★Room40
Ke I Te Ki
Room40 release Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda's Ke I Te Ki. "Akio Suzuki and I have been performing together frequently for the last five years; we have a tendency to perceive sound as space, or to always consider sound in relation to space. We don't usually hear sound sources as they actually are, since they are always modified by a space's acoustics and its reflections, absorptions, and attenuation. Sound is affected by the conditions and characteristics of a particular setting. We respond to the ex…
132 Ranks
132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played…
Light Pipe
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years. Many would recognize Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorization. With Unearth, he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his…
Illustrations For Those Who
Polish producer Tomasz Bednarczyk returns to Room40 with Illustrations For Those Who, his first full length edition in almost a decade. Across the late 2000s, Bednarczyk created a series of acclaimed ambient recordings that married the unsteadiness of archival technologies with an extensive palette of pastoral timbres. These recordings quietly set a particular tenor of work for a new generation of Middle Eastern European ambient composers. Following these recordings, however, Bednarczyk's energi…
At The Still Point Of The Turning World
Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes's new offering At The Still Point Of The Turning World, borrows its title from T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton". It is a record of restless motion, lilting and pulsing with a sense of gentle determination. Born out of a period of mutual loss, the works carry a bittersweet sentiment. Bitter in the sense of loss; sweet in the sense of lingering memory and influences recognized of those departed. It is also a record that, like the poem from which it takes its title, m…
Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9)
Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is the latest edition from Tokyo-based artist Toshimaru Nakamura. The "No-Input Mixing Board" is a unique instrument pioneered by Nakamura. As its name suggests, it is a mixing console within which external no input exists. The instrument is fueled only by its own feedback. Initially used by Nakamura as a more tonal instrument, creating incredibly high frequency outputs, over time the mixing board has become decidedly more rhythmic and harmonic. It is this son…
Love Songs
The music of Australian artist Thembi Soddell resides in a zone of unrelenting darkness and physical affect. Working at the nexus of raw emotion, sound design, and musique concrete, she creates sound worlds that are effortlessly dense and abyss-like. In her performances, she explores sonic environments which swallow the audience. By utilizing intense sound pressure and varying dynamics she creates profoundly unsettling, but fulfilling, experiences for her audiences. Love Songs, her latest work, …
Indelicate Slices
All is lost, all is lost. Or is it? A poignant question from Pinkcourtesyphone. A haunting strain. A coat of gloss smeared. A scene recalled, a fond memory, a terrible lie in this new dark age of love. Suspended in that lush, lonely feeling, Pinkcourtesyphone implores you to hang breathless on the line, above the chandeliers in shimmering stasis that belie those desperate, shadowy passions underneath. A creak, a glance. Nothing is for certain anymore. That sentimental something echoed across cor…
Unearth
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years. Many would recognize Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorization. With Unearth, he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his…
Smoke Under The Water
"I confess to being in a state of ceaseless awe when it comes to Tokyo guitarist, Ueno Takashi. I have had the pleasure to know Ueno now for well over ten years. In that time he has remained a source of constant curiosity and surprise. Just when I think I have the man pegged, he throws out some unexpected musical gesture that completely catches me off guard. Whether it be his work with Saya in Tenniscoats, or his almost endless stream of solo releases, many of which exist in very short run editi…
Moon Field
On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, mark the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase. Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Mood Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chose…
After Vacation
Swans’ influential guitarist Norman Westberg returns with his most substantial album to date on the expansive, personal panoramas of After Vacation, a profoundly beautiful set of windswept soundscapes amplified by production from Lawrence English. For the last 6 years Westberg has rendered a one-take representation of his studio performances, effectively presenting a series of naked meditations on the electric guitar with little or no over-dubbing. Now, breaking with tradition following the end …
The Collection
From Nicola Ratti... "These recordings were made during a relatively long period of time, not continuously, over several months in my studio. Nothing was been planned in advance, not any idea of album or approach. Nevertheless I easily recognize myself in this material, moreover I recognize my working space itself. It's like taking a picture, or make a painting, of your personal room where all your stuff is well placed and, among them, their identities as sound sources and acoustic possib…
Glitter in My Tears
Glitter in my tears’ marks the 20th anniversary of Janek Schaefer’s career as a recording artist, having now released 30 albums. His music is best comprehended through examining his time as an architect, and how that forged his innate sense for constructing tactile atmospheres, that navigate through unknown structures and forgotten spaces, creating profound new places. Over his career he has placed focus on the relationship between body, medium, and sound, creating a field of work that defies ea…
Raft
Mike Cooper's output of the past half century has been described as "post-everything". It's a fitting phrase really when you consider he has been at the beating heart of so many critical musical moments; from the development of the blues touring circuit in the UK, through the growth of the folk scene and into the explosion of free improvisation that came to define a generation of UK musicians. Amidst it all, working at stitching these disparate forms into some kind of de-territorialized z…
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…
Piano I
“The Piano has been an instrument that has woven its way in and out of my life since I was a child. I grew up listening to great classical and jazz players, prepared piano and electronic experiments, extended techniques and later the incredible works of Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Ligeti, Ferrari, Feldman, Xenakis and Scelsi. I had written for and worked with many great pianists and created ensemble works with piano and electronics where I was given the freedom to write complex pieces for gifted …
Which Way To Leave?
Includes download code. Which Way To Leave? is the latest record by Stockholm based musician John Chantler. The self-reflexive sequencing that tracks the sub-harmonic series in the opening blast of "Falling Forward" positions the record as Chantler's most explicitly melodic. These melodies however do not exist in a mono-dimensional vacuum, rather they co-exist in a meshed framework of dynamic layers of timbre. The record's abrupt cuts, deft variations of density and unexpected diversions a…
Memory Fragments
Pierce Warnecke presents a chasmic solo debut LP with Memory Fragments for Room40 offering his most expansive, personalised vision of electro-acoustic abstraction. Nine tracks cover a broad spectrum of tones within his chosen subset, from doomy keys and cinematic drone panoramas thru curdling dissonance and prickling glitch textures subtly playing with notions of deferred gratification and unpredictability. One to check if you’re into Tim Hecker or KTL. “Based in Spain, composer and visualist Pi…
Entities Inertias Faint Beings
"The music existed already, spores maybe or dormant clusters of digital files. Out of three periods of solitude the germination began. The first was in Queensland, on Tamborine Mountain (an aboriginal name), so silent at night that I listened to recorded music - Japanese Gagaku, Buddhist ritual from Bhutan, Korean Confucian music - as if drifting into cavernous black space. Stepping into sleep I saw a hypnagogic image - a transparent swimming pool suspended over the mouth of a volcano. I read St…