ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

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Australia's Chris Abrahams, widely known for his work with legendary trio The Necks, has amassed an impressive solo discography over the past three decades. With four electro-acoustic editions already published by Room40, the label announces Chris's first piano solo for the label. Appearance is two longform pieces for piano that weave and mesh to create a sense of flow and subtle shifting which unfolds into eternal variation.

A note from Lawrence English: "I first met Chris Abrahams sometime in the early part of the '00s. In 2003, I had the pleasure of spending a very late night glued to his sofa, lights diminished, being introduced to his solo work. That listening experience became known as Thrown, a record that to this day haunts me with its electronic timbral shifts and wheezing positive organ textures. Since that release, Chris's work has resided at the very heart of Room40. His music captured across his five solo editions is, I believe, both utterly personal and compellingly diverse. It is music that has been a source of respite, provocation and, most of all, inspiration for me (and many of you I am sure). Over the years, I have gently encouraged Chris to consider making a solo piano recording to compliment the series of electro-acoustic works he has made for us. Appearance is the manifestation of this encouragement. Appearance typifies a very particular approach to piano that Chris has cultivated across three decades. He creates a pairing of rippling cascades of tonality with a macro-minimalist compositional form that invites a sense of perpetual release. Notes cycle and gently coalesce to create weaving melodic patterns that accumulate into a slow unfolding of form, across time. Chris Abrahams' pieces, in many respects, defy an easy categorization. He creates music that is unto itself, but profoundly open to the situations in which is it encountered. It's this porous quality that makes his work so intoxicating. It is a music of moments, cycling in memory and accumulating across time in a way that is without compare. I can't recommend Appearance to you strongly enough."

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Room40 release at 15th anniversary edition of Chris Abrahams's Thrown, originally released in 2005. A note from Lawrence English: "I've written quite often about my first experience listening to Thrown at Chris's place in Sydney. On that initial listening I was equal parts terrified and awestruck. The sensation of sitting there, in low light after midnight, listening with Chris and our mutual friend Clayton after an evening out at a NowNow event, is something I can recall vividly. Thrown is a record that, from the very outset, has roused me in a very direct, particular and profound, sense of affect. Recorded using Dx-7, piano and a positive organ, the album exists in some kind of parallel acoustic dimension where these divergent musical timbres are somehow brought together into a unifying (albeit unsettling) whole. It was the first recording Chris had made like it, and in my opinion, it set a benchmark which has guided his numerous releases for Room40. Now 15 years on from its original release, it seemed like a suitable moment to seed this edition back into the sonic consciousness. Time has cast little shadow on this edition - it still sounds absolutely outside of time. It creates its own microcosm upon each listening and remains one of the records from the Room40 catalogue that deeply resonates for me."

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Los Angeles based artist Geneva Skeen returns to Room40 with her second full-length edition. Born out of the ashes of 2020's cascade of heartbreak and uncertainty, Skeen unpacks the chaotic and unruly events with agency, heaping the distorted eruptions of her day to day into a soldering pyre of voice, pulsing rhythm, textured electronics, and masked field recordings. This is a reflexive music, made for unlocking the possibilities of the moment rather than being caged in by their particulars.

Poet Aristilde Kirby writes: "Flower branches dowsing rod against their doubles in the wind's aimless static. Spindled fog verglas plants, caressed by white rays of absolute eyelash. [A wisp of fresh respiration] 'The world has no visible order & all I have is the order of my breath,' says the fifth track on Double Bind. [A ribbon of a scream] It has the incandescent & incantation-like quality of the title of Fushitshusha's 2014 album: Nothing Changes No One Can Change Anything I Am Ever Changing You Can Only Change Yourself. [Asemic voices from anywhere] What can you count on these days in 2020, outside of the pacing of your breath as we all struggle to cleave to each passing beat pair & repair? [Spirals of a finger on glass] Between two right hands, neither really righter than the other, we have no choice but to hold on to the you one holds dearest to: the beads of just being. [Sinewaves in phase] When I comb my hair to get ready for the day, I realize that the black static it collects was always meant to fall away. [Synthetic graupel in flames] Here, Skeen specializes in ambient music as the pellucid space of an emotional landscape, limned in Timothy Morton's ethos of dark ecology & Gloria Anzaldua's idea of nepantla. It is equally phenomenological, psychological, spiritual & visceral. If you ask me, Geneva is a poet who works in sound sculpture. She cures slabs of lived time as if flesh marble & makes of her subconscious an underworld for the listener to locate themselves in. [Bats that clamor as strata of bleeding leather] The through-lines of her past works are clear as a fault crack & in this instance, glimmer like quartz veins. [Tiny harmonic partials prick like an ice pick] Skeen knows that to protect the lit wick, you have to cup the darkness. [Anvil & shelves of overcast guitar drop into a weak bell pulse] She knows that to get past a hard period, like timing a total eclipse's black sun, you have to account for every degree, every granular shift, of lost movement..."

