★Room40
World Rhythms
"In late 1975, Annea Lockwood realised her composition World Rhythms. It represents one of the first creative works exploring the potentials of field recordings in a multichannel setting. It is a landmark work and a composition that, on its 50th anniversary, has gently carried forward over the decades, but arguably now is only starting to come into true focus, and be understood for exactly how revolutionary it was. World Rhythms was a work concerned with a practice of sustained listening into th…
Poulaine
When you’re creating something loosely referred to as “art” with another person, you’re mining the depths of minds and experience, searching connections with pasts, each of us producing from a different place. Communication exists as unspoken and simultaneous, more carnal than collaborative, and dwelling rather than saying. We all miss that, wrapped up fantasies of perfectness and lovesick doves. Youth, how fleeting and naive. "Created by commission for the University of California at Irvine as …
TripleAkuma
TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow. The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative.
Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of …
Polaroid Piano
Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano is a record that is very close to my heart. In fact, it is Akira’s work that was one of the drivers for Someone Good, one of the Room40 sibling labels, to be founded. Polaroid Piano marks the beginning of what would later become known as felt piano music, an approach to the piano which was picked up by numerous artists across subsequent years. It captures an essential and intimate rendering of the piano at close proximity, but it does more than that, it allows the…
Soundsphere
Akio Suzuki has always been an artist in search of unexpected sound, and curiosity has been his guiding principle. Whether that be curiosity for objects, spaces or places, his work has been guided by a porousness and pliability which has allowed him to explore an enormous sonic terrain. This freedom has also allowed him to develop a language in sound that remains utterly his own. Nowhere is this more evident than in his approach to instrument creation. During the 1970s Akio Suzuki devised a seri…
Parasymbiosis
I have long pondered the concept of connectedness in relation to life’s existence. The Dalai Lama teaches that destruction of one’s neighbour equates to destruction of oneself. In contrast, modern Western culture has placed the individual at the epicentre of existence – to the detriment of non-humans and humans alike. Ecological Memory influences present or future responses of a community; it is this shared memory that enables organisms, objects and the environment to connect to each other, and …
Imu Plastos
Spring 2024. Carl Stone and Asuna performed together for the first time at an international experimental music festival held in Kanazawa city, where Asuna lives. Carl Stone is a pioneering composer of computer sampled music. and Asuna known for its “100 Keyboards” performance, played in this duo with over 100 toy instruments, samplers, and synthesizers. Carl samples and processed the sound of Asuna's various toys in real time. Asuna then incorporates the sounds into her own sampler and sends agai…
Lustres
Our approach to making records has always involved an exchange of individually created sounds, which are joined together through live improvisation, studio recording, and the use of diagrammatic visual scores. Over the last several years, we have been interested in expanding very small fragments of these discreet pieces of audio into long-form compositions. This process has resulted in a new approach to how we build tracks from the ground up. In this particular workflow, one of us is largely resp…
The Sound Leaves
"The Sound Leaves" began as an interactive sound performance and installation based around humans’ impact on the environment and how that impact is altering the sonic landscape of our world. As ecosystems change due to climate collapse, the sound of those ecosystems changes too. "The Sound Leaves" used an amplified collection of autumn leaves to encourage participants to listen closely to how their actions alter the sounds of the fallen leaves by walking on and through them for a period of time.…
Pendulum
A note from Carlos... "I initially recorded all tracks in California between 2024 and 2025. The tracks were then sent to various locations around the world to each collaborator for completion, before returning to me in California for final touches. They were subsequently sent to Japan for mixing. Then, back to California, and then to Australia, where the final designs for the artwork were created. The final version was then multiplied and spread all over the world until it reached your ears, the…
Obliteration Bliss
Degraded, faded cities now empty of people. You can hear household appliances in the kitchens still talking, but only to each other. The phrases are distorted, unclear; broken English , Japanese and a few Korean and Chinese automated voices, syllables, shopping lists, play lists for dinner and recipes. Somewhere one of the machines is dialled in on an isolated pre Buddhist monk chant, distant like from a high cliff meditation cell. The flow of the wide, long Black Mother River Kali Gandaki below…
Meditations
Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha's death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual a…
For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name
With For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name, Peter Knight extends his fascination with the porous relationship between body, instrument, and environment into one of his most personal and immersive solo works. Due for release in November 2025 on Room40, the album takes its cue from extended fieldwork and improvisations undertaken near Yeerung River on Krowathunkooloong land, where Knight spent much of his early life. Each of the album’s pieces grew organically from direct encounters with that setting—…
Is Spring a Sculpture?
"Is Spring a Sculpture?" is a collaboration between David Toop and Rie Nakajima, released as a limited edition CD and book on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The work consists of a series of sound pieces and text fragments exploring the poetics of objects, ephemeral phenomena, and the ambiguous boundaries between sound, environment, and tactile form. Together, Toop and Nakajima sculpt a listening experience that is elusive and sensorially charged, extending their mutual fascination with the int…
Smelter
Smelter by Faith Coloccia and Daniel Menche constructs a temporal architecture that explores water in its myriad states—snow, ice, streams, and storm. Moving between spontaneous, voice-laced vignettes and epic drone formations, the record serves as an aural archive that suspends the listener in crystalline moments, as if each piece is fixed in time yet endlessly malleable.
Steelwound (20th Anniversary Edition)
"If I’m not mistaken, Ben Frost and I first talked about the ideas of what would become Steelwound sometime in mid 2002. In the early 00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realised in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at an…
Within Without
"I first owned a fender rhodes electric piano in the late 1970s. It was a Mark 1 model (wooden key action). I had a band with my younger brother and my best friend from school and this was my ‘portable’ gigging instrument that weighed ‘a ton,’ and only just fitted in our small car. (I eventually got smart and left the 15 kg lid at home.) I had one effects pedal, a Boss chorus. Sadly—due to the rise of synthesisers and electronic keyboard instruments—I sold this lovely instrument in the late 1980…
WhiteOut
"Even without visiting a place, we often think we know it. It’s a syndrome of the modern age. The world is right before us, on screen, summarised and sensorially curated into a particular vision that casts light across ‘just so much’ of an impression of a place and a time. In some ways, I realised this phenomenon most strongly when I visited Antarctica in the summer of 2010. In my mind’s ear (and eye) certain features of that place were front and centre – imagined, as to be real. The stark colou…
Steel Wound
Twenty years after its original release, Ben Frost's "Steel Wound" returns as a testament to isolation transformed into transcendence. Born from solitude at a derelict cabin on Australia's windswept coast, this masterpiece of textural guitar manipulation still sounds like a transmission from another world—one where beauty emerges from the marriage of abandonment and obsession.
Elemental View
Few contemporary composers have created instruments as singular as Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, and fewer still have explored its possibilities with the depth and invention documented on Elemental View. This six-movement work, performed in collaboration with The Living Earth Show, transforms an industrial-sized space into a resonating chamber where 136 precisely tuned strings create what can only be described as environmental music in its most literal sense. Fullman has spent decades …