In stock
LP
Chris ABRAHAMS
“Follower”
On the opening track, Costume, bass piano meanders through a wilderness of de-tuned bells and organ swells; a strange sort of festival. Low frequency sighs evenly punctuate, like a pump or a heartbeat. It’s a procession that takes it time as it wanders the terrain, brought to a close with transcendent distortion. On track 2, New Kind of Border, muscular modal piano surfs among waves of percussion and analogue synthesisers. A buffeting travel.
Follower is Abrahams’ 6th album for Room 40 and showcases his continuing interest in the ambiguous spaces between music and noise; tonality and atonality; rhythm and texture. All four tracks have piano as a key factor: in one instance, high-pitched and atonal; in another, emotive yet distant as if projected on to a screen. Follower presents the listener with a sound world of colourful juxtapositions, rich orchestration and organically open forms.
24,00€
In stock
LP
Philip SAMARTZIS + Eugene UGHETTI
“Array”
Array expresses the experience of a remote Antarctic research station through the convergence of sound, site and performance. The result is an immersive and affective experience of the spaces, protocols and conditions comprising the bracing polar environment. Array is a companion piece to Polar Force, a performance-installation work by Philip Samartzis and Eugene Ughetti, presented by Speak Percussion.
Array features recordings of radar and scientific instrumentation used for upper atmospheric research and terrestrial communication. These sounds reveal the sophisticated technology and architecture used and heard within the Australian Antarctic Territory. Many of the recordings focus on the way the built environment is transformed through stress and fatigue caused by extreme climate and weather events including freezing temperatures and high velocity winds.
Together with the field recordings are layers of live performance using custom built instrumentation to produce a unique series of textures, rhythmic cycles, resonances and timbral phenomena. The application of tension and pressure upon the assorted instruments recalls the distressed state of highly specialised infrastructure found within the perimeters of a research station.
A polar research station comprises many types and volumes of prefabricated space. In dialogue with this are the unique spaces used to record the instrumental performance. By merging different spaces Array brings into focus various industrial resonances, spatial characteristics, timbres of metal and concrete, and sonic artefacts produced by hard and permeable materials and surfaces.
In three parts, Array presents Antarctica as a liminal space oscillating between representation and abstraction to challenge often repeated tropes. The intent is to blur the relationship between the recorded and performed to produce a hyper-realistic encounter of the powerful forces that operate at the margins of our planet. One hears the precariousness of a remote research station contorted by unrelenting stress, compressed air forced through waterborne fipples and the volatility of weather events.
Life on remote research stations is progressively resembling the broader contemporary experience, in which strict protocols are used to govern and preserve life. The resilient communities who live and work in these places have learnt how to co-exist with an increasingly hostile environment, along with its unknowns and necessity for hyper-vigilance. Rather than consider it as a place on the edge of elsewhere, Antarctica and its assemblage of durable, super modern colonies provides an archetype for an uncertain future in anticipation of the volatility that awaits.
24,00€
In stock
LP
HEXA
“Material Interstices”
‘Material Interstices’ is another collaboration between Room40 label head Lawrence English and Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, known collectively as HEXA. The ominous, nightmarish soundscapes of dark ambient drones and industrial music the pair create apparently came from English detailing a recurring dream he had of a maze underneath his house. (Norman Records)
***
A note from Lawrence English
When I was child I had two recurring dreams. Both these dreams were tethered to the house I lived in. It was a rambling home which was high set but underneath it was largely unfinished. The underside of the house was a labyrinth of small rooms, concrete pits and a collection of building materials, piping and leftover furniture sat alongside beds of dirt that had a consistency of lunar dust.
The first recurring dream was of a burning bird, falling from the sky past the kitchen window in the early hours of the morning. The bird I’m pretty sure was some devolved version of a tabernacle candle, that shape of the twisted eternal flame often symbolised with twitching wings. This dream has never returned to me as an adult, though I can vividly recount it.
