Music from Australia

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…

Oren Ambarchi and Johan Berthling are two masters of reducing music’s peak intensities to their root meaning. Oren’s early solo guitar works rendered this process with an instantly recognisable combination of sine wave throb and precisely controlled attack that has bloomed in maturity – concentrating the ecstatic potential of the guitar solo by folding it back on itself and stacking the points of greatest liminal intensity into waves of powerfully psychedelic excess while also encompassing …

Live Industrial action from S.P.K., showing the good people of Brixton a beautifully bleak and heavy vision of existence in the year 1983. London Brixton Ace is brimming with clanking metal percussion, tortured howling and unidentified textures, with an all-pervading sense of doom. Great stuff, reissued on Therapeutic / Adverse Recordings.

Approaching Nothing is Lawrence English’s response to one of his favourite concrète works, Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien. Its title is a direct english translation, and the piece follows very similar methods of recording and collaging with minimal alteration made to the original source material, which was also collected on and around the Croatian island of Vela Luka where Ferrari visited and made his original recordings in the ‘60s.

Medical Records presents it's 60th release with the much needed reissue of Australia's Severed Heads and their 1985 release - Stretcher. The Severed Heads story continues with the expanded and Stretched 2LP reissue. After personnel changes in 1985 (Garry Bradbury and Paul Deering left the band), Sev was now down to a 2 piece (Tom Ellard and Stephen Jones). Stretcher was originally released to be a compilation to introduce the band to an American audience, but it was ultimately sold in three vers…

The remarkable series of releases from the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi continues with I wonder if you noticed "I'm sorry" Is such a lovely sound It keeps things from getting worse, which presents the entirety of an 80-minute set performed at Tokyo's SuperDeluxe in March 2014. While the trio's 2012 performance was divided into two releases (BT 011LP (2014) and BT 012LP (2015)), the single extended performance presented here ranges widely over terrain both new and fam…

**restocked** Oren Ambarchi, Stefano Pilia, and Massimo Pupillo (Zu) team up for an instrumental trip bridging post-rock, drone, and improvisation. Limited 180-gram LP in silk-screened sleeve with artwork by Sara D'Uva. Includes download code. Since the late '90s Oren Ambarchi has been exploring new ground as composer and multi-instrumentalist (mainly focusing on guitar), fusing a wide range of influences and inspiration from improvisation, contemporary music, modern electronics, and rock…

**restocked** Pale Calling presents the fruits of the first collaboration between Oren Ambarchi, Kassel Jaeger and James Rushford, recorded at GRM studios, Paris in 2014. Although drawing on aspects of each member's solo works, the trio mark out their own unique territory, a mysterious space of slowly cycling electronics, distracted vocal mumbles and often unidentifiable field recordings. These two side-long pieces are composed of distinct layers that gently rise up and recede, obeying a dream-l…

The field recordist and lucid-dream composer Kate Carr conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigation…

Mind-crushing 7LP box set housed in a deluxe book-like folder featuring the earliest recorded material from the legendary SPK, dating back to the late 70's and including some properly eye-opening material and combining all of their early works and the bands-history prior to Graeme Revell signing to Wea and to go a slightly different path and more commercial with the band's musical output. SPK was an Australian industrial band formed in 1978 in Sydney by Graeme Revell and Neil Hill, being …

Severed Heads are one of the longest surviving bands to emerge from the Australian post-punk independent music scene. They began in Sydney in 1979, incorporating elements of ‘industrial’ noise-generation, tape cutting & looping and electronic sound synthesis. As the project developed song-structures and vocals were employed in a more-or-less recognizable mutant electro pop style. After many line-up changes featuring Garry Bradbury and psychedelic guitarist Simon Knuckey, Severed Heads was…

Oren Ambarchi and Johan Berthling are two masters of reducing music's peak intensities to their root meaning. Oren's early solo guitar works rendered this process with an instantly recognisable combination of sine wave throb and precisely controlled attack that has bloomed in maturity - concentrating the ecstatic potential of the guitar solo by folding it back on itself and stacking the points of greatest liminal intensity into waves of powerfully psychedelic excess while also encompassing…

"Shade Themes from Kairos is a new iteration of the dream for all the guitar freaks out there, bringing together a couple of singular players together, just to see what happens. In this case, the players were old friends and collaborators Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O'Malley, playing in a space engineered and co-populated by Randall Dunn. From the top, Shade Themes from Kairos is resonant as a collective inquest in sound, with all the players deeply immersed within the panorama they are creating. …

Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello are creators of mythology. Their mythology renders a series of acoustic spaces, haunted by narrative and hinting at happenings unseen, but certainly heard. With Fable, we are presented with their second duet. It chronicles three years of intermittent audio communications in search of new collaborative approaches. The results focus on the pair’s joint interests in modular synthesis, field recordings and the blurry boundaries between acoustic instrumentation a…

Behold is the second collaborative release from Oren Ambarchi and Jim O'Rourke following the 2011 LP Indeed. Ambarchi and O'Rourke seamlessly blend field recordings, electronics, guitar, drums, and other acoustic instruments into a subtle combination of krautrock, minimalism, and classic free flowing electronics. Side A takes the listener into the Fourth World adventures pioneered by Jon Hassell on Fourth World Music Vol. I: Possible Musics (GB 019CD/LP), while the flip seems like an unlikel…

"Live Knots", Oren Ambarchi’s first release for PAN, presents two live realizations of ‘Knots’, the epic centrepiece of his Audience of One (Touch, 2012) release. Built on the interplay between Ambarchi’s swirling, guitar harmonics and the metronomic pulse and shifting accents of Joe Talia’s DeJohnette-esque drumming, the piece merges the organic push and pull of free improvisation with an overarching compositional framework.‘Tokyo Knots’ presents the complete recording of a duo performance of t…

"At this point, it can justifiably be said that Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi have become one of the leading groups in experimental music. This, their sixth release, presents the entire second set of the trio's March 2013 concert at SuperDeluxe (the first set is available on Black Truffle as Only Wanting to Melt Beautifully Away Is It a Lack of Contentment That Stirs Affection for Those Things Said to Be as of Yet Unseen). While the first set of the evening saw the trio branch…

After providing one of 2014’s standout albums 'Wilderness of Mirrors’, Lawrence English returns to penetrate that most desolate zone of the psyche with an incredible suite of treated and layered field recordings made in Patagonia and Antarctica in 2010. “In the summer of 2010 I had the chance to visit Antarctica under the invitation of the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of breath taking as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires, the Hercules transpor…

Shadow of the Monolith is the collaboration of acclaimed artists Lawrence English and Werner Dafeldecker. Recorded across the Antarctic Peninsula and produced in Brisbane Australia, Shadow of the Monolith works across aesthetic disciplines exploring electroacoustic transformations of atmospheric, hydrophonic and ionospheric materials. The raw materials have been layered, processed and structured into a record that drifts from dense microscopic cracks to vibrant shifting frequencies, from section…

LP version. "Begun as a one-off collaboration in 2009, the trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi has now become a solid working group, refining its craft through a series of annual concerts at Tokyo's legendary SuperDeluxe. Much of their recorded work has focused on their intense, ritualistic take on the rock power trio of electric guitar, bass and drums. Presenting the entire first set of the trio's March 2013 concert at SuperDeluxe (the second set will follow on Black Truffle lat…