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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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HH 03210751LP
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The debut release from the trio of Chris Abrahams (piano), Clayton Thomas (bass and preparations), and Miles Thomas (drums and percussion). Words Fail is an intergenerational meeting of the minds. Their inaugural collaboration bears the traces of each artist's deep immersion in Sydney's storied improvisation scene. Chris Abrahams, widely acclaimed for his history with The Necks is the elder statesman. Clayton Thomas, co-founder of the vital NOWnow concert series and annual festival as well as both the Splinter (Sydney) and Splitter (Berlin) Orchestras, has been a pioneering force for some years. Whilst newcomer Miles Thomas (no relation) is a serial collaborator with a unique instrumental voice, representing the new guard and showing that the future of the scene is in safe hands. Despite the quintessential trio format, the sound world subverts the instrumentation across four expansive improvisations. Chris Abrahams begins proceedings with a lone piano note, repeating like droplets of water on a glassy lake, the interwoven textures of Clayton Thomas's prepared double-bass and Miles Thomas's foley-like percussion -- sounding on occasion like something out of Xenakis's Pithoprakta -- soon attempt to pull things into deeper, darker waters. Recorded by Richard Belkner at Free Energy Device. Mixed by Miles Thomas. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler, Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. Painting by Amanda Tsioutis. Design and layout by WBYK. "Tip On" gatefold; includes download.
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HH 0321075LP
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In 1977 the US government sent two unmanned probes -- Voyager I and Voyager II -- on a one-way journey into interstellar space. On board each craft, a carefully etched golden record containing sonic artefacts of life on earth, including fragments of Bach and traditional musics, sounds of animals and nature, an audio realization of the "music of the spheres" and children's laughter. As the 40th anniversary of the mission loomed, the three artists, working here together for the first time, locked themselves in a dark studio, armed with three things: a gleaming desktop computer and microphone running custom software (pulled from a previous gallery installation by Tim Bruniges), a pair of keyboards from the era, and a laboriously hunted-down playlist of fragments from the original golden record (this was before the Ozma boxset existed...) The setup was such that Bruniges and Julian Day could each hear Matt McGuigan's collaged Voyager excerpts but not each other's responses, like a sonic exquisite corpse. Each artist brings insights from their diverse extra-musical practices, sound art, film making and writing, which lends a keenly sculptural approach to the material. The results are mysterious and evocative, like a submerged fever dream. The release includes a poignant lyric essay "Termination Shock" that ruminates on the Voyager program, comparing the implicit melancholy of its steady recession with a long-distance relationship coming apart. Recorded and mixed by Matt McGuigan. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler, Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. Design and layout by WBYK. "Tip On" jacket; includes download.
Julian Day (New York) is an artist, composer and writer. Their work frames sound as a social and civic practice.
Tim Bruniges (Sydney) is a musician and visual artist. His installations and performances make use of live, regenerating sound to foreground the act of listening as an inherently creative and inclusive activity.
Matt McGuigan (Sydney) is a musician, sound-engineer, film-maker and founder of record label and production house, Hospital Hill.
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HH 03210750LP
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Crossed & Recrossed presents two works composed by Peter Knight and inspired by mappings of imagined places by iconic Australian novelist, Gerald Murnane and Italian master, Italo Calvino. Simultaneously celebrating and deconstructing the tropes of minimalism, Crossed & Recrossed creates a series of musical mirages that form on an endless sonic horizon, reflecting and reimagining the wide-open spaces described in Murnane's iconic novel, The Plains and the labyrinthine streets of Calvino's Invisible Cities. Peter Knight's work sets up a post-minimal logic that refracts and disintegrates as you listen. The instrumentation of the chamber jazz orchestra is expanded with the unexpected additions of turntables, a reel-to-reel tape machine and live laptop signal processing. The sounds of acoustic instruments and voices are interwoven with field recordings cut onto vinyl and are filtered and augmented as Knight plays with your perceptions of what is heard and what is imagined. Time folds into itself in a very Calvino-esque manner, leaving you with the trace residue of moments half remembered.
