New Arrivals
At The Grass Roots Of Dub
Seminal dub album produced by Winston Edwards. In 1974 Edwards left Jamaica to reside in the UK and through his strong connections with such reggae luminaries as Joe Gibbs, Lee Perry and King Tubby began to travel back and forth between London and Kingston (JA) to bring back recordings to issue on his Fay Music label here in the UK. In 1974 he released this controversial, seminal dub set, shunned by some at the time due to the spurious marketing device employed. The whole album appears in fact t…
Shalom Dub
Originally released in 1975, King Tubby And The Aggrovators ‘Shalom Dub’ stands as one of the earliest and most cherished dub albums in existence. King Tubby, the studio mastermind, works with a a killer set of riddims from Bunny Lee’s archive and turns out a masterpiece of manipulated FX. Eighteen tracks deep including reworked classics from Cornell Campbell, Derrick Morgan, Johnny Clarke, Linval Thompson and more.
Brass Rockers
King Tubby and producer Bunny ‘striker’ Lee are intertwined in the birth of dub music. After discovering a mistake that made a ‘serious joke’ they went on to release the first pressings of this new musical genre namely ‘dub music’. Tubby’s vast knowledge of electronics and Bunny’s vast catalogue of rhythms would lay the foundations of what today is taken as a standard…the remix / version cuts to an existing vocal tune. Sit back and enjoy this historic set of sounds. Lovingly restored and with a …
1980-1981 Fields Of Artifical Flowers
Psychotic works of L-R-D from 80 & 81. Noise bliss and sad feedback. Pivoting into a more rich toned psychosis of sound, these sessions have been lightly remastered lovingly by Polish engineer Kurzweil Holownia.
Ghost In The Shell (Original Soundtrack)
Composed by Kenji Kawai for the original 1995 film. In 2029, with the advancement of cybernetic technology, the human body can be augmented or even completely replaced with cybernetic parts. Another significant achievement is the cyberbrain, a mechanical casing for the human brain that allows access to the Internet and other networks. An often-mentioned term is “ghost”, referring to the consciousness inhabiting the body (the “shell”).
Megatech Body, a shell manufacturer with suspected close ties…
Façadisms
*400 copies limited edition* The seeds of composer Rafael Anton Irisarri’s latest LP were first planted during his 2016 tour in Italy, months before that Autumn’s unexpected presidential election. The linguistic glitch of an innocuous diner in Milan named “il Mito Americano” – meant as “The American Dream” but translated literally to English as “The American Myth” – sparked a series of ideas, both conceptual and musical. Amid the chaos of 2020, while exploring the stark world of brutalist archit…
Totemo Aimasho
*2024 stock* In essence Tokyo’s Tenniscoats celebrate all that makes song vital in our collective conscious. Matching emotive live performance against delicately psychedelic folk songs, the duo of Saya and Takashi Ueno (assisted by a plethora of floating members), create some of the most compelling music currently emanating from Japan.
On Totemo Aimasho – loosely translated as 'Lets Meet Very Much' – Tenniscoats find themselves traveling across countries, scribing audio journal entries from Aust…
Alluvial
*2024 stock* Crafted throughout 2004 and early 2005, Rösner’s original source material stems largely from instruments (guitar, percussion, analog electronics), and through his detailed processing and production methods he’s been able to counterpoint a desire for raw digital overtones against earthy acoustic qualities.
The results are simply a pleasure for the ears – course passages of hiss and electronic splutter give way to lilting moments of sheer melodic beauty. With strong humming bass heavy…
Constants
*2024 stock* UK-based artist Chris Herbert is a man of intermittent communications. Over the past decade he has published a select oeuvre of crushingly lush and elegant records. Fittingly then, Constants, his new edition for Room40 is a transmission from an overtly private realm. Working in a relative vacuum, beyond the reach of contemporary electronic music trends, Herbert has focussed his interest in intuitive composition. Drawing on a mixed musical palette and interweaving sounds sourced from…
Ballad(s) for Quiet Horizons
*2024 stock* Incredible collection of Scott Morrison's audio visual works. Presented in a gatefold monochrome printed and matte laminated jacket with insert cards.
