ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

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From Michalis Moschoutis: "Observing visual and auditory patterns of slowly moving objects, induces a comforting sense. Whether random or organized, complex or simple, intentional or incidental, seen, felt or listened to, most physical movements carry a reassuring message; the receiver is alive, earth is in orbit exerting a gravitational force upon all matter and time has a constant flow which can be measured through the periodic succession of physical phenomena. It was upon these fundamental principles that visual artist Roman Signer built a large body of fascinating works which have had a great impact on me since a young age . . . In the realm of sound, I was recently introduced by orchestra director and good friend Ilan Volkov, to the work of Pierre Berthet and Tetsuya Umeda. In 2018 I invited Pierre Berthet to perform at Borderline Festival and the following year, in the context of Tectonics Athens we programmed, together with Ilan Volkov, Umeda's solo show. Onstage, both artists explored various physical phenomena whose visual and auditory effects were of equal significance. Their seemingly meaningless actions bore an indefinable emotive strength and revealed a profound attachment of artists to sounding objects. As a listener I was totally immersed in the intensity of the moment and found meaning in intended and unintended actions and events . . . Being a bad liar in actual life, I've always inclined to transparent creative processes as experienced in the work of artists like Roman Signer, Pierre Berthet and Tetsuya Umeda. In a similar manner, I see this record as nothing more than a sonic imprint of a series of actions and reactions, assembled and composed into a four-track album. I perceive all of the following sounds simply as movements that have resonated within me over the past few years; the touch of contact microphones on various surfaces, vibrating strings loosened to the extend they no longer produce audible tones, myself swimming in the sea, the underwater crackling of rocks, Thalia Ioannidou's heavy breathing, Ingi Garðar Erlendsson's solo thranophone performance in Reykjavík in 2014, oscillating springs, rotating cymbals, subtle movements of tuning pegs and knobs, scrubbing of piano strings, Sofia Labropoulou playing with the mandals of her qanun, pressing keys, patting strings, moving pedals and knee levers of a pedal steel guitar, Ilan Manouach's close-mic'ed soprano saxophone and soft mouth sounds. With Classical Mechanics I invite the listener to an intimate space I find as immersive as a large venue resonating to the throbbing frequencies of a full-range PA."

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Over the past decade, Richard Chartier's Pinkcourtesyphone has charted a cruelly lush passage through the extravagant interiors of psyche. A master of the melancholic, Pinkcourtesyphone's Leave Everything To Be Desired carves an effortlessly gorgeous chasm of sound that is profusely abundant with swelling melody, luxuriant texture and a perfume as dampening as one could possibly imagine. The follow-up to Pinkcourtesyphone's previous collection of negative mood music Indelicate Slices (RM 490CD) has arrived and it is even more of a sonic banquet than its predecessor. Leaving Everything To Be Desired is a sumptuous serenade revealing with candor the essence of the many careful adjectives used for situational descriptions. Pinkcourtesyphone swerves range out of another interior from sparkling dream-soft shimmers of strings, creamy arrangements, drifting drones, to dissected cha-chas. Sometimes charmingly flamboyant, sometimes darkly wistful, sometimes deadeningly soothing, sometimes abrasively tender, but always engaging and ultimately engulfing of us. This recording of temporal extravagances is meant to enhance with all the pillow-y richness of high fidelity to bring you every fascinating hue and shade of sound. Its soft-focus aesthetics lull the mind's ear into a state of woozy intoxication, comfortably unsteady underfoot. This could be the album you felt you have been entitled to, designed to be kept nearby. And so... recline... its night, late late night... without sleep the dreamtime has come and gone leaving us with perhaps an uncomfortable predictability suddenly we can no longer deny the shock of each moment.

$23.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 9/11/2020

From David Toop: "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 but almost nothing of substance as all that beauty is crushed, burned, dug up, wiped out, to be replaced by banality, so it's about a language of love and desire in which we speak openly to all the unknowns, the speculative, the ancestral, the forgotten, the different, the extinct, the unimaginably distant and vast, the incomprehensibly small and intimately close, the fast or the slow, as if as we spoke we were becalmed in a wooden galleon off the coast of Java, sleeping microscopically in soil of a thousand years hence, hearing the voice of a dead person from the rim of a vibrating cup, gliding backwards and weightless through the alleyways of a city unrecognizable yet heartbreaking in its poverty, speaking in conference with winged and amphibious beings, crouching in a cavern whose opening only reveals the specter of many wonders now apprehended as memories of the skin, heard through cheekbones, nostrils, the crepitation as a neck turns, pains of the knee and thumb and some not yet fully understood sensation within the throat which suggests a way of comprehending that which is being lost of this magical place. All I desire is what already exists or once existed, now falling asleep outside the world. Don't ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares? Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box . . . Apparition painting is the term used to describe a certain type of ancient Chinese painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In these works, often associated with Chan (Zen) teachings, the ink used to depict the subject was exceptionally pale, the background lacking in any detail. As Yukio Lippit has written: 'This combination results in remarkably self-dissembling images that somehow compromise their own visibility. Apparition painting appears to capture its subjects in mid-fade, as if managing to preserve only a dimly translucent afterimage of a bygone entity.'"

