★Room40
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…
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 …
Neuromancer
"It’s hard to imagine that this year William Gibson’s Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural spectres he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was…
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.
July 15, 2022
The first LP by the Taj Mahal Travellers was recorded at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo on July 15, 1972, which became the title of the work and was released the same year by CBS Sony Records. A live performance celebrating the 50th anniversary of this album was held on July 15, 2022. The only original members of the Taj Mahal Travellers who attended were myself and Seiji Nagai. This is because two of the six members passed away, two are religiously active and they can not play music according to their b…
1982
I stayed in Iwate, where I was born, for a few days and created some sound materials using limited materials and old media. Over ten years ago, Iwate was devastated by the Great East Japan earthquake. Many old things that remained in my memory became rubble, dismantled, and new scenery was there. I bounced every song from “1982” straight onto an old tape recorder.
This album that comes out of my interest in sonic "degradation and rebuilding". I treated the guitar and synthesiser in a lot of new …
Tropical Church
I was waiting for the bus to arrive at the stop when the rain started pouring. I quickly escaped into a chapel nearby, and that’s where the idea of this album came to be. Inside the chapel, I was reminded of the scent of Mauritius, where my father was from, and the pillars of dampen woods mixed with the ritualistic frankincense. The rain continued to hit violently on the metallic church roof as the road outside grew overwhelmed with angry drivers, honking their way through, their frustrations ec…