Trystero
This debut full-length album of Stockholm-based composer and electroacoustic experimentalist Theodor Kentros, could easily be interpreted as 'just' an assemblage of pieces written between 2021-2024. Named after the paranoid hallucination (or, if said hallucination is real, the underground secret mail system) figuring in the 1966 Thomas Pynchon novel ‘The Crying of Lot 49’, it should rather be perceived as a very distinct, coherent stream running through his output during these years.
The six tra…
Dry Routine
*200 copies limited edition with hand-stamped coffee stained sleeves and insert* 5 decided and minimal arrangements of raw organic waste, tired motors, and idling electronic signals. Sound sources that are unmistakably worldly, spun into Ochu’s signature malaise, making them impossible to place. A continuation of the trajectory established on his preceding albums Unproduktiw and Lähmung des Wartens, this time while a slightly noisier edge.
Two im Teer
*300 copies limited edition* “Two In Teer (two in the tar) contains five cycles of poems spread over fourteen tracks, always implemented differently in terms of sound. Poetry and sound poetry turn into fragile and lonely noises. An excessive collage of voices, piano, and increasingly distorted and destroyed tape recorders. Solo and in duet with the voices of Alice Kemp, Mara Genschel, Anna Schimkat, and the violins of Hans Essel and Inge Salcher.Perhaps the most naked, embarassing and most indet…
”A&E, Adolf & Eva, Adam & Eve, in the Garden of Eden, Picnic”
This recording is roughly 80 minutes of the A&E three day performance superimposed.
Performed by Paul McCarthy (Adolf / Eva) and Lilith Stangenberg (Eva / Eve).
Das Berliner Konzert
*300 copies limited edition* "Stimulated by our first public performance of "rarely heard music" (Das Münchner Konzert), we at once planned another concert in which the tight circle of performers was to be enlarged by a couple of dear friends, and once again the location had to have the lure of the special. oswald wiener suggested the church of the holy cross in berlin as our place of action, for we had learnt that it could be hired for public performances. everyone was most enthusiastic about p…
Oman Protest Music
Compilation of revolutionary Omani songs from the time of the Marxist-Leninist Dhofar Liberation Front seeking to overthrow the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman and Establish an independent state in Dhofar, free from the rule of the Omani Sultan Said bin Taimur. The rebels also held the broader goals of Arab nationalism which included ending British influence in the Persian Gulf region. The Dofar War lasted from 1965 – 1976 ultimately ending with the defeat of the PFLO. These songs celebrate the bra…
Balinese Gamelan Music
”Nowhere is the richness of Balinese art more evident than in the glitteringly brilliant music and dance of gamelan gong kebjar, which uses a 25-piece orchestra of xylophone-like bronze-keyed instruments, tuned gongs, cymbals, drums, and flutes. This style is relatively new. The earlier musical style known as gamelan gong was stately in pace. Gamelan means orchestra; gong refers to the large gong used in the orchestra. But when the kebjar style came into existence, this traditional form changedr…
Kiss Me Again
Arthur Russell first visited The Gallery in 1976 with his then boyfriend Louis, who introduced him to Nicky Siano. Arthur became a regular at the space and one night as Siano was playing “Turn the Beat Around”, which had just been released, Arthur waved at him from outside the booth and asked to come in. Nicky opened the door and Arthur suggested they make a record like this together. This ended up being a huge step for Siano as it marked the first ever production by a DJ making a record from sc…
Clouddead
cLOUDDEAD's debut album, compiling six 10" EPs that appeared between 2000-2001, is aurally dense and obscured. A sprawling mass of miniature beat-suites and Dadaist lyrics, this strange and beautiful 3xLP would influence a myriad of sub-genres (cloud rap, hauntology, lo-fi hip-hop, etc.) in the two decades since its initial release. Only the three members of cLOUDDEAD – Why?, Doseone and Odd Nosdam – can speak to the group's origins, but in the context of underground hip-hop towards the end of t…