The second dream has recently emerged, albeit a distant hazy reference to the tangible intensity that I experienced when I was younger. This dream was one buried deep within the labyrinthian, unfinished features that existed under my house. The dream usually started with me playing on the lunar dirt and gradually a sound would emerge from a large concrete pit that was in the centre of the space. The sound would get louder and eventually I would have to go and inspect it. It called me in, there’s no other way to describe it. As I looked into the pit, there was always some kind of hatch, often resembling a pressure door, the type you might see in a Submarine film, and the sound would emanate from underneath that hatch. It was also a throbbing, hammering type of sound, deeply diminished and buried, like hearing bass music from a car parked up the block.
Inevitably, I would twist open the hatch and inside it was a mechanical world that today brings to mind the interior psyche of Tetsuo The Iron Man. It was dark, almost entirely duotone, shaded in heavy grey and black, and wet with a thick, humid, oil like moisture. As I climbed into the hatch and down the ladder (there was always a ladder too) the pressure of the sound increased and it was as if my whole body was being consumed by this monolithic subterranean machine. I never got to understand what the machine did, or if in fact it was a machine at all, the system was never revealed, but what I was made to feel was that there was something beyond my usual understanding that forged away night and day and was infinitely more powerful and commanding than I ever could comprehend.
I was surprised that, over the past year, this dream has returned to me. Perhaps it’s a result of the general quietening of the world and that innate way our ears can open up to even the most subtle acoustic shifts when we are sleeping. Remote sounds, usually hidden in the din of the urban nightscape, were filtering into my dreams and triggering some kind of speculative consciousness. This post-hypnogogic state ushered in a return to that imagined place from my childhood dreams, but simultaneously I was never allowed full access to that place, rather it felt more reserved. I could not enter it in the same way, even if the hatch was there, I was not the same mind and could not unlock it in the same way.
Last year, I mentioned this dream to Jamie, and he too reported unsteady sleep patterns. This got us to thinking about how the dynamics of the world have recently shifted towards the emergence of the natural world. Equally though it has shifted in favour of its shadow; those ongoing industrial, mechanical and other acoustic by-products of human (and unhuman) labour reach out from the hushed ambient noise floor. What is usually soaked up in the everyday (sub)urbanscape has been exhumed and in these particular moments it haunts us from a distance, an exterior force that unlocks interior uncertainties. This music is transposed of this experience and is written for those moments were consciousness is arguably speculative.
Written and produced by Lawrence English and Jamie Stewart
Mixed at Negative Space 2020-2021
22,00€
In stock
LP
Marina ROSENFELD
“Teenage Lontano”
Teenage Lontano and roygbiv&b, from 2008 and 2011 respectively, comprise two key works by composer and artist Marina Rosenfeld. Both works are choral compositions imagined for and enacted by teenagers.
Premiered in New York’s immense Park Avenue Armory, Teenage Lontano is Rosenfeld’s groundbreaking "cover version" of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s 1960s classic for orchestra. Teenage Lontano is reimagined as an immersive sound environment bisected by a column of teenagers in headphones. Beneath a loudspeaker rotating at the phonographic speed of 33 1/3 rpm, the teens' collective voices produce a hauntingly vulnerable account of Ligeti’s dissonant polychords. Teenage Lontano has been performed on three continents, including a French premiere in 2020 as part of Musica Strasbourg.
In roygbiv&b, asynchronous, sometimes raucous incantations of song fragments swell and dissipate, loosely organized around a purposeful mis-hearing of the acronym ROYGBIV: in Rosenfeld’s version, “r” evokes ‘are' (as in, "Are you that somebody...”);, o is 'oh' (“Oh, oh, oh…”); y becomes 'why' (“Why should my heart...); g is 'je (sus)', and so on. The extra 'b' in the work’s title pays homage to the ‘blue(s)’ of r&b.
Rosenfeld’s punning, spectral composition had its debut performance at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011. The recording featured on this edition took place at the South London Gallery in 2014 realised by local south Londoners, the recording highlighting their style and genre affiliations. Both works have remained unpublished until now.
