★Room40
Annular Silhouettes
With Annular Silhouettes, Brad E. Rose traces an undulating pathway through ideas of place, memory, and intergenerational exchange. The edition is a mediation on how perspective is shaped, and reshaped, in time. More so it explores how change is simultaneously incremental and accumulative. This is reflected in the compositional strategies he deploys. Elements arrive and pass with an almost subconscious logic. Their pace is measured, but entirely fluid, creating a sense of breathing or perhaps ev…
Moths & Stars
"Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy - so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones …
Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth
Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth is a recording made in the United States whilst CM von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser were undertaking an exhaustive tour in 1991 alongside Hafler Trio and Zbigniew Karkowski. This, now legendary, tour was both arduous and rewarding. Living in a van for many weeks at a time, travelling between cities with the most modest of means meant Phauss came to know a very particular vision of the United States, one that existed below plain view. Their’s was an experience ha…
Audiodrome
Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser. Formed in the early 1980s, Phauss operated amidst of generation of uncharacteristic Swedish artists concerned with reshaping the edges of practices in sound, light, performance and vision. It was a monumentally fertile period for Sweden in that a confluence of factors allowed artists to dedicate themselves to the relentless excavation of ideas, drilling down to the absolute core of their interests and ways of making. Von Hausswolff and Pause…
Follower
Black Vinyl. For more than three decades now Sydney pianist and composer Chris Abrahams has developed a singularly iconic body of work. Known widely for his work with trio The Necks, Abrahams solo works have carved out an entirely otherworldly realm in sound. His explorations of organ, electronics, and piano capture a restless curiosity and timbral interrogation that only deepens with each of his releases. With Follower, his compositional language further expands. Melodies cascade with a cinemat…
Shadow Phase
Limited Edition Clear Vinyl. "Most of this record was created in the shadow of Covid and deep in the maw of Melbourne’s 2020 long winter lockdown. It is a meditation on the nature of connection. Restricted to a 5km zone, one of the only people I saw outside my family during this time was my old friend and teacher, Ania Walwicz. We met in the overlap between our zones on the waterfront near Docklands to walk and talk on bright, cool winter afternoons. Those conversations became large in my though…
Petra (Tape)
Tip! Milanese sound artist Alberto Boccardi explores eerie electro-acoustic interstices reflecting his time spent in Cairo, and move back home to Italy, for Room 40. ‘Petra’ unpackages the artist’s mind in quiet, spectral designs after spending five years in the humid swelter and febrility of the Egyptian capital. Recording in a Milan studio he set up years before, Boccardi embraces silence after so long without, prizing his studio’s relative familiarity and controlled settings as a space to ru…
Of Which One Knows
Of Which One Knows is a collection of works by Natalie Beridze that sit outside the easy categorisation of ‘al-bum’. They are of course, an album, but they are more than that, in that they represent a kind of multiplicity in sound, an accumulation of experience, of emotion, of life, transposed into sound. It is only together that the stories that sit between them might start to be assembled. Spanning a decade and a half, these works chart a trajectory of investigation and curiosity that charts t…
Singles
Finland’s Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay has been responsible for some of the most radically positioned rhythmic electronic music of the past few decades. His willingness to abandon mea-sured and progression senses of repetition in favour of multi-layered unfolding pulses has become a touchstone for a new sensing of time. In a similar way, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset has reappraised the harmonic and timbral ca-pacities of his chosen instrument, the guitar, and unlocked new perspectives o…
Deafened By The Noise Of Time
Pierce Warnecke’s work springs forth from the nexus of sound and vision. With Deafened By The Noise Of Time, he undertakes a deep interrogation of sound, which mirrors many of his approaches to visual ma-terials. Seeking to test how elements of music are altered through interference and deterioration, he uses a range of methods to reveal new densities, timbres and melodies from within his original source materi-als . Rather than becoming fragmented or overtly degraded though, Warknecke’s work on…
Spectral
Madeleine Cocolas’s Spectral is a reimagining of the familiar. It is an attentiveness to the inciden-tal, and a reaching out towards the unheard. Taking these acoustic microcosms as a source of focus, she unpacks these transient flickers and memories, and repositions them; exploding them outward and shifting perspective. Spectral, celebrates the shadows of melody and the after-thoughts of rhythm. It breaths with a sense of calculated intensity that reflects on Cocolas’s focus throughout the proc…
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…
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…