Electronic / All styles

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…

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…

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) 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…

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, …

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 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…

"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…

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 leaving Iran with his family at the age of 6, Emad Dabiri (Sarin) lived in Toronto before moving to Berlin in 2014. Though Toronto provided Dabiri with the foundation to pursue his music, he knew he had to move overseas to explore his art further. “The depth of the underground electronic scene [in Berlin] is vast,” says Dabiri. “There’s also a good sense of community and support among the artists and musicians here.” The current sounds coming out of Berlin, combined with Dabiri’s fixation …

Seven fixed-medium works from 1998 to 2013 by Glasgow-based Alistair MacDonald, arranged as a cabinet of curiosities: Glasgow streets, Carrie Fertig's glass instruments, a tribute to Delia Derbyshire, building bricks and the jungle explored by Alfred Russel Wallace.

David Berezan’s Nautical Cycle, five multichannel acousmatic pieces from 2011 to 2017 built from sea buoys, unmanned light vessels, mooring chains in Visby harbour and the bass clarinet of Marij van Gorkom, including the Klang ! first prize winner Lightvessels.

Three fixed-media works by eRikm from 2013 to 2016: an Icelandic crossing built around a folk tale, New Year’s Eve fireworks on a Berlin street, and a fire-retardant scar on the hills above Marseille, with a text by psychiatrist Georges Yoram Federmann.

Two long works by Monique Jean: T.A.G. (2013), mostly synthesized sound shaped by crowds of demonstrators, and Out of Joint (2009-11), a hybrid of Shakespeare's Macbeth and the films, stagings and rewrites it inspired, mastered by Christian Bouchard.

Six acousmatic works by Adam Stanović from 2015 to 2017, made mostly in Sheffield: a remix that lost its source, a parody of the metal-sound cliché, traffic around an old steel furnace, and a birthday homage to Beatriz Ferreyra.

Four stereo works by Åke Parmerud from 1990 to 1995, led by Grains of Voices, a 31-minute piece built from voices he recorded while travelling around the world and premiered at the United Nations in 1997.

**Incredible pioneering recording of extended synthesiser and percussion technique from the Australian experimental underground. Edition of 500** Welcome to the strange musical world of Tolley & Dara, an experimental duo whose incredible music held a marginal yet vital position on the fringe of the Australian music industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consisting of jazz bassist and synthesist David Tolley and percussionist Dure Dara, their union was a relationship of romance and inten…

A fluid dream logic runs deep in William Fowler Collins’ Field Music. The New Mexican composer of dark minimalism has long centered his practices upon the slow burn of the drone through guitar, electronics, etc. That remains the case for Field Music, with Collins extending his strategies through compositional exercises into rhythm and a diverse array of conceptual signposts that push his work along unfixed, sometime oppositional directions. The idea of ‘field music’ can relate to the arch…

Hui Terra. The dreamlike shape of the half-heard word, abstracts with faint impressions of bucolic landscape, or handfuls of translucent and brightly-colored gemstones that hold odd, elusive, asymmetrical form. This enchanting, gently surreal debut album from Alex Cobb’s Etelin project explores the power and playfulness of impulsive action diffused through electro-acoustic and ambient sound.This music was created with digital synthesizers and a sampler in the four months immediately follow…

Touch issues Jana Winderen's Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone. The marginal ice zone is the dynamic border between the open sea and the sea ice, which is ecologically extremely vulnerable. The phytoplankton present in the sea produces half of the oxygen on the planet. During spring, this zone is the most important CO2 sink in our biosphere. On Spring Bloom In The Marginal Ice Zone the sounds of the living creatures become a voice in the current political debate concerning the officia…