★Room40
Echos+
From Lawrence English: 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 pleasure to meet Beatri…
Analapos
Matte laminate CD, embossed artwork, insert card and 28 page book. In 1979, Akio Suzuki recorded a performance, ’New Sense Of Hearing’, at the Nagoya American Centre. During the performance, Suzuki used voice, turntables, glass harmonica and his self-designed instrument the Analapos to create a series of improvised pieces that effectively charted out his sonic investigations for the proceeding decades. In 1980 these recordings were issued by ALM records as Analapos, the first work made publicly…
StereoAkuma
In June 2019, Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow travelled to Australia to take part in Room40’s Open Frame festival. Across a week he delivered a series of performances to sold out audiences in Sydney and Melbourne. The performances were viscerally explosive, a channeling of intensities of frequency and volume - the kind of trademarked bodily affective noise Merzbow has become renowned for. Between the concerts, Akita spent his days visiting a variety of forests, spending time with legenda…
Parallel Darks
Estimable Austrian double bassist Werner Dafeldecker commits his first electro-acoustic full length with an engrossing side of textural roil for Room 40 comparable with enigmas by Kevin Drumm, Emptyset or Cam Deas and primed for deep immersion.
Tomorrow Is Too Late
John Chantler’s recorded works for electronics are a dichotomy. Each of his editions, whilst entirely refined and composed, maintain a distinct sense of experimentation. Chantler’s willingness to forgo the familiar in favour of the unknown or the unexpected has become a recurrent methodology which has resulted in a body of work that is simultaneously united and sprawling.Tomorrow Is Too Late typifies this dichotomy. Across each of the long-form pieces he brings together unexpectedly vibrant soni…
Sirens
"When I was 22 I managed to acquire Techno Animal’s Demonoid 12" at a local record store, Rocking Horse Records. I can still recall the intensities of sound that marked the first moments of listening to it. The sense of bass as a tactile surface, that rolling groove and the howling sine waves and dub sirens that scorched with a type of sonic burning sensation that to this day makes my hairs stand on end. A year later I heard Ice’s Bad Blood, from there I discovered The Bug through a release on W…
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…