Side A
Teenage Lontano, 2008
Recorded on March 8, 2008 at the Park Avenue Armory by Arup Acoustics for the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Special thanks to Art Production Fund, Bob Bielecki, Raj Patel and all of the NYC performers
Side B
roygbiv&b (Version for South London), 2014
Recorded on June 11, 2014 at South London Gallery, London by Mick Ritchie. Special thanks to Simon Parris, Avid Williams and the talented vocal stylists of Peckham and Brooklyn
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space
22,00€
In stock
LP
MERZBOW
“Flare Blues”
Flare Blues reimagines two of Merzbow’s long out of print EPs from 1994, Flare Gun and White Blues. Revisiting the original pieces and adding previously unreleased materials recorded during these sessions, Flare Blues tethers together a set of Merzbow’s most exploratory work, creating a visceral linkage between a pair of vital works.
Originally recorded in June 1994, Merzbow's Flare Gun is a pulsating and hammering collection of pieces that grinds ever forward with a sense of bludgeoning determination. By contrast, White Blues recorded the following month (which draws its title from several of the samples used as raw material that originate from blues inspired British rock bands), maintains a more unsteady sense of movement and musicality, matching degraded samples against a flurry of theremin and electronics which are overdriven and saturated in ways that would later go on to become some of the trademark sonic actions of Merzbow's live performances.
On Flare Blues not only are the pieces remastered by Merzbow, but they are recontextualised and when heard together with the previously unreleased bonus materials open up a new sense of his studio experimentation at the time.
What marks these recordings as critical is they trace a line through a period of significant discovery and refinement for Merzbow. Having been recorded just months after Venereology, this set of works bares the marks of Merzbow’s deepening awareness of extreme forms of distortion, compression and also his dynamic mixing approaches that simultaneously allow multiple or singular elements to occupy the entirety of the available sound spectrum.
Ultimately, these works are morphic, often churning and erupting with a magma like quality. When they do fall into waves of pulse, those patterns are never held long and the intense sense of cutting into the sound creates a feeling of endless anticipation as Merzbow guides you through an ever-evolving sound world that is uncompromisingly restless and relentless.
All Music by Masami Akita
Recorded & Mixed at ZSF Produkt, Tokyo June-July 1994
Remastered at Munemihouse Feb-March 2021
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Beatriz FERREYRA
“Canto+”
From 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.
Canto+, collects works from almost 40 years of her life in music and pays homage to her unerring interests in dynamism, rhythm, voice and the morphic potentials of concrète materials. Two of the works are also dedication to close friends; Jingle Bayle’s (to François Bayle) and Au revoir l’Ami (to Bernard Bashet). This edition picks up where Echos+ leaves off and opens her sound worlds even further.
22,00€
In stock
LP
Mike COOPER
“Playing With Water”
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.
In the years that followed I have visited many places around the North and South Pacific, South East Asia and The Caribbean that are also in danger of being inundated as water levels rise, both coastal and inland, due to melting ice or weather patterns that change drastically bringing untypical amounts of rainfall.
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. I have been in that city during the monsoon season and seen water coming up through the floor of shops and houses exiting to the street through the door. 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.
We could quite possibly all be looking forward to an island existence in that future where all of our cities, or Wetropolis, will be floating worlds of Aquatecture and Aquaculture will provide all our food, powered by wind, solar or mechanical energy from the tides and the waves. Oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth’s surface making it the worlds largest solar collector - Seven Tenths
In 1957 the Rio Turia that ran through the city flooded to such an extent, killing 60 people, that it was diverted to the south and what was the riverbed turned into a park which runs through the centre and surrounds the old part of the city. Within a few weeks after finishing recording this collection in my studio in Valencia the city experienced the biggest storm recorded in over a hundred years. Within a day the normally 135 metre wide, several kilometres long, Malvarrosa beach and the 10 metre paseo and road beyond it was completely flooded, as were the restaurants lining it. After cleaning and repairs some weeks later they re-opened only to be closed again two weeks after by the pandemic and subsequent lockdown in which I am now writing this.
