★Room40
Pain Avoidance Machine
In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge. I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with its own …
White Shadows in the South Seas
It's difficult to know how to summurise the meandering journey that has been the life and times of Mike Cooper. Having just celebrated his 70th year of mischief making here's what we can tell you... A young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in London beat cult film 'That Kind Of Girl'. His first band The Blues Committee played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed. Cooper was central in launching several o…
Wege
Wege translates as 'path' and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums' four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Be…
Narrow
Steinbrüchel’s Narrow is an album of reduction and transformation. Like much of Steinbrüchel’s recorded work, the genesis of Narrow stems from a singular idea concerned with the notion of ‘static development’. Working with a limited palette of source material Narrow’s elegance is in its varying perspectives on related sonic materials. The title track is the nexus here - a somewhat more organic sound palette than heard previously in Steinbrüchel’s work - Narrow is a subharmonic oceanic-like compo…
The Oansome Orbit
The Oansome Orbit is the latest work from Australia’s electronic godfather Pimmon (known to friends as Paul Gough). Over the past decade and a half, Pimmon has carved out a unique space for himself amidst through producing a series of masterfully executed excursions into abstract electronic sound. With this new edition, he strikes out at some of his most harmonic territory to date, merging washes of rich tone against irregular grids of texture. The results are wholly individual and utte…
May
May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner. Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner's concert performances. Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner's live work explores the intersection between piano and digital music technology. For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more …
47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing
2008 release ** Eugene Carchesio's renown as a visual artist has unjustly eclipsed his extraordinary output as a soundmaker. Since the mid 80s, the Brisbane artist has steadfastly proliferated a sack full of barely released cassettes and cdrs under the D.N.E. moniker.Twenty years ago, he emptied his wallet to press 250 copies of the appropriately titled LP 47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing'. Then compact discs arrived. The local pressing plant closed and the master tape went with it. Copies were ci…
Painting Sky Together
Wroclaw based sound artist Tomasz Bednarczyk has a penchant for capturing the emotion in moments of stasis. It's this acute sense of expanding fleeting moments and exploring their detail that informs the sonic palette of his latest full length recording Painting Sky Together. Akin to his acclaimed debut edition 'Summer Feelings' (Room40), which elegantly documented a uniquely Polish experience of summer replete with distantly warm bursts of piano, and crisp glitch ridden pulses, Painting Sky Tog…
Basis
'Basis' is based on recordings of acoustic instruments. All sounds were processed and layered into compositions by Steinbrüchel. Through this processing Steinbrüchel revealed hidden structures and melodies and isolated them, creating new melodic and organic textures without losing the soul of the original. These seven tracks reveal a new side in his music. Tonal harmonics have never before played such an important role and each track contains layers of subtle shifting and interweaving melodies, …
11 Easy Pieces
Since 1995, Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has etched out a varied musical existence, from solo keyboard studies to an extensive body of collaborative work. His solo works, which span delicate ambient keyboard excursions through to site specific live documents and most recently song based explorations, have mapped out a focus of tone, duration and 'situations' for sound. On 11 Easy Pieces, his first widely available solo LP, Craig offers an intimate yet robust collection of works recorded on a…
Substation
Apart from being recognised as two of Australia's leading improvising musical forces, Clayton Thomas and Robin Fox are also acknowledged for their unrelenting experiments and divergent acoustic approaches in relation to their instrument of choice. Over the past 3 years, Robin Fox has developed some of the most powerful live processing tools in Australia through his research with MAXMSP. Clayton Thomas on the other hand has expanded his performance styles, moving between blistering free jazz expl…
Pech
Pech is the latest duo recording from inside pianist Reinhold Friedl and avant- percussionist Michael Vorfeld. Over the past five years, this pair of German musicians have created some of the most engaging and imaginative electro-acoustic music, exploring the potentials of subtle performance techniques and refined compositional approaches. On Pech, the duo seek to uncover the hidden and masked character of their instruments - the piano is altered via various preparations and unconventional ways …
Ku
The act of conjuring remarkable sound from found objects is at the very heart of this recording from American musicians Greg Davis and Jeph Jerman. Having met in Arizona some years back, Davis and Jerman commenced working together on a series of recording projects. Improvising with a range of implements and devices ranging from sticks, stones and lo-fi electronics to prepared instruments, gongs and broken percussion, the pair sought to develop a personal language that reflected their individual …
Wakool
Recorded over a series of four Sunday afternoons, Wakool is an interrogation into an expanded range of techniques and gestures applied to instruments including banjo, electroacoustic guitar, bandura, and eukolin. In part an antidote to laborious studio process, this project privileges live stereo recordings without additional overdubs, processing or equalization. The varied and spontaneous nature of David's effortless playing across an eclectic range of instruments was recorded transparently to …