★Room40
Too Ne
Yui Onodera’s work is patient. He invites a sense of dwelling with his pieces, an encouragement to pause and to allow sound to swell up around you. On Too Ne, he charts out a very specific sonic exploration. Across these five works he creates a lilting passage of sound, a liouidous flow that confirms the adage of Ambient music existing as constant, but never solid. Too Ne also invites a sensing of the self, in that the works ask us to examine our own memories as a way to unlocking a deeper reson…
Guitar Studies I-III
Swiss artist Zimoun is known for creating effortlessly deep and fluid sound works and sculptures. On Guitar Studies I-III he limits his acoustic focus to just one instrument, arguably the most iconic of the modern age. In doing so, he begins a vertical study of the guitar, seeking deeper and deeper into its tonal and timbral qualities, pushing to reveal the dynamic possibilities of the instrument. Using a wide variety of techniques and settings, he unlocks an entirely personal and profound readi…
Viento
'In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos. What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm ble…
Hiss Lift
"What I remember … a car on fire alongside the highway in the middle of the night. Waking in someone else’s bed in London with an entire poem spilling into my head, and then recording it with Tim in the kitchen after breakfast. Seemingly endless car, bus and train rides full of the country side splintered and refracted through glass and fatigue, always the same, always different. The screaming woman at the airport who pulled the fire alarm, evacuating the terminal. Some guy in Brooklyn talking t…
Tomorrow Is Too Late
Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition. Tomorrow Is Too Late was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette. Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares witness to Chantler’s uncompromising son…
Zone 7
Overview 'On Zone 7 New York artist Christina Giannone creates sound worlds that act as portals to the interiority of our lived experiences. These portals appear like shimmering nebula, distant but compelling, calling our attention and sparking us to reach out towards them. Through a series of drifting passages her record maps out a possible trajectory into the recesses of our often under explored subconscious. This is not a didactic music, rather it is invitational and maintains a constant flow…
Oionos
Notes from Steve Roden on Oionos
:'Oionos was created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece.
The exhibition took place in various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens, creating a situation for contemporary site specific works to be in dialogue with their historical surroundings.
While it was not originally offered as a possible site, I pleaded with the curator to allow me to work with architect Dimitris Pikionis’s Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis, abo…
Oceans Of Milk And Treacle
From Mike Cooper ‘This is a soundtrack for an otherwise silent film. The title of the album, and of course the film, is borrowed from my late friend Fred Hardy’s book The Religious Culture of India - Power, Love and Wisdom, considered to be one of the most important books on the subject. In this book Fred wrote...“In 1835 the historian Macaulay investigated whether there was anything in the traditional Indian systems of learning and education that could be used in the training of native personne…
For Leolanda
Melbourne based percussionist and composer Maria Moles charts out an electro-acoustic familial history with 'For Leolanda’. Drawing on family roots in The Philippines, she extrapolates rhythm and timbre from the diverse musics of that country and interweaves them with percussion, synthesizer and singing bowls. Her sonic meditations are open and generous, and they chart out the shape and pulse of memory; both real and imagined. Each piece tests for the relationships between frequency and harmony,…
Objects Of Interest
* Matte laminated and embossed CD with insert card plus extensive book featuring an in conversation between Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, plus scores, documentation and photographs. * ctive action has incorporated itself into an imagining of how we might reshape our understanding of community.” The translation of the visual into the acoustic is a powerfully esoteric practice. For Magda Mayas and Tina Douglas, this nexus of sensory curiosity has provided a perfect point from which they have maint…
Six Pieces
* Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, printed in monochrome with a full colour artist edition fold out poster featuring the photographic work of Joel Westendorf * ctive action has incorporated itself into an imagining of how we might reshape our understanding of community.” Kristof Hahn is perhaps best know for his role in Swans, where his work on lapsteel guitar has provided a critical and unsteady sense of tonal variation and glissandi. On Six Pieces, Hahn draws upon the legacy of his time to…
Jubilee
* Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, printed in monochrome with a full colour artist edition fold out poster featuring the photographic work of Joel Westendorf * On Jubilee, Los Angeles based artist Robert Takahashi Crouch conjures a profoundly personal vibrational landscape. The edition, which is a mediation on, and suture for experiences of conflict and violence, Jubilee merges longform low-frequency drone work against a reductive sense of harmony. It is a record of hushed intensity, punctu…
A Mirror Holds The Sky (Book + CD)
* Matt laminate and embossed sleeve, insert card, CD and 48 page perfect bound book featuring photographs by Lawrence English, taken on location in the Amazon * From Lawrence English: "In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez's Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had . . . Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am …
Appearance
Australia's Chris Abrahams, widely known for his work with legendary trio The Necks, has amassed an impressive solo discography over the past three decades. With four electro-acoustic editions already published by Room40, the label announces Chris's first piano solo for the label. Appearance is two longform pieces for piano that weave and mesh to create a sense of flow and subtle shifting which unfolds into eternal variation.A note from Lawrence English: "I first met Chris Abrahams sometime in t…
Zeitstudie
Tip! During one of the most collectively challenging years in living memory, Lawrence English’s Room40 has managed to beat the odds and consistently deliver rays of light through the darkness, reminding us of what great art is all about and its importance in times like this. 2020 has already seen the label drop incredible albums by Werner Dafeldecker, Rafael Toral, David Toop, Phill Niblock, Ellen Fullman & Theresa Wong, Merzbow, Beatriz Ferreyra, and handful of others. Now they’re at it again w…
Apparition Paintings
Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that’s not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it’s about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense of fading, like a mist that thins out to leave not a clear bright day b…
StereoAkuma
In June 2019, Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow travelled to Australia to take part in Room40’s Open Frame festival. Across a week he delivered a series of performances to sold out audiences in Sydney and Melbourne. The performances were viscerally explosive, a channeling of intensities of frequency and volume - the kind of trademarked bodily affective noise Merzbow has become renowned for. Between the concerts, Akita spent his days visiting a variety of forests, spending time with legenda…
Illustrations For Those Who
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…
At The Still Point Of The Turning World
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…
Love Songs
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, …