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Field Recording and Fox Spirits is a collection of personal recordings -- from the field, from performance, from interviews -- that sketch out the breadth of David Toop's work over the past five decades. The recordings exist both as individual memories and as a hazy auditory daydream-like collage woven together by Lawrence English. Additionally, the edition includes a 40-page book, consisting of an extended in conversation with David Toop, which features extensive visual works and photographs from his archive.

From David Toop: "What are field recordings? 'My memory is not what it used to be, David,' my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria's funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat. Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious. During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted..."

$23.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 8/28/2020

Harbors is a collaboration of composers Ellen Fullman (Long String Instrument) and Theresa Wong (cello), which draws inspiration from the soundscapes, stories, and atmospheres that manifest around bodies of water that propagate exchange. Structured around the extended harmonics of the open strings of the cello, Wong and Fullman utilize subsets of these tonal areas to create distinct sonic environments within the piece. Fullman's Long String Instrument, a stunning installation of over forty strings spanning seventy feet in length, places the performers and audience inside the actual resonating body, transforming the architecture itself into the musical instrument. Wong has developed techniques that take the cello beyond tradition into a vocabulary more closely rooted in the sounds of the natural world. She captures material electronically, layering textures amplified throughout the space which form an immersive field where figure and ground are in constant flux. The piece reveals an orchestration of shifting drones, aberrant melodies and glistening atmospheres. Harbors has reverberated many spaces around the world, including: Click Festival, Helsingør, Denmark; Transformer Station, Cleveland; MONA FOMA, Tasmania; Centennial Hall, Sydney Festival; The Lab, San Francisco; and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. An iconic American figure in experimental music, Ellen Fullman is the creator of the long string instrument, in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, spanning fifty to over a hundred feet in length. Her work has encompassed the study of Just Intonation tuning theory, developing a tablature graphic notation system, experiments with various wire alloys and gauges, and wooden resonator design and fabrication. In 2020 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Theresa Wong is a composer, cellist and vocalist active at the intersection of music, experimentation, improvisation, and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her works include The Unlearning (Tzadik, 2011), 21 songs for violin, cello and 2 voices inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings, O Sleep, an improvised opera for an eight-member ensemble exploring the conundrum of sleep and dream life and Venice Is A Fish (2014), a collection of solo songs. She currently works and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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Room40 continues its series of archival releases from Tokyo noise maestro Merzbow with an unreleased work originally recorded in 1997. EXD is like some kind of pulse driven industrial electronics experiment. It grinds with an uneasy sense of determination, rupturing outward into caustic waves of Merzbow's trademarked harsh noise. Across the middle years of the 1990s, Merzbow (Masami Akita) refined a stochastic language for harsh noise that had emerged from his studio experiments at the beginning of that decade. This technique, which involved a combination of self-made instruments, synthesizers, tabletop effects and, in the case of EXD, drum machines, often recorded at incredible levels to create a uniquely visceral distortion, has essentially become the benchmark for noise music in the 21st century. A devout archivist, Merzbow's unreleased works from this period are finally getting the attention they deserve. Editions like Noise Mass, issued by Room40 in 2019 (RM 4108CD), are amongst a growing number of releases that document the gradual unfolding of his signature approach to overabundance of frequency and ceaseless sonic chaos. Recorded at the end of 1997 and early 1998, EXD owes its title to the Bias Rockaku-kun EXD 5ch analog drum synthesizer. It is an exercise in maximal minimalism. Using repeated phrases, atmospheric, but reductive drum patterns, and tightly wound pulses, Merzbow calls up a vision proto-industrial technoscape. Bathed in white noise, it is a music in which the reassurance of the kick drum is largely torn away, sending the music into an uneasy orbital decay. It's the sound of warning systems onboard a satellite as it begins to burn up, falling back to earth. An exquisite sonic evisceration. What makes EXD quite unusual is it reveals, in part at least, some of the skeletal structures Merzbow deploys in the creation of his works. It's especially revealing, as this period is mostly recognized for its unending shower of brutalizing harsh noise. On the title track "EXD" a Roland TR-606 drum machine folds into and out of focus. Its grooves ruptured by, and then become gradually consumed in, a field of phasing noise and distortion. Includes poster.

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Australian master percussionist Eugene Ughetti teams up with composers Anthony Pateras, Liza Lim, Robin Fox, and others to create a series of deeply textured and intensely executed solo percussion works. Exploding out the ideas of his chosen instruments, Ughetti's work is relentless in its search for new articulations and extended readings, seeking entirely new methods of approaching percussion.

