★Room40
The Voice of Theseus
From Yann Novak In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos’ minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any orig…
Der Krater
A note from Valerio Tricoli: "It is always very, very difficult for me to write about the music I was personally involved in making. As a matter of fact, a good reason for me to make music is precisely that I don't want to be a writer, and also to be able to shut up... for once. Yet, once a record is finished, invariably arrives the request from the publisher - in this case the great Lawrence English -- asking for a 'press sheet', a very weird, but apparently necessary form of literature in whic…
Vakning
Tip! "Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing holds for anyone, any time or anything.
As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper thin crust, the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable.
There are moments though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the surface of the planet si…
Fluid To The Influence
Restock 2023. CD version. Chris Abrahams returns with Fluid To The Influence. Building upon the foundation of his previous three editions for Room40, Abrahams charts out a divergent course through lilting piano flows, distended organ passages, thunderous electronic eruptions, and focused concrète explorations. Fluid To The Influence spans a huge spectrum of sound, each movement calling forward to the next in a flowing motion that demonstrates Abrahams's commitment to and interest in the album as…
Black Flamingo
Incomparable bluesman Mike Cooper marks over 50 years of deadly cool and restless experimentation with a masterful melange of free jazz, Oceanic, and Hawaiian inspirations in his umpteenth hallucinatory collage
Neural
Intense, mind-bending, and spectral long-form drone works inspired by the way neural networks self-organise thru repetition, variation and reiteration. Features input of Lucio Capece and Judith Hamman.
Atmospheres And Disturbances
"Atmospheres and Disturbances registers the changes in high altitude ecologies caused by increasing global temperatures. The composition is based on field work undertaken at the High-Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland where for four weeks I deployed various recording devices around the station, and in the surrounding alpine environment to register natural, anthropogenic and geophysical forces. The project provides new encounters of an endangered alpine environment to enhance …
The Clear Distance
"I got a note from Stephen. As the consummate archiver he had inherited a tape of an interview with me in 1985 done with Kevin Concannon, in particular about my music production. He points out that in it I mention “a device called a digital delay” that I had been exploring. A Deltalab Effectron II Digital Delay, which let you make little short 1 second loops and manually inject other sounds among other things – nice kind of kluge aesthetic. We knew each other through Electronic Arts Intermix wh…
Empty, Expanding, Collapsing
"Empty, Expanding, Collapsing was recorded in the months after the release of 2021’s No Lasting Form. Whilst No Lasting Form documented a return to the creative process after a long period away, Empty, Expanding, Collapsing comes from a more confident and assured place. At the heart of this record is an upright piano, loaned from a dear friend for safe keeping. Built in the 1898, the piano is heavy, laden with time, a resonant lead sound board and the carefully restored hammers and strings.
Thes…
Chimæra I
Tip! A body is bounded. It operates within physical limitations and biological constraints. Whilst some see these physiological boundaries as a terminus, others such as Colin Stetson perceive them as a nexus of possibility, and perhaps even of expansion. It is in this zone of unsteady tension and promise that his new album Chimæra dwells. Collecting a series of extended drone works for saxophone, Chimæra charts an entirely new thread of work for Stetson. This thread simultaneously maintains stat…
Long Drove
‘Long Drove’, the title of Scott’s first edition for Room40, is a location in the Fens close to the home of British composer, multi-instrumentalist and mastering engineer Simon Scott. It is the connective pathway between two nature reserves, called Holme Fen and New Decoy, and both sites are part of a habit restoration project called The Great Fen Project and is close to where Scott grew up as a child. This area first became a location of compositional inspiration over a decade ago, when Scott c…
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…
Agitas Al Sol
Rafael Anton Irisarri’s works from Room40 have always dwelled in a place of pressure. His low fre-quency excursions have charted out a unique voyage into a territory in which texture and density are equally matched to create a visceral, but ultimately comforting zone of entanglement. At the same time as completing his Solastalgia edition, Irisarri recorded Agitas Al Sol. Like its sibling work, this album is an enveloping sonic drift that traces across the unsteady topographies of the anthro-poce…
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…