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From Mike Cooper: "Playing With Water is a novel written by James Hamilton-Paterson. I was introduced to his writing by the Australian poet Peter Bakowski who gave me a copy of his book Seven Tenths - The Sea And Its Thresholds; a book that influenced my record Globe Notes and subsequent works immensely. Another of his books Playing With Water: Passion And Solitude On A Philippine Island is about exactly what the title describes it as and provided me with the title. The first edition on my Hipshot c.d.r label in 1999 was titled Kiribati and was dedicated to the people of that Pacific Island nation as I shared their concern, then as now, with the fact of rising sea levels due to global warming which threatens to destroy or make uninhabitable their low lying island homes. That album was the start of a long musical and artistic journey for me . . . Cities such as Venice, Bangkok, Jakarta, London, Manhattan or any coastal, or near a major river, city will be subject to serious flooding and subsidence and may well become uninhabitable in the same way in the very near future. Bangkok was previously known as 'The Venice Of South East Asia' and its now roads were once canals . . . Jakarta is currently sinking at such an alarming rate that the Indonesian Government is building a new capital city in Kalimantan (Borneo) Several of my albums subsequent to Kiribati -- Globe Notes, Rayon Hula, Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer, Fratello Mare, Raft, Oceanic Feeling-Like (with Chris Abrahams) and now Playing With Water are all conceptually concerned with this same subject. Another conceptual thread connecting them is my concern for the co-habitation of the human and non-human world expressed through my use of unprocessed avian or insect field recordings of song, signs and signals. Climate change, as well as the destruction by humans of the natural habitat of many species, is disturbing the balanced relationship we need to have with nature. Indigenous and small, often nomadic, coastal communities are very aware of this balance and the incursion of the industrial world into their way of life is having disastrous effects which will (if not already) have similar effects and repercussions on ours. There are field recordings on this edition from Pulau Ubin, Ko Phayan, Ko Lanta, Sri Lanka, Bangkok, St.Lucia and Martinique; all places that can look forward to or are already witnessing the Postdiluvian Future . . . My guitar playing here, as always, draws on a number of styles and genres influenced by Hawaiian Slack-key and lap steel guitar."

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From Akio Suzuki: "In May 1984 I appeared at a German festival called Pro Musica Nova, organized by Radio Bremen. I then travelled to Berlin by car with Rolf Langebertels, the owner of Galerie Giannozzo who had driven to Bremen to hear me perform. I still remember very vividly the experience of passing through the checkpoint to enter West Berlin, a city that floated like an island in the middle of the still socialist GDR. I had previously visited Berlin in 1982 to perform at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien at an event that Rolf had organized. This time too Rolf had organized a concert for me at the Technische Universitat. Playing off the title of the piece ('Study Time') I had performed at Pro Musica Nova, I titled the piece for this concert 'Zeitstudie'. I owe Rolf a great deal of gratitude, as it was him who encouraged me by releasing my very first cassette tape, Zeitstudie von Akio Suzuki. In recent years it has become difficult for me to carry heavy instruments around with me, and I have started to do simpler performances with objects assembled on site . . . On Zeitstudie von A.S. I used an ANALAPOS, the echo instrument I invented in 1970, and the Suzuki-type glass harmonica that I created in 1975. The ANALAPOS resembles the tin-can telephone that children used to play with: two metal cans, open at one end and connected by a coil spring. You play it by stretching out the spring horizontally and then projecting your voice into the open end of one of the cylinders. The second piece features a variation, where I would suspend several ANALAPOS vertically and play them like a percussion instrument. The Suzuki-type glass harmonica is in a simpler form than the pre-existing glass harmonica, and consists of five long glass tubes of varying diameters suspended horizontally in a metal frame. As well as rubbing the tubes with wet hands, I developed my own style of playing it using sticks. Once when I was practicing with it in the Netherlands, outside the window I was surprised to hear a bird imitating my sounds. However, later I discovered that the bird always sang that way, and as a token of my regret for having ever doubted it, I borrowed the bird's Dutch name, De Koolmees, and I still use it for my instrument..."

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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.

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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..."

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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$16.58 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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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 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.

$23.00$19.55 IN STOCK

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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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..."