From Eugene: "This album is a distillation of the many long-term relationships I've had with Australian composers. The music forms a body of work, spanning fifteen years, that provides a glimpse into my percussive language and a 21st century Australian percussion sound. In many instances the pieces on this album were the germ for larger scale compositions and collaborations, forming some of the major works for Speak Percussion, the organisation I currently direct. Sitting around these solo works are other percussion solos, trios, quartets, sextets, twelve-tets, mixed ensemble works and an opera. Each of these projects have cumulatively deepened my creative rapport with the represented artists. Major works of note include Liza Lim's 'Atlas of the Sky' (opera for solo soprano, 3 percussion soloists and 20-person crowd), Alex Garsden's 'tolle lege, tolle lege...' (spatialized percussion quartet with electronics), a co-composition with Robin Fox entitled 'TRANSDUCER' (quartet, live electronics and eight channel speaker system), James Rushford's 'Whorl Would Equal Reaches' (percussion sextet with electronics), Thomas Meadowcroft's 'So Long Country' (mixed ensemble and electronics), and Anthony Pateras' 'Flesh and Ghost' (percussion twelve-tet), among others. I am attracted to sound that speaks more to concept than to musical convention and in performance more than concert. In Agglomeration Of Measurement my artistic practice is articulated through experimental techniques exploring feedback, microtonality, micro-percussion, post instrumental practice and an investigation into broader non-musical concepts. I am indebted to these composers for their exceptional artistry and collaboration and to Speak Percussion for providing the extraordinary platform for these works to flourish."

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Room40 present a reissue of Phill Niblock's G2,44+/X2, originally released in 2002. Matte laminate embossed sleeve; includes insert card and 24-page book with liner notes from Bill Meyer, interview, and photos. Design by Traianos Pakioufakis.

Liner notes from Bill Meyer: "In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, 'You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough.' In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual six hour-long solstice concert at the Experimental lntermedia loft; not only did the neighbors complain, the landlord sued. But the validity of his prescription is undiminished, for it takes sonic volume and spatial confinement to unlock his music's true nature. Give the sound waves a boost and something hard to smack against, and they begin to shiver and multiply so that tones transform tones and every turn of the head (or every new room) yields a new listening experience. But 'Guitar Too, For Four' is notable in Niblock's oeuvre for its independence from loudness. While it sounds great turned up, the additive process that yielded the CD's two versions has resulted in music that changes most rewardingly, even when heard at modest volume. Victor Frankl opined that in the hierarchy of essential human motivations, meaning eclipses pleasure. In some ways, this music hews closer to the pleasure principle. Once you let go of the yearning for tunes and grooves, it's a sensuous delight to dunk yourself in the warm sound-bath of his music. And Niblock would be the first person to scotch any efforts to assign the sort of cosmic significance that certain other drone-oriented minimalists did to their art. But consider this notion; Niblock's music is fundamentally social. It only truly happens in spaces where people gather. While he does much of the composing and assembling of this music alone, Niblock didn't treat 'Guitar Too, For Four' as finished until he got some more people in on the act. He asked Rafael ToraI and Jim O'Rourke to contribute to a CD edition. And when O'Rourke declined to play on his own production, but instead invited Kevin Drumm, Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, and Lee Renaldo to do the honors, Niblock's reaction was the more, the merrier. To the extent that connecting people is an essentially meaningful activity, this music is the connective tissue of meaning."

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In June/July 2019, Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow traveled 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 legendary Australia fauna icons like the Australian White Ibis, Little Penguins, and various other native species. As a vegan, his affinity for the natural world is unconditional. With this in mind he has announced all profits from this edition will be donated to assisting wildlife recovery in the wake of the Australia bushfire crisis of the past few months. Room40 will be matching all money raised. StereoAkuma is a live recording made on Friday July 5th 2019 at The Substation, Melbourne.

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Room40 present a reissue of Analapos, the debut recording by legendary Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki, originally released in 1980. Recovered and is presented here in a newly remastered edition complete with the most extensive documentation to date of Akio Suzuki's development and practices surrounding his most iconic self-designed instrument, the Analapos. In 1979, Akio Suzuki recorded a performance, "New Sense Of Hearing", at the Nagoya American Centre. During the performance, Suzuki used voice, turntables, glass harmonica, and his self-designed instrument the Analapos to create a series of improvised pieces that effectively charted out his sonic investigations for the proceeding decades. In 1980 these recordings were issued by ALM records as Analapos, the first work made publicly available by Akio Suzuki. For going on six decades now, Akio Suzuki has been responsible for creating amongst the most otherworldly, yet deeply affective sound works of his generation. As a musician, sculptor and sound artist, Suzuki's work threads an important linkage between Eastern and Western sound art practices. His approaches, that focus primarily on intense states of listening, 'throwing and following' and a relentless sense of open curiosity, have allowed him to continuously deepen his work. Originally published in an edition of just 200 copies in 1980, Analapos has been out of print literally since its release. Clocking in an over an hour, the original pressing of the recordings to a single LP, presented some technical limitations. This 40th anniversary edition of Analapos is entirely remastered and is published with a booklet that includes a longform interview with Akio Suzuki conducted by sound artist and collaborator Aki Onda, plus extensive photographic documentation of the development of the Analapos. The publication of this edition is announced in conjunction with the Sense Of Ekō retrospective exhibition which opens at The Substation in Melbourne late January.

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Portugal's electro-acoustic maestro reimagines one of his seminal compositions from his lauded Sound Mind Sound Body album (1994). Extracting the harmonic essence of AER 7, Rafael Toral explodes it outward into a fully orchestrated evolving constellation of sound. A remarkably simple and compelling piece of reductive composition, AER 7 G combines piano, harp, vibraphone, clavinet, Rhodes, and sinewaves to create a music that generates sensations of the infinite, through the acoustic.

