★Room40
Oceans Of Milk And Treacle
From Mike Cooper ‘This is a soundtrack for an otherwise silent film. The title of the album, and of course the film, is borrowed from my late friend Fred Hardy’s book The Religious Culture of India - Power, Love and Wisdom, considered to be one of the most important books on the subject. In this book Fred wrote...“In 1835 the historian Macaulay investigated whether there was anything in the traditional Indian systems of learning and education that could be used in the training of native personne…
For Leolanda
Melbourne based percussionist and composer Maria Moles charts out an electro-acoustic familial history with 'For Leolanda’. Drawing on family roots in The Philippines, she extrapolates rhythm and timbre from the diverse musics of that country and interweaves them with percussion, synthesizer and singing bowls. Her sonic meditations are open and generous, and they chart out the shape and pulse of memory; both real and imagined. Each piece tests for the relationships between frequency and harmony,…
Flare Blues (LP)
Tip! Flare Blues reimagines two of Merzbow’s long out of print EPs from 1994, Flare Gun and White Blues. Revisiting the original pieces and adding previously unreleased materials recorded during these sessions, Flare Blues tethers together a set of Merzbow’s most exploratory work, creating a visceral linkage between a pair of vital works. Originally recorded in June 1994, Merzbow's Flare Gun is a pulsating and hammering collection of pieces that grinds ever forward with a sense of bludgeoning de…
Material Interstices
Tip! Lawrence English teams up with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart once again for another voyage into ambient music's punishing underworld. It’s their gloomiest slab to date - unfurling nightmarish Lynchian drones and seismic, overdriven rumbles that sound like a Thomas Köner and Wolf Eyes soundtrack to Dante's Inferno.
If the gaseous, clouded noise of 'Material Interstices' sounds as if it could be snatched from one of David Lynch's most unsettling dream sequences, we have to assume that's completely…
Innocent Passage In The Territorial Sea
Magisterial, psilocybic stuff from Windy City electro-acoustic explorer Olivia Block, returning to Room40 with a filmic new album inspired by mushy trips during lockdown. "During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward, adopting a regular practice of listening with intention while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron I had recorded earlier. I starte…
Index (CD + Book)
* Matte laminated and embossed CD with insert card plus 32 page book featuring an in conversation between Marina Rosenfeld and Lawrence English, and archival photographs and other materials. * For over two decades, New York-based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld has pioneered a specific language for turntable music, based on an ever-expanding collection of dub plates she creates.
The dubplate is a one-off, hand-cut record. Each dubplate can be made to contain any array of sounds decided on …
Teenage Lonatano
Tip! * Monochrome printed jacket, printed inner sleeve, black vinyl.* Teenage Lontano and roygbiv&b, from 2008 and 2011 respectively, comprise two key works by composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld. Both works are choral compositions imagined for and enacted by teenagers.
Premiered in New York’s immense Park Avenue Armory, Teenage Lontano is Rosenfeld’s groundbreaking "cover version" of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s 1960s classic for orchestra. Teenage Lontano is reimagined as an immersive s…
Culvert – No-Input Mixing Board 10
Toshimaru Nakamura’s No Input Mixing Board instrument is without question one of the most personal and experimental explorations of its kind. Over 10 volumes, Nakamura has stretched the capacities of the mixing console in ways that both shock and delight. He maintains a tireless sense of curiosity, seeking to constantly expand the range of the instrument and subvert its pre- conceived role. On Culvert NIMB#10, Nakamura’s work takes on an incredibly dynamic and at times volcanic quality. Each pi…
Objects Of Interest
* Matte laminated and embossed CD with insert card plus extensive book featuring an in conversation between Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, plus scores, documentation and photographs. * ctive action has incorporated itself into an imagining of how we might reshape our understanding of community.” The translation of the visual into the acoustic is a powerfully esoteric practice. For Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, this nexus of sensory curiosity has provided a perfect point from which they have maint…
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…
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…
Polar Force (CD + Book)
* Matte laminate sleeve, insert card and artist book featuring essays and photographs from the Polar Force project. * From Eugene Ughetti: as Philip Samartzis was preparing to leave for his second Australian Antarctic Division residency, he invited me to lunch to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a new work. He recounted his first experience on the ice, where the surrounding landscapes seemed to articulate avant-garde percussion works of an epic scale. On this visit, he wanted his fiel…
Reflex In Waves
n August of 2017, Ross Manning opened his first major survey exhibition, Dissonant Rhythms, at Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art. As part of the exhibition a monograph and LP edition, titled Reflex In Waves, were prepared to celebrate this milestone. Reflex In Waves brings together a series of sonic approaches Manning has been developing for over a decade. Specifically, Manning's work is concerned with waves and the impacts of their resulting vibration. Quietly producing audio works out of his …
Breathing Spirit Forms (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and24-page book with text by David Toop, drawings by Akio Suzuki and photography by Lawrence English * In August 2013, David Toop and Akio Suzuki visited Australia. During a residency on Tamborine Mountain (an anglicized version of the Yugambeh word Jambreen), the pair were joined by Lawrence English for a series of site specific, environment-led improvisations created around the fringes of the Tamborine plateau. Embedded in place, these reco…
A Mirror Holds The Sky (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and 48 page perfect bound book featuring photographs by Lawrence English, taken on location in the Amazon * From Lawrence English: "In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez's Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had . . . Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am …
If You Do
Megan Alice Clune's If You Do is a work of restrained ecstasy. Drawing on her interests in extended minimalist traditions, especially explorations into variable tunings featured in the works orbiting those involved in the Theatre Of Eternal Music, Clune devises a record of constant deepening. Each piece unfolds into the next, and whilst existing individually, they also operate as a collected mass of sound. If You Do is a constant, almost stream of consciousness, flow of voice, drones, keyboards …
In Light of Blues
Will Long's work as Celer traverses a nebulous and morphing galaxy of sound that centers around textured ambience and extended durational pieces. A long-time resident in Tokyo, his work explores the way in which sound can operate in an evolving atmosphere, coalescing with everything, and everyone, around it. With In Light Of Blues, Long pivots away from long-form works to create a series of vignettes that capture the essence of his aesthetics interests. The record condenses and refines his compo…
he Thousand Buddha Caves
David Shea's The Thousand Buddha Caves explores his deep and continuous interest in the nexus of eastern and western musical forms. The recording charts his life-long fascination with the caves and their connection to sound, ritual and Buddhist teachings. The record transposes those interests and is an evocation to the mythologies spinning forth from the caves.A note from David: "My path to the caves began when I was about 14, with my passion for reading Taoist, Buddhist and Zen texts, my love o…
Appearance
Australia's Chris Abrahams, widely known for his work with legendary trio The Necks, has amassed an impressive solo discography over the past three decades. With four electro-acoustic editions already published by Room40, the label announces Chris's first piano solo for the label. Appearance is two longform pieces for piano that weave and mesh to create a sense of flow and subtle shifting which unfolds into eternal variation.A note from Lawrence English: "I first met Chris Abrahams sometime in t…
Canto+
Room 40 presents Canto+ by Beatriz Ferreyra. "I’m not really sure when I first heard Beatriz Ferreyra’s music. My best guess would be in the early to mid 2000s when I was working alongside the curatorial team at Liquid Architecture. Given the focus of the festival at that time, GRM and musique concrète more generally was very much a point of focus. That said, it wasn’t until this decade that her work was sharply in focus for me (and I am guessing a great many others). In 2017, I had the great pl…