As Artistic Director of one of Australia's leading contemporary music ensembles, the Australian Art Orchestra (AAO), Peter Knight has emerged as a significant force in contemporary music, initiating commissions, collaborations and performances with a diverse range of artists including recently: Anthony Braxton, Nicole Lizée, Amir ElSaffar and Alvin Lucier. He has also performed his works with the Orchestra at major international festivals.
The Australian Art Orchestra was formed in 1994 and is Australia's leading contemporary music ensemble. It explores the meeting points between disciplines and cultures, and imagines new musical forms to reflect the energy and diversity of 21st century Australia.
Crossed & Recrossed features an embarrassingly rich list of performers including: Simon Barker (drums), Erkki Veltheim (violin), Joe Talia (Revox tape machine), Vanessa Tomlinson (vibraphone), Tilman Robinson (electronics) and Andrea Keller (piano), to name just a few.
This deluxe gatefold edition features a reproduction of a new original text by Gerald Murnane. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler, Dubplates & Mastering Berlin. "Tip On" gatefold; includes download.
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HH 3190749LP
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Ben Carey is a Sydney-based saxophonist, composer and technologist. His practice is profoundly informed and extended by technology, through the creation of audio-visual works, the development of his interactive performance software: _derivations and more recently, his fixation on modular synthesis. Ben's work is driven by a fascination with the symbiotic relationships that develop between human and machine in composition and performance. His work has been performed and exhibited at numerous national and international festivals. He is also a serial collaborator, working regularly with artists/ensembles such as Zubin Kanga, Joshua Hyde, Ollie Bown (Tangents), Sonya Holowell, Kusum Normoyle, Alon Ilsar, Sydney Chamber Opera, and others.
"The three pieces on this record are the result of live interactions with complex and unwieldy networks of electricity, realized on a small Eurorack modular synthesizer system in the studio sometime between late 2017-mid 2018. Over the past few years this instrument has become a core part of my musical practice. For me, working with a modular synthesizer is about experiencing musical composition as an interactive process, where the lines between sound design, composition and improvisation are enticingly hazy. The first two pieces are edited from longer improvised sessions on the instrument. 'Peaks' evolves from a single, restless microtonal line into a sea of metallic resonances and unstable bass snarls. Named after the Danish physicist Søren Absalon Larsen, the second work explores a gestural language based around audio-feedback, the acoustic phenomenon he discovered. Feeding the outputs of filters, oscillators and amplifier circuits back into their inputs, 'Larsen' exploits the resultant textural, timbral and rhythmic instability of these chaotic vibrations. Finally, the long-form improvisation 'Networks Articulated' drives relentlessly forward through active surface textures to arrive at a monolithic, suspended noise-scape woven from un-synced oscillators, swirling filters and crackling analog noise." --Ben Carey
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HH 12180748LP
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The Vanishing is the long-awaited return of abstract electronic duo Oren Ambarchi and Martin Ng, in a remarkable collaboration with the acclaimed new music group Ensemble Offspring. Working together with the ensemble in 2013 for a series of concerts and recording sessions, Ambarchi and Ng developed a suite of pieces that build on the distinctive sonic language established by their three previous duo albums -- released between 2000 and 2006 -- of ringing bell-like tones and sustained hums with a new palette of acoustic textures. Recording material together as a duo as they had in the past, Ambarchi and Ng then supervised Ensemble Offspring as they recreated these recordings on their instruments, using the original recordings as audio scores. The result is a disorienting play of mirroring and imitation that blurs the boundaries between acoustic & electronic sound. On the opening piece, the aptly named "Simulacrum I", bowed violin harmonics mimic feedback tones and dispersed vibraphone attacks recall the glitching bell textures prominent in Ambarchi and Ng's earlier work for electric guitar and turntable, which were themselves often uncannily reminiscent of acoustic sounds such as Tibetan prayer bowls. On "Woods", two vibrating bass drums create an ominous landscape of rumbling tones that call to mind Ambarchi's past work with abstract doom lords Sunn O))). Channeling giants of 20th century music, such as Giacinto Scelsi and Luigi Nono, as well as contemporary composers like Klaus Lang, the restrained palette of strings and percussion present throughout the record creates a distinct sound world, yet each of the five pieces possesses its own compositional identity. On "Recife" (arranged by Australian composer James Rushford), Ambarchi and Ng's guitar and turntables join Ensemble Offspring for one of the record's highlights, a delicate tapestry woven from subtly overlapping sonic events. Finally, the closing side-long title piece acts as the perfect summation of the record as a whole: beginning in silence, it builds into a densely buzzing texture of closely tuned harmonics before gently returning to the silence from which it came. Intended as the next step in a continuing project in which Ambarchi and Ng will go on to use these two LPs directly as part of their live performances, The Vanishing is a unique document of two artists reimagining the potential of their previous work, made possible through collaboration with a group of world-class musicians.