From Rafael Toral: "... The music I recorded between 1987 and 2003 somehow sends its message and there's a story behind it. By 2006, with 'Space', I radically changed both the message and the story. I have always found that both need to be in tune to what is happening in the world, because they are a response to that. However, since Moon Field (2017), i have been arriving to a 'third phase' that somehow (re)unites the previous two, a space where the divergent messages and stories from those different periods are both needed and make sense in these days. Feeling a general need to slow down almost accidentally shed new light on my background in ambient, inspiring new forms to the future. This is the context where this release is emerging from . . . 'AER 7' (the record's only track) is a piece i wrote in 1992, of which a guitar version is included in my debut album, Sound Mind Sound Body, released two years later. It was a departure from the earlier 'AER' pieces I made from 1987 to 1990, replacing a drone guitar sound with empty space, in a similar kind of structure. The empty units are in sync but their contents are not, rendering the sequence of time events almost random. I had the idea to produce the present 'AER 7 G' version back then, but at the time there were no instrument players in Lisbon who might be interested in it. Commitment to other projects like Wave Field (1995) and all the ensuing work kept it in the drawer until now. A new generation of generous, open-minded, highly skilled musicians made it suddenly possible to develop the project. I have always regarded 'AER 7' as a melodic generator, or 'generative', a word i would learn later on. It's written in a way that prevents repetition and generates unpredictable results, apart from the pace and the set of notes. Curiously, Constellation In Still Time is by far the most quintessentially ambient record i have ever done."

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Argentine born, French based composer Beatriz Ferreyra has played a hushed but utterly critical role in the development of musique concrète since its early days. Working alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the writing of Solfège de l'Objet Sonore, Ferreyra left GRM to pursue her compositional research outside the confines of the institution. Echos+, one of only a few collections of her work available on vinyl, collects three of her most affecting pieces; each of which explore questions of mortality and the afterlife.

Lawrence English: "I'm not really sure when I first heard Beatriz Ferreyra's music. My best guess would be in the early to mid-2000s when I was working alongside the curatorial team at Liquid Architecture. Given the focus of the festival at that time, GRM and musique concrète more generally was very much a point of focus. That said, it wasn't until this decade that her work was sharply in focus for me (and I am guessing a great many others). In 2017, I had the great pleasure to meet Beatriz in Braga, where we both were performing as part of the excellent Semibreve Festival. Subsequent to that I invited her to perform in Australia and we also had the pleasure to send time together this year in Rio during the Novas Frequencies Festival. Across these meetings, I have come to realise the incredible focus, generosity and vision that Beatriz has maintained across her life in sound. Beatriz Ferreyra is one of only a few female concrète composers who were active across the second half of the 20th century through to today. Her work, which is still very much an active investigation, is simultaneously complex and elegantly simple. Often drawing upon singular object of focus, Ferreyra's use of tape and other forms of manipulation radically reconfigure her chosen sound materials, opening them outward. 'Echos' for example is sourced entirely from recordings of her niece who was killed in a car accident and 'The Other Shore' (composed as a response to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead) uses only percussion. Echos+ brings together three of Ferreyra's most engaging compositions. Each of the works are deeply personal, but transcend that position, effortlessly welcoming us inside them. They collectively chart out a broad framework that not only defines her philosophical interests as a composer, but also marks out critical moments in her creative and technical approaches; shifting from her roots in tape music to more digital approaches."

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Room40 present a reissue of Rafael Anton Irisarri's The North Bend, originally released 2010. From Rafael: "The North Bend is about the Pacific Northwest region of the USA, where I lived at the time the album was made. Still, today I consider that region my spiritual home, even though I am now living on the East Coast. I had met Lawrence English in Poland back in 2009 and he kindly invited me to make a record for the label. I was a fan of his releases so this was really an obvious thing for me to say 'yes' to and a chance to create something special. I had released a few EPs and an LP under my name, all influenced by the so-called 'modern classical' ambient style pioneered by the late great Jóhann Jóhannsson and minimalist composers like Harold Budd and Arvo Pärt. The North Bend is the first work that dealt with 'place' and explored a locality, the first in a series of recordings all released with Room40. Since this album came out, I've left the Pacific Northwest for another location, New York state, which couldn't be a starker contrast from the life in the PacNW. I had to start from scratch here in NY, as everything I owned until age 36 was stolen the night before I left to drive to NY. It was both a curse and a blessing. Not having the baggage & pitfalls of old ideas was wonderful, but also losing all the recorded & written works I had was harrowing at the time. Remastering The North Bend seemed like a natural thing for me. Not so much as revisionist history, but rather thinking how to make a record sound in a certain way without being able to revisit any of the mixes. In other words, the creative choices I made at the time (2010) are 100% preserved, there wasn't any opportunity to revisit those, but rather make the record sound as good as I can framed through hindsight and a decade of separation from the period it was created."

