit outside the easy categorisation of ‘al-bum’. They are of course, an album, but they are more than that, in that they represent a kind of multiplicity in sound, an accumulation of experience, of emotion, of life, transposed into sound. It is only together that the stories that sit between them might start to be assembled. Spanning a decade and a half, these works chart a trajectory of investigation and curiosity that charts t…
Singles
Finland’s Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay has been responsible for some of the most radically positioned rhythmic electronic music of the past few decades. His willingness to abandon mea-sured and progression senses of repetition in favour of multi-layered unfolding pulses has become a touchstone for a new sensing of time. In a similar way, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset has reappraised the harmonic and timbral ca-pacities of his chosen instrument, the guitar, and unlocked new perspectives o…
Spectral Organ / Feedback Gong
Finnish artist Antti Tolvi operates at the nexus of performance and installation. His work, which is concerned with how sound operates in the spaces that contain it, is a meditation on how sound reveals itself, in time and in space to the listener. Each of the works captured on this edition dwell in the reductive, the subtle and the sus-tained. The pieces seek to draw attention to microtonal variation and flutter. They arc in a slow reveal that high-lights Tolvi’s patience and his unwavering des…
Deafened By The Noise Of Time
Pierce Warnecke’s work springs forth from the nexus of sound and vision. With Deafened By The Noise Of Time, he undertakes a deep interrogation of sound, which mirrors many of his approaches to visual ma-terials. Seeking to test how elements of music are altered through interference and deterioration, he uses a range of methods to reveal new densities, timbres and melodies from within his original source materi-als . Rather than becoming fragmented or overtly degraded though, Warknecke’s work on…
Spectral
Madeleine Cocolas’s Spectral is a reimagining of the familiar. It is an attentiveness to the inciden-tal, and a reaching out towards the unheard. Taking these acoustic microcosms as a source of focus, she unpacks these transient flickers and memories, and repositions them; exploding them outward and shifting perspective. Spectral, celebrates the shadows of melody and the after-thoughts of rhythm. It breaths with a sense of calculated intensity that reflects on Cocolas’s focus throughout the proc…
Too Ne
Yui Onodera’s work is patient. He invites a sense of dwelling with his pieces, an encouragement to pause and to allow sound to swell up around you. On Too Ne, he charts out a very specific sonic exploration. Across these five works he creates a lilting passage of sound, a liouidous flow that confirms the adage of Ambient music existing as constant, but never solid. Too Ne also invites a sensing of the self, in that the works ask us to examine our own memories as a way to unlocking a deeper reson…
Array / Polar Force (LP + CD with Book bundle)
This special bundle includes the two collaborative releases by Philip Samartzis and Eugene Ughetti recently released on Room40:"Array" (LP)Array expresses the experience of a remote Antarctic research station through the convergence of sound, site and performance. The result is an immersive and affective experience of the spaces, protocols and conditions comprising the bracing polar environment. Array is a companion piece to Polar Force, a performance-installation work by Philip Samartzis and Eu…
Inshallahlaland
*In process of stocking* A note from Saint Abdullah: 'In the 22 minute piece 'glamour factory', we start things off by sampling the voice of one of Iran's pre-eminent film voiceover artists, whose career lasted decades in Iranian cinema. Here he was, receiving a lifetime achievement award for his services to the film industry. And in his speech, he started off by saying that society does not accept us for having multiple identities. They want us to keep as one. Understandable. Measurable. And w…
Guitar Studies I-III
Swiss artist Zimoun is known for creating effortlessly deep and fluid sound works and sculptures. On Guitar Studies I-III he limits his acoustic focus to just one instrument, arguably the most iconic of the modern age. In doing so, he begins a vertical study of the guitar, seeking deeper and deeper into its tonal and timbral qualities, pushing to reveal the dynamic possibilities of the instrument. Using a wide variety of techniques and settings, he unlocks an entirely personal and profound readi…
All Intensive Purposes
Richard Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone operates at nexus of recollecting 20th century anxiety and opulence. Over the course of this project he has created a lush and overtly queer sound world of drifting rouge atmospheres, smudged lipstick electronics and cavernous architectures that dwarf the sense of human interaction in favour of omnipotent acoustic voyeurism. All Intensive Purposes aches with a deep sense of longing, held aloft with tangible suspension. Voices and sounds float, haunting a murk…
Ghosts and Others
'Ghosts And Others is a singular work in the Phill Niblock canon. It’s singular not just in its material content, but also in its methodology and approach. It represents a highly focused exercise in editing, location recording and acoustic observation. In many ways, this work reflects a kind of acoustic mirroring of his practices as a film maker. It makes itself available to the world and in doing so reveals a particular perspective that says as much about its creator as it does about its subjec…
Viento
'In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos. What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm ble…