★Room40
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…
Scandal
** Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, monochrome print and includes a full colour collage fold out poster from Masami Akita ** Scandal collects together three newly unearthed and revised pieces from Merzbow recorded between 1992 and 1995. Each of the pieces here typifies work that sits at a nexus between the experimental cassette and electronic collisions of Masami Akita’s late 1980s works and the emergent noise language that resolved into a series of now legendary recordings completed during t…
Lifeblood of Light and Rapture
** Monochromatic print, matte laminate jacket with emboss, insert card ** Room40 presents Lifeblood of Light and Rapture by Yann Novak. "When I began working on Lifeblood of Light and Rapture I was thinking a lot about both my personal and society’s tendencies towards nihilism. When I was in grade school, I was taught that 2020 would be the turning point in our collective fight against climate change—that if we did not change by then, there would be no turning back. After learning this at a youn…
A Trail of Laughters
Room40 presents A Trail of Laughters by Siavash Amini. A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels. More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more …
Playing With Water
Playing With Water is a novel written by James Hamilton-Paterson. I was introduced to his writing by the Australian poet Peter Bakowski who gave me a copy of his book ‘Seven Tenths - The Sea And Its Thresholds’; a book that influenced my record Globe Notes and subsequent works immensely. Another of his books ‘Playing With Water: Passion And Solitude On A Philippine Island’ is about exactly what the title describes it as and provided me with the title. The first edition on my Hipshot c.d.r label …
Zeitstudie
Tip! During one of the most collectively challenging years in living memory, Lawrence English’s Room40 has managed to beat the odds and consistently deliver rays of light through the darkness, reminding us of what great art is all about and its importance in times like this. 2020 has already seen the label drop incredible albums by Werner Dafeldecker, Rafael Toral, David Toop, Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Merzbow, Beatriz Ferreyra, and handful of others. Now they’re at it again w…
Classical Mechanics
Observing visual and auditory patterns of slowly moving objects, induces a comforting sense. Whether random or organised, complex or simple, intentional or incidental, seen, felt or listened to, most physical movements carry a reassuring message; the receiver is alive, earth is in orbit exerting a gravitational force upon all matter and time has a constant flow which can be measured through the periodic succession of physical phenomena.
It was upon these fundamental principles that visual artist…
G2, 44+/x2
Room40 present a reissue of Phill Niblock's G2,44+/X2, originally released in 2002. Matte laminate embossed sleeve; includes insert card and 24-page book with liner notes from Bill Meyer, interview, and photos. Design by Traianos Pakioufakis.
Liner notes from Bill Meyer: "In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, 'You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough.' In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual six hour-long solstice concert at the Experimen…
Agglomeration of Measurement
**Embossed, Matte laminate sleeve, insert card** This album is a distillation of the many long-term relationships I’ve had with Australian composers. The music forms a body of work, spanning fifteen years, that provides a glimpse into my percussive language and a twenty-first century Australian percussion sound.
In many instances the pieces on this album were the germ for larger scale compositions and collaborations, forming some of the major works for Speak Percussion, the organisation I curren…
EXD
**Embossed matte laminate CD, 6 panel fold out poster, featuring a collage work from Masami Akita created in 1982** Across the middle years of the 1990s, Merzbow (Masami Akita) refined a stochastic language for harsh noise that had emerged from his studio experiments at the beginning of that decade.This technique, which involved a combination of self made instruments, synthesisers, tabletop effects and, in the case of EXD, drum machines, often recorded at incredible levels to create a uniquely v…
Harbors
**Matte laminate sleeve with black inner reverse print** Over the last 20 years, since its humble launch at the outset of the millennia, Lawrence English’s Room40 imprint has grown into an unmistakable force in the landscape of experimental, electronic, and electroacoustic music, enveloping a vast global context that extends far beyond its Australian roots. Somehow as humble as it is ambitious, with a catalog number into the hundreds - covering an incredibly diverse range of practices, as well a…
Apparition Paintings
**Clear blue swirl vinyl, matte laminate sleeve, printed inner void** Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it’s about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense o…
Field Recording and Fox Spirits
What are field recordings? “My memory is not what it used to be, David,” my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria’s funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one …
Leaving Everything To Be Desired
**Limited Edition. Emboss, matte laminate sleeve, with insert card** The follow up to Pinkcourtesyphone’s previous collection of negative mood music ‘Indelicate Slices’ has arrived and it is even more of a sonic banquet than its predecessor. ‘Leaving Everything To Be Desired’ is a sumptuous serenade revealing with candor the essence of the many careful adjectives used for situational descriptions. Pinkcourtesyphone swerves range out of another interior from sparkling dream-soft shimmers of strin…
The North Bend - 10th Anniversary Edition
"The North Bend is about the Pacific Northwest region of the USA, where I lived at the time the album was made. Still, today I consider that region my spiritual home, even though I am now living on the East Coast.I had met Lawrence English in Poland back in 2009 and he kindly invited me to make a record for the label. I was a fan of his releases so this was really an obvious thing for me to say “yes” to and a chance to create something special. I had released a few EPs and an LP under my name, a…