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Viennese born, Berlin based electro-acoustic maestro Werner Dafeldecker creates an intense and beautiful musique concrète journey on Parallel Darks. He examines perspective, extreme subjectivity and the specters that haunt our auditory worlds. What are the bounded limits of sense? How is it we come to know the world and moreover how is it that we share that experience collectively? Where are the points of mutual understanding and how can we approach the spectral aspects of our sensing of the world? It's these questions that have shaped the approaches used by Werner Dafeldecker on his first fully fledged electro- acoustic outing. Parallel Darks charts out a divergent, yet relational sound field that reflects an intensity of practice that Dafeldecker has cultivated over the better part of three decades. Concerning himself with sounds that often lie at the periphery of our listening, Parallel Darks layers dense spatial textures into a tightly woven sonic fabric. Calling on materials collected through field recordings, analog synthesis, and through his extended instrumental techniques, Dafeldecker seamlessly draws together these sources, creating an at times blurry harmony between elements that might otherwise appear incongruous or in contest. The sound world Dafeldecker creates is one that is simultaneously musical and profoundly abstract. As potential elements of harmony emerge, they are pulled away through various dynamic interjections, which the draw the focus of the ears. There is no one singular plateau of sound, rather a constant deepening, a beautiful abyss of spectacular pressure and vital acoustic darkness. Recorded across 2018 and 2019, each of the editions two pieces dwell on sounds' capacity to be a specter. Parallel Darks uses sounds at the very threshold of perception that suggest uneasy acoustic spaces and haunted zones within which the rules of listening in the everyday must be abandoned. In these zones, Dafeldecker carefully crafts hidden sonic relations that call for an intensity of listenership.

"It compares music and reality. The music functions like an observer: the music observes reality. And it is precisely the limits of this approach that make us realize something about the observation instrument. The music, the culturally created, thus becomes a metaphor for perception. A perception that can in no way do justice to what has been perceived, and in this failure can tell us all the more about the limits of our perception and about the process of creating reality in perception." --Peter Ablinger

$19.50 IN STOCK

With Slowly Dismantling, Los Angeles based artist Yann Novak problematizes understandings of ambience as homogenous and static. Slowly Dismantling deconstructs ambient, pulling it way from the blank and the atmospheric, refusing the perceived luxury of sound within which context is erased. Reflecting on his formative experiences as a queer youth in middle America, he explores the idea of these acoustic and social spaces as zones of liberation within which a spectrum of identity is formed.

From Yann Novak: "The cover of Slowly Dismantling features the remnants of Hotel Washington, home to the LGBTQ+ community in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin from the '70s until 1996 when it burned down . . . I was 17 when the hotel burned down and had only gone to the cafe a handful of times. What I expected to be the formative site for exploring my newfound queer identity was suddenly lost to the past, and I was left wondering how such a space would have influenced me. What remained in Madison after the fire was only the mainstream version of gay culture . . . Art and music are often identified as 'queer' when they share these same core aesthetics, tropes, and character stereotypes . . . This led me to withdraw; the alienation that came with my introversion made it hard for me to take up space in the world. As my work as an artist and composer progressed, this lack of self confidence became part of my practice. I began using field recordings as a way for me to limit my decision making. I could shape and mold this source material to an extent, but there was always an external structure. While this allowed me to create work that was autobiographical, I was never totally in control of what I was making; thus, I was never fully visible in the work. This all changed following a transformative experience at a queer music gathering in the spring of 2019. I was finally immersed in a queer community that existed outside all dominant cultures, finally allowing me to feel seen as queer without any of the shortcomings the mainstream culture would have me believe . . . As I worked through Slowly Dismantling, it became a liberation from and a reinterpretation of myself. It allowed me to shed my insecurities and routines: grounding my work and process in something outside myself. Instead I choose to utilize digital and analog synthesis, recorded at my studio in Los Angeles and reprocessing recordings captured at MESS in Melbourne and EMS in Stockholm."

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LP version. Australian born, Sweden-based 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 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 bears witness to Chantler's uncompromising sonic articulations. John Chantler's recorded works for electronics are a dichotomy. Each of his editions, whilst entirely refined and composed, maintains a distinct sense of experimentation. Chantler's willingness to forgo the familiar in favor of the unknown or the unexpected has become a recurrent methodology which has resulted in a body of work that is simultaneously united and sprawling; Tomorrow Is Too Late typifies this dichotomy. Across each of the long-form pieces, he brings together unexpectedly vibrant sonic materials that converge and occupy attention with a dynamic intensity that exceeds all of his previous offerings. Rather than considering dynamics purely in terms of amplitude, Chantler uses frequency as means for creating elegant moments where stability is removed and we, as listeners, are left to find our own way amidst the towering, complex patterns he devises. The record also maintains a surrealist sensibility; audio hallucinations manifest, buried within the acoustic substrata. Voices, submerged within electronics hint at some imagined place. They bubble away at the very threshold of audibility. Similarly, stacked oscillating tones create hazy acoustic visions that suggest concrète landscapes, a nod to the storied history of the INA GRM studio. Tomorrow Is Too Late resolves a great many of John Chantler's interrogations into sound. It also opens a new chapter for his work, an aesthetic deepening that is sure to sustain him for many years to come. Chantler works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics. Originally from Australia, he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small festival His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM center for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.