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HH 2140742CD
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2015 release. Cycle~ 440 are the London-via-Perth duo of Sam Gillies and Kevin Penkin. Their semi-improvisational electro-acoustic explorations fuse Kevin's brooding acoustic piano with Sam's fractured laptop sampling and processing to create soundscapes of alternately extreme fragility and overwhelming density. Both Penkin and Gillies are former students of Australian sound artist, composer and graphic score exponent Cat Hope. The Topography of Ascending Frameworks marks the final installment of the Constructions Trilogy; a longform conceptual recording project that explored a large scale idea-based framework to guide improvised composition. The trilogy began in 2011 with The Geography of Collapsing Structures, a study of deconstructive forces as applied to composition. In 2012, Cycle~ 440 recorded The Cartography Of Shifting Planes, an exploration of the musical potential of the line and of constant variation through minimal gestures. Finally, 2015's The Topography Of Ascending Frameworks explores the power of growth, utilizing musical structures characterized by excessive development and departure. The Topography of Ascending Frameworks boasts a strikingly scientific title, but it is by no means a cold or clinical listen. It ticks forward with quiet, sanguine momentum, bubbles under its still surface, surges with warped strands of noise pitted against contemplative piano chords and seethes with ominous drones and unsettling oscillations. Every moment exudes a unique blend of granular detail and zoomed-out expansiveness. Cycle~ 440 are winners of the 2013 WAM Experimental Song of the Year award for "So We Beat On, Boats Against The Current". Deluxe CD; limited edition.
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HH 4130739CD
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2013 release. "There is no argument; Merzbow stands as the most important artist in noise music. The moniker of Japanese artist Masami Akita has appeared on over four hundred albums since 1979. The name comes from German artist Kurt Schwitters' famous work Merzbau, in which he transformed the interior of his house with found objects. This is reflected in Akita's junk art / collage aesthetic. Other influences on the Merzbow philosophy range from ritualized eroticism (fetishism and bondage), surrealism to extreme metal and animal rights. Since the early 2000s Akita has been a vegan and dedicated animal rights activist. Many of his releases are dedicated to or about particular animals. Kookaburra documents a rare live appearance of Merzbow down-under, capturing his solo performance in Sydney, Australia, May 2012. Following a slew of archival boxset releases and a relative scarcity in new recordings, Kookaburra comes at an opportune time to showcase the current solo Merzbow live sound. Leaving aside the more melodic and ambient touches heard on recent studio albums, Kookaburra cuts straight to the chase with 60 minutes of blissfully dense noise, brimming with endless detail. Differing from previous Merzbow live albums, the trademark loops are now buried deep within a monolithic torrent of black noise, characterized by both analog and digital flavors. The world of Kookaburra is built upon impenetrably thick walls of low-end oomph and filled with relentlessly caustic textures from which distorted howls, wild oscillations and inexorable pulsations rear their monstrous heads. This monolithic single track is remarkable for its incredibly hypnotic journey along an enormous arc of sonic strata that is both glacial in its pacing and molten in its unyielding force. This is Merzbow at his most elemental and Kookaburra boldly displays the king of noise's most focused exploration of stunningly powerful noise in recent years." --Alex Pozniak Deluxe CD; limited edition.
