★Room40
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—…
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 …
Njurra Wänja
"The process of making music together in Hand to Earth is unlike any other we have experienced. It is not free improvisation but it is not composed either. It is somewhere in between, and it feels like ‘weaving.’ Through Hand to Earth, we weave the threads of our different histories, different lives, and different perspectives together, and become family. Daniel weaves the ‘Manikay’ (public songs) in his first language, Wagiläk - into the syntax of our shared practices. He talks about the ‘rak…
In the Depth of Illusion: A Soundtrack for Nervous Magic Lantern
"Ken Jacobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschac…
A Book of Waves
"After playing together for years, our tide was turning. What began as a happy rhythm of show dates in Berlin, from cozy trios in Klaus’ home studio to ten-piece ensembles at Ausland, was now ebbing away thanks to Andy’s move to the US. Whenever an accustomed pattern shifts it can take time to readjust, to find the gravity that will pull to shape an orbit again. What had been working well between us remained on both our minds for a few years after: the tension between complimentary forms and ref…
Archival Recordings: Primal Image / Beauty
Time is a mysterious companion in Alan Lamb’s Primal Image/Beauty. Recorded on abandoned telephone wires in Western Australia, these works explore harmony and materiality, blending dynamic sonic environments with deep listening. Lamb’s music invites us to experience the world’s hidden sounds, unlocking inner reflection.
Milan
"In 2016, I invited Norman Westberg to Australia for his first solo tour. He’d been in Australia a few years before that, touring The Seer with Swans, and it was during this tour that I’d had the fortune to meet him. Since that time Norman and I have worked on a number of projects together. He very kindly played some of the central themes on my Cruel Optimism album and I had the pleasure to produced his After Vacation Album. Last year Norman shared a multichannel live recording with me from a to…
Caligo
"What remains after mutilating and reassembling an essential historical recording? How is it connected to a particular event in a grotesque and cyclical novella riddled with medical procedures of an aesthetic and deforming nature? Malakoot – this spiral, centres on a decision made one afternoon by a character. On a similar afternoon, full of anxiety, pressed by an unknowable presence in this city , I decided that the soundscape for such an inspiring work of fiction was a mutilated one; things co…
Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds
From Lawrence English: "I like to think that sound haunts architecture. It's one of the truly magical interactions afforded by sound's immateriality. It's also something that has captivated us from the earliest times. It's not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of our early ancestors calling to one another in the dark cathedral like caves which held wonder, and security, for them. Today the ways in which sound occupies space, the so-called liquid architecture, holds just as much wonder, albei…
Journey to the Cave of Guanyin
The inspiration for these pieces comes from the Chinese folklore of Guanyin, a deity whose name translates to ‘the one who perceives all the sounds, or cries, of the world’. Also known as Guanshiyin 觀世音, she is the embodiment of infinite compassion. I grew up knowing of Guanyin as a female deity, but recently discovered that she had transformed through the centuries from the male Hindu bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara. I instantly found an affinity for this gender-fluid figure, who was said to have a…
Arms
"There’s two things I can tell you about Ueno Takashi, without reservation. The first is he knows the best coffee spots in Tokyo. I am the happy recipient of this knowledge. The second thing I can tell you is that he is someone for whom the guitar is a platform of exquisite promise. Ueno Takashi, who many of you would recognise as one half of the legendary unit Tenniscoats, is also responsible for an impressive series of solo guitar recordings which stake out a claim that tests the fringes of ex…
Slow Motion Lightning
Slow Motion Lightning; deadly and unpredictable never strikes twice in the same place except when it does.
A Colour For Autumn
"Somehow, 15 years has passed since I worked on A Colour For Autumn. This recording was, in many ways, a critical one for me. In some respects, it rounded out a period of work that was focused on a particular marriage of thematics and harmony. Like For Varying Degrees Of Winter, it dwelled on old world impressions of the seasons, something that, in the southern hemisphere, isn’t intrinsically part of our way of approaching place. I think it was this incongruity with my own lived experience that …