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Australian born, Sweden-based 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 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 bears witness to Chantler's uncompromising sonic articulations. John Chantler's recorded works for electronics are a dichotomy. Each of his editions, whilst entirely refined and composed, maintains a distinct sense of experimentation. Chantler's willingness to forgo the familiar in favor of the unknown or the unexpected has become a recurrent methodology which has resulted in a body of work that is simultaneously united and sprawling; Tomorrow Is Too Late typifies this dichotomy. Across each of the long-form pieces, he brings together unexpectedly vibrant sonic materials that converge and occupy attention with a dynamic intensity that exceeds all of his previous offerings. Rather than considering dynamics purely in terms of amplitude, Chantler uses frequency as means for creating elegant moments where stability is removed and we, as listeners, are left to find our own way amidst the towering, complex patterns he devises. The record also maintains a surrealist sensibility; audio hallucinations manifest, buried within the acoustic substrata. Voices, submerged within electronics hint at some imagined place. They bubble away at the very threshold of audibility. Similarly, stacked oscillating tones create hazy acoustic visions that suggest concrète landscapes, a nod to the storied history of the INA GRM studio. Tomorrow Is Too Late resolves a great many of John Chantler's interrogations into sound. It also opens a new chapter for his work, an aesthetic deepening that is sure to sustain him for many years to come. Chantler works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics. Originally from Australia, he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small festival His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM center for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.

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Tokyo ambient maestro Chihei Hatakeyama's Forgotten Hill is a record about the melting of time. He creates an impressionist meditation on his journey through the Asuka region of Japan; an area known for its burial mounds, epic Buddhist monuments, and quietly poetic landscapes.

From Chihei Hatakeyama: "A few years ago I went on a trip to the Asuka region. This album, Forgotten Hill, draws all of its inspiration from this trip. The experiences I had on this journey were used as compositional guides to compile the sonic impressions I experienced during this time. The Asuka region was once land that hosted the capital of Japan from the Sixth to Seventh centuries. Today, it is an unpopular rice-drenched rural area, and although there are few tourists compared to Kyoto and the northern part of Nara, the region still draws people as there it features various burial mounds, known as 'Kofun'. One of these old burial mounds is called the 'Ishibutai Kofun', which loosely translates as Stone Stage. When I was a child, I learned about the existence of this old burial mound through Tezuka Osamu's Manga and since that time, I always wanted to visit there . . . It was the spring when I visited there, and yet I was the only person in sight. I have no idea what kind of stories are trapped within this tomb, all those things seen and heard by the rock. When I stood in front of it, I was captured by the feeling that I wanted to get on the stone stage, to be consumed by the burial mound. As I went inside the stone chamber I felt a strong sense of pressure. While getting down the stairs leading to the dark stone chamber, this pressure grew stronger, it was a very particular and strange sensation . . .The interior of the stone chamber was like an alien landscape. I couldn't help but think about the Monolith from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . . . With this record, I aimed to create music, like a labyrinth, based on these days spent in the Asuka region. This is a record about time, about losing direction in time and wondering where it is exactly the past, the present and the future might meet, and under what circumstances this might happen."

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Australian electronic composer Todd Anderson-Kunert creates a deeply reductive electronic drone work for Moog System 55. Every recording project explores a gap that exists between uncertainty and realisation. It can be a treacherous zone of investigation, one that can frustrate as easily as it can reward. In this expanse of possibility, artists and musicians traverse a particular set of variables within which the potentials for their chosen work are realised. When Australia artist Todd Anderson-Kunert, commenced work on his debut edition for Room40, Conjectures, he was intent on approaching this zone of entanglement with equal doses of curiosity and strategy. Undertaking a residency at Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, which is run by Room40 comrade Robin Fox and artist Byron Scullin, Anderson-Kunert began trawling through the vast array of synthesisers within the facility. After some time, he began to realise the answer to the creation of Conjectures did not lie in some survey of modern electronics, but rather an interrogation of one machine. With this strategy in grasp, he sat at their Moog System 55 Synthesizer, one of only a few existing in the world and set about creating a delicate but richly timbral album of reductive electronics.

From Todd: "I feel I don't know much, it's not that I feel stupid, but often I feel like I'm trying to engage with the world while simultaneously trying to understand it. It's a gap in some form of knowledge I've learnt to appreciate, a contemplation of details and how they relate, but where many are still unknown. When trying to translate this feeling into linear form, the word 'Conjecture' feels appropriate, mainly due to a complimentary duality of meaning. There is the 'formation of conclusions based on incomplete evidence', and so there is a form of understanding and comprehension without knowing. However there was also what was referred to as an 'obsolete' use, which was the interpretation of occult signs. And so here there is a similar type of guesswork happening, however the material that is being considered could be described as ephemeral, experiential, or maybe at times non-tangible . . . Sonically it uses only electronic sounds in order to interrogate frequency, dynamics, and timbre, being influenced by genres of noise, modern classical, ambient and varieties of electronic experimentation. Recordings that were close to me during this period include works by Eliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi, Pan Sonic, Stephen O'Malley, Okkyung Lee, and The Haters..."