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HH 4130740CD
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2013 release. "Cat's Squirrel is a live recording of Masami Akita and Oren Ambarchi's performance in Sydney, Australia in May 2012. Although Akita and Ambarchi have known one another since 1993 and performed together as part of larger ensembles, this was their first performance as a duo. Together they create a massive wall of sound that moves from the cavernous to the blisteringly psychedelic, laying down shifting low-end structures over which pointillist details ricochet across the stereo field. Akita and Ambarchi's voices blend together into a sonic morass. Moving through a number of episodes, from deluges of reverberated metal screeches to rapid-fire iterations of visceral electronic tones, the record reaches a high point midway through the second side, where Akita's electronics gradually thin out into a stream of skipping chirps and screeches while around him Ambarchi builds up a dense mass of phasing low-end guitar tones; the duo patiently developing an impenetrable wall of ecstatic, psychedelic noise." --Francis Plagne Deluxe CD; limited edition.
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HH 12130741CD
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2014 release. Andrew Batt-Rawden is a Sydney-based composer, performer, and publisher. His practice is cross-platform and all-embracing. Though initially stemming from an almost traditional sense of 'the composer', Andrew fuses elements of gesture, choreography, new technology, text, performance art, and mixed-media into his work and has a wide-ranging history of inter-disciplinary collaboration. His current focus is on incorporating all the senses into the audience experience by integrating data feeds to affect live electroacoustic performance, particularly with the use of heartbeat and movement data and by building algorithmic software that works with both light and sound; a collision of chamber/art music and technology. Chris Mansell has been called 'a significant voice in Australian poetry'. She began as an editor and poet in the '70s and since then has chosen to live an isolated rural life. She is the recipient of multiple awards for her work and continues to publish with regularity. Her writing has been described as 'stylistically and thematically groundbreaking'. One emerges from the experience of reading it disturbed and challenged. Its haunting rhythms do not easily let go. Seven Stations (In Any Order) is a collaboration between a young composer and a multi-award winning poet, combining elements of contemporary chamber music, electric instruments, electronics, and voice with a vivid text. It is a cheerfully profane song-cycle, using the railway stations of the city's center as the focus of its imagery. Deluxe CD and booklet; limited edition.
"Like every city, the soundscape is a constant hum of people, traffic lights, cars, buses, birds. Depending on where you are, you also hear water, trains, music. Depending on when you are, your ears pick up the scurry of rats and possums, the asymmetrical rhythm of drunken steps in cloppy heels punctuated by profane outbursts, laughter, and conversation in many languages. Some people open their mouths and the sound of bank notes flap with their tongues. Others speak with a smile full of shark teeth, ever-ready to take a nip. The lucidity of the dream that created the structures holding this city together - something beautiful yet strange." --Andrew Batt-Rawden
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HH 11140744CD
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2014 release. Bud Petal is the stage name of musician Eran Asoulin. His music has been described as 'cerebral art-folk' & 'the music Lord Byron would be making had he lived in the 21st century'. Bud is a true outsider, a freak-folk wunderkind who has been compared to Syd Barret and Daniel Johnston. But don't for a minute think him primitive or naive - Bud is worldly beyond his years and holds a PhD in both linguistics and philosophy. He was 'discovered' when his self-produced first album was pulled from the trash at a local radio station. A self-taught musician from The Levant, he spent his teenage years immersed in the bohemian/DIY art scene of Newtown, Sydney. His music collides Mediterranean '70s/'80s folk pop (Lucio Battisti, Nada Malanima, Aviv Geffen), the Middle Eastern/Arabic music of his childhood (Marcel Khalife, Oum Khaltoum), and from the west: early Joan Baez and elements of free jazz. Once you come to terms with his voice - a glorious, effortful glissading din with stuttering vibrato - lyrically you'll find an oddly surreal, socialist-utopian world with strands of Emile Zola, A. B. Yehoshua, Yaakov Shavtai, Andre Breton, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Stephen J. Gould. The making of Fabric Cordial was a two-year adventure, written in small German towns, cities of The Levant & the inner west of Sydney. It sees Bud Petal create an idiosyncratic world of sounds and stories. Folk songs dressed in screeching sax, freeform guitars, makeshift choirs, droning e-bows & Bud's ever-strained but mesmerizing voice. Deluxe CD and booklet; limited edition.