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For well over a decade, Erkki Veltheim has been involved in some of the most critical contemporary sound works performed in Australia. Celebrated widely for his performance approach, that orbits outward from his extended violin practice, Erkki Veltheim's recorded works are grossly under represented. With Ganzfeld Experiment, his first published solo recording, he lays out his methodology for creating music that is intense and provocatively extrasensory. Veltheim's Ganzfeld experiment is an audiovisual work for electric violin, video, and signal processing. In parapsychology, a Ganzfeld experiment is a test for evidence of extrasensory perception, particularly telepathic communication. It is based on the Ganzfeld (German for "total field") effect, which describes the tendency of our central nervous system to invent patterns in random, uniform sensory data, for instance hearing voices in white noise or seeing images in visual static. In a Ganzfeld experiment, a test subject is exposed to such a continuous uniform stimulus field, while another person attempts to send them telepathic messages. Using this premise as a starting point, this edition replicates elements of this experiment in order to explore synaesthetic hallucinations. The electric violin's signal acts as a tool for gradually manipulating and transforming static noise in both the audio and visual domains. Drawing influence from esoteric and occult numerology, Tony Conrad and Brion Gysin's experiments with flicker and the Dreamachine, and Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972), which fuses composition with improvisation in a long-form ecstatic and trance-like work, Ganzfeld Experiment resides in a tradition of transcendental minimalism.

From Erkki: "I'm always interested in how structure interacts with randomness, form with formlessness, and ways in which sound can be used to transform a listener's perception and sense of time and place. I'm also often looking for ways to expand my musical ideas to other media, through ritual, installation, or visual elements. An important motive in my work is the idea that through sound (and these other elements) we can enter different realms of experience: the mystical, the magical, the shamanistic. In Ganzfeld Experiment, as in many other of my works, I'm particularly searching for an ecstatic experience, one that transports the audience outside of their rational, everyday selves. The constantly panning white noise and visual flicker are intended to induce a hallucinatory state where one's sense of time and perception are disoriented, becoming prone to suggestibility by the repetitive but subtly morphing sounds and images."

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Noise Mass matches previously unavailable Merzbow works from 1994 with pieces from the limited-edition Hole album of the same year. This new edition charts the through line between records such as Venereology (1994) and Pulse Demon (1996), and includes a 28-page book, with exclusive photographs, and a long-form interview with Masami Akita charting the continuum of Merzbow from 1979 to the present day. On Noise Mass in the late 1980s, Masami Akita's Merzbow began to shift from being a studio project into a fully-fledged performative undertaking. It was a decisive period that began opening up new possibilities for his very particular approach to sound. Across the first half of the 1990s, Merzbow began touring extensively across Europe, the United States, and also in his homeland. It was during this period that the dynamism of Merzbow exploded and the physicality of volume became a primary driver for the experiential capacity of the work. Simultaneously, Merzbow began developing a range of self-made instruments and techniques for exploiting found objects as sound sources, which he used in combination with amplifiers to create a unique spectrum of noise and feedback both in the studio and live. Noise Mass catalogs a critical period within the continuum of Merzbow. It typifies the radical approaches he developed not just through his music, but also through mastering, pushing the very medium of digital audio to its limit through extreme post-production approaches. Of Noise, Masami Akita remarks, "This was around the time Venereology was released from Relapse and the work of Merzbow became more well known to the world. Far greater quantities of that Relapse release were pressed, and much more promotion along with it. In other words, the image of Merzbow's music as it is best known in the world today came from this time. The music of Merzbow has always been a continuum, the piece added this time to Noise Mass, the revised version of Hole, is a work utilizing a voice similar in style to Venereology. Listening to both Hole and Venereology, one can appreciate how these works constitute a thread of continuity through this period." Noise Mass is just that, a ritual of intensity and ferocity that denotes the force that is Merzbow's approach to noise in the absolute.

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Portuguese electronic composer Luís Fernandes creates his debut edition Demora comprised of deep pulsations and cycling harmony, all smeared with an echoing dreaminess of kosmische musik. André Almeida Santos on Demora: "For the first solo record under his own name, Luís Fernandes chose an on-point title that echoes in one word a constant feeling throughout Demora. Demora means 'delay' in Portuguese. Depending on the way you use it on a sentence, it can also mean that something is taking too long or it's making someone wait for someone or something. Demora doesn't take too long to show you its intentions, but it leaves you waiting. It tricks you to think to wait for the take-off until you realize you're already in mid-journey. It's all part of the process that Luís embarked to create Demora. For this piece he decided to work in a different way from what he's used to. The desire to create a piece with a constant flow with little variations was the starting point for his new album. Armed with a modular synthesizer, he recorded everything in one take to give the core structure of the album a unified sound that would create a permanent relationship with the listener. Doing it in one take shaped the fundamentals for Demora. The flow of the improvisation gave room for Luís to play around with the structure and refine the sounds that now populate the main narrative of this 35-minute piece, separated in five different chapters. The middle sections of Demora, 'Demora Pt. 1' and 'Demora Pt. 2', sound like a reward. Not that you needed one. If you arrived there and felt tricked about the take-off, the slow and glimmering harmonies will provide the comfort you needed all along. It's here that Demora shows how beautifully crafted it is, how the details aren't just details. They're the tiny screws that make the machine operate into a subtle kosmische lullaby. The details aren't there to distract you from the main thing, they are there for you to embrace the core and follow the same flow, the same path, that Luís did when Demora took off in his synthesizer. It took time for Luís to publish something solo under his own name. After years under various aliases and three beautiful releases with Joana Gama, Luís Fernandes has flourished with this mesmerizing sonic experience."