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HH 3160745LP
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Limited restock. Chicago-based Australian vocalist Jessica Aszodi is a performer of notated and improvised music, a researcher, and curator. She bridges the worlds of contemporary art music and the experimental with total conviction. In her genre-bounding career Jessica has premiered over 70 new pieces of notated music, performed works that have lain dormant for centuries and collaborated with a constellation of artists. She is co-director of the vocal festival Resonant Bodies Australia. Prayer for Nil is a composer/performer experiment for electronics and voice. Each piece is its own microcosm of unfolding connections, decisions and influences, negotiating varying degrees of control and freedom. If there is a common thread amongst them, it is that they all push her vocalic body towards its limits. The voice on this record is not the voice of a unified and cogent human, it is the mutable voice of someone wailing unrestrained in passionate argument. The composers are Anthony Pateras (Mike Patton, PIVIXKI, Pateras/Fox), James Rushford (Oren Ambarchi, Golden Fur), Alexander Garsden (Erkki Veltheim, Melbourne Symphony), and Jeanette Little (Speak Percussion).
"In Anthony Pateras' "Prayer for Nil" the electronics are a swell of voices so dense they seem inhuman, amassed like a threatening cloud. As the piece unfolds the masses thin to a taper. By its conclusion the solitary singer is left brutally alone, though it's hard to tell if she wasn't alone the whole time - every voice in the throng was my own. In "[ja] maser" Alexander Garsden deals with relationships between groups of pitches and non-traditional vocal utterances to create cresting swarms of vocality that grow, splinter and re-germinate. In the second half of the piece, a more vulnerable voice emerges, broken and crumpled in the low depths of my range. James Rushford's piece is the most overtly inspired by composer-performer relationship. Composed material was conveyed to me though an audio-score, piped point-blank into my ear. In Jeanette Little's "Mechanical Bride", my singing voice represents anima in an automated world. The text comes from Enrico Cavacchioli's 1914 poem, Let the moon be damned, in which he describes a decaying environment where humans entwine with machines. The dystopic picture painted in this poem still convinces. As I perform this piece, I stage inside myself a battle between flaw-filled human expressivity and savage, ancient machines. Jeanette's sound world pays homage to an analog era, mid-century modernist instrumental and electronic techniques in a milieu that is something like a space-western."
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HH 6140743CD
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2014 release. Zubin Kanga is a modern-day David Tudor; he is at the forefront of 21st century avant-garde piano music, not only as a performer but also as a prolific commissioner of new works. Zubin has collaborated with many of the world's leading composers including Steve Reich, Beat Furrer, Thomas Ades, and Michael Finnissy. His teacher and mentor Rolf Hind was a pianist signed to the infamous Factory Records (Joy Division, Cabaret Voltaire) who instilled a borderless view of 'classical' music in him. Zubin has performed for the BBC Proms, as well as with the Bang-on-a-Can Allstars, Eighth Blackbird, and Ensemble Plus-Minus. Zubin's more recent concerts have aimed to extend the possibilities of the pianist, incorporating mixed-media and extended techniques as well as exploring the interaction between gesture and technology. Zubin is fitted with motion sensors which track his movement and give him direct sound-shaping control. This all plays out with him transplanted into films, virtually multiplied and layered, drowned in electronics and climbing on and in the piano in a La Monte Young/Fluxus salute. It could be said that he has aligned himself with the '"New Discipline" - a European scene defined by composer Jennifer Walsh which assimilates theatrics, absurdism, video art, the Internet and pop culture - although he still most definitely fly's the flag for pure contemporary classical music. Zubin is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Paris at one of the world's leading music technology research institutes - as well as Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music, where his research on new approaches to performer-technology interactions is published widely. The heyday of the graphic score was the 1960s; composers like Bussotti and Cardew picked up on the ideas first put forward by pioneers like Feldman and Brown, developing non-conventional music notation into elaborate and artistic scores. Not Music Yet for solo piano is a watercolor graphic score by Berlin-based Australian composer, David Young. Composed for Kanga, the performer is to consider it a time-space score (pitch read on the vertical axis and time on the horizontal). They should make three equal passes, reading left to right, playing only the black parts of the painting first, followed by white then blue. The work can be performed in either seven or 42 minute versions. Young recommends the use of a stopwatch to aid exact timing. Further, every attempt should be made to realize the graphics' contours and shapes as carefully and precisely as possible. Recorded with incredible detail on a 102-key Stuart and Sons piano. Deluxe CD and booklet with score image; limited edition.
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