$23.00 IN STOCK

Iranian composer Siavash Amini creates an ode to night; literal and metaphorical. Using textural electronics and post classical arrangements, he asks you to dwell in the "dark" of sound and forgo the sensory certainty of light. From Siavash: "The Idea of this album, when I first started drafting it, was to continue what struck me as very interesting yet simple idea; night. I became interested in different definitions of what night is, our perception of it and what night means physically to us as well as symbolically. I came across the idea of 'other night' described by Maurice Blanchot, during my research. It started me recognizing night as something we experience as 'the night of sleep'; it is night that we resist in sleep, by way of dreaming. Things became more interesting for me during many nights of not sleeping and intoxication, and an eventual nervous breakdown. This experience, culminating in me spending three days in ICU, gave me pause to think about Blanchot's words. Slipping in and out of consciousness my mind, which had already experienced a blurring of what one might call the 'other night' and the night itself, by being in half sleep most of the time. I felt myself far away from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me. It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim. A feeling to describe this sensation, the word for which I only came across later, is Serus. There was a sense of repetition and familiarity in some feelings and emotions that I had towards some objects like sensing I knew them but not exactly from where or when. It was as if my body was resisting sleep and my sleepy mind was resisting being awake, only to dream of another type of the world that I could be awake in." Personnel: Nima Aghiani - violin; Pouya Pour-Amin - electric double-bass. Artwork and visuals by Tereza Bartůňková.

$23.00 IN STOCK

Room40 offer a re-mastered, re-edited 2019 version of Rayon Hula, originally released in 2004. From Mike Cooper: "After several trips, beginning in 1994, to the Pacific and its Island Nations, Australia and subsequently to South East Asia, I conceived the idea of making an updated more 'now' version of some of the Exotica music that originated in 1950's America. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny were the two I mostly had in mind at the time, but I didn't want it to sound like them and the two words 'Ambient' and 'Electronic' had to figure large. I was deeply influenced by the ambience of the places I was visiting (Australian birds are scarily creative) and lo-fi electronics were something I had been working with in my free improvisation gigs since the '80s . . . No-one was issuing recorded work by me, so I started my own DIY cd.r. label, Hipshot, and sold them via the internet. I was free to record whatever I wanted and I did, starting in 1999 with Kiribati . . . The summer of 2004 house sitting in Palombara, 40 minutes outside of Rome, at our friend Jo Campbell's house, in the company of several dogs and numerous cats, I set to work outside in the shed with a Zoom Sampletrack ST-224, two mini disc recorders and a Tascam four track cassette machine; a pile of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny CDs and my lap steel. My intention was to create a kind of music that I had hoped to hear when we visited Hawaii in the early '90s (some kind of Hawaiian Futurism maybe?) which we never did. Rayon Hula appeared from the shed and was initially released as Hipshot c.d.r. HIP-007. I submitted it to the Ars Electronica awards in Austria and was very surprised when it received some kind of a prize. I think that David Toop had something to do with that, as he was on the jury (thanks David). It was picked up by Cabin Records, a new label initiated by Pete Fowler and Graham Erickson and released as a double 10-inch vinyl set . . . Although the idea was an homage to Arthur Lyman, it was also an homage to Steve Feld who introduced me to the concept of 'lift up over sounding' in his book Sound and Sentiment, a study of the Kaluli people of Papua and their relationship with their aural environment. From it I gleaned, among other things, the idea of looped sounds played simultaneously but out of sync. An idea which had in fact guided me from the beginning of the series."

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Room40 presents Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug)'s Sirens, his solo debut. "When I was 22 I managed to acquire Techno Animal's Demonoid 12"; I can still recall the intensities of sound that marked the first moments of listening to it. The sense of bass as a tactile surface, that rolling groove and the howling sine waves and dub sirens that scorched with a type of sonic burning sensation that to this day makes my hairs stand on end. A year later I heard Ice's Bad Blood, from there I discovered The Bug, a band called God, a sound movement called isolationism and much more; all of these projects had one nexus point. In 2015, Kevin and I book-ended a series of concerts at Berghain for CTM festival. For his performance, Kevin debuted a new work I'd heard very little about called Sirens. I remember two things distinctly about the performance. The first: he opened the set with a blazing passage of bass and dub sirens that transported me back to those initial moments of encountering his work. The second was the feeling of absolute, crushing bass. Not before, or since, have I felt a sense of sound pressure like this. Unlike his other work with The Bug, the consistent bass carrying in the space was literally breathtaking and there were moments when it seemed difficult to see clearly as my eye sockets were vibrating in a way I'd never experienced. Sirens, which documents the intensities surrounding the delivery and early days of his first child, carries in it a sense of deep affect. The album, unlike the live work, traces out a dynamic sound world that is both tender and caustic. Within each piece, microcosms of sensation unfold, Kevin deftly maneuvers us through the tumultuous journey. Sirens somehow creates a sense of time that is without anchor and foggy in a way that is profoundly unique. Martin has remained a point of constant inspiration for me over several decades now; to have the opportunity to share his first ever solo recording brings me the utmost pride. His new work Sirens is a life journey transposed into sound that is truly personal, but effortlessly universal. It is the start of a new chapter, one that I know will only strengthen his place as one of the critical voices in contemporary electronic music." --Lawrence English, March 2019 Mastered by Stefan Betke at Scape Mastering.