My guitar playing here, as always, draws on a number of styles and genres influenced by Hawaiian Slack Key and Lap Steel guitar.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Akio SUZUKI
“Zeitstudie”
Referring to "Study Time", Zeitstudie presents two works each for two instruments developed by sound artist Akio Suzuki and recorded in Germany in 1984: the ANALAPOS, an echo instrument used to project the performer's voice across a coil spring; and the "De Koolmees" glass harmonica, 5 glass tubes in a metal frame that are struck or rubbed to create unique sounds.
22,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Steve RODEN
“Oionos”
Notes from Steve Roden on Oionos:
Oionos was created for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece.
The exhibition took place in various archaeological and historical sites in central Athens, creating a situation for contemporary site specific works to be in dialogue with their historical surroundings.
While it was not originally offered as a possible site, I pleaded with the curator to allow me to work with architect Dimitris Pikionis’s Church of St. Dimitris Loumbardiardis, about a 10-minute walk from the main path of the Grand Promenade. Pikionis designed the original promenade which is still visible in several areas, but much of the area’s original designs were altered during the “restoration” before the 2004 Olympics. The small path that leads to the church gives a much stronger impression of Pikionis’s vision for the entire promenade as it was; so i wanted to use my work to draw viewers/listeners into his world.
When I first saw the small church it totally took my breath away, and I immediately began to think about a work that could exist in resonance with it — but not distract from it. The church itself is still in use, and I wanted to the work to be gentle and out of the way of the people who worship there. I decided to use the large tree in the front of the church for a hanging work that would a little bit of visual presence as well as sound which could blend with all of the insect noises and the overall quiet of the area.
The audio was built from field recordings and small “poor” objects such as tin whistles, toy harmonicas, and the like. These “instruments” suggested by the museum of musical instruments in Athens, where the proper instruments take up most of the museum, but there is a wonderful display case in the basement with musical toys, religious objects, and other sounding devices not considered musical instruments. I felt that these simple things related to Pikionis’s ideas about architecture and craft, and his interests in indigenous culture in conjunction with intellectual and modern culture. I felt there could be a relationship.
Oionos was created in 2006 for the exhibition The Grand Promenade, in Athens, Greece.
18,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Mike COOPER
“Oceans Of Milk And Treacle”
From Mike Cooper
This is a soundtrack for an otherwise silent film. The title of the album, and of course the film, is borrowed from my late friend Fred Hardy’s book The Religious Culture of India - Power, Love and Wisdom, considered to be one of the most important books on the subject. In this book Fred wrote...
Mike Cooper plays Electric Lap Steel Guitar. Acoustic Brazilian Viola Ciapira and Virtual Pedal Steel Guitar, Double Bass, Koto, Strings, Percussion and Drums.
Viv Corringham - Voice.
Tim Hill - Baritone Saxophone.
Aaron Hawkins - Tenor Saxophone.
Geoff Hawkins - Tenor Saxophone.
Lol Coxhill - Soprano Saxophone.
Roger Turner - Percussion.
Ambient and Field Recordings from Bali, Cambodia, Vietnam, Martinique, Crete, Sri Lanka, Australia.
18,00€
In stock
CD
Maria MOLES
“For Leolanda”
A Note from Maria Moles:
'For Leolanda' was created during the lockdown in Melbourne 2020. Listening to and making music was healing and I'm very grateful I was able to create during that time.
Most of the pieces are inspired by listening to Kulintang music of the Philippines; some of the compositional techniques are applied to the combination of synthesizer, percussion, tape loops, and drum kit.
The name 'In Pan-as' refers to my grandfather's farm in Pilar that my mum regularly played at. The drum kit part is adapted from a rhythm I heard on a beautiful album 'Muranao Kakolintang - Philippine Gong Music'. The initial inspiration for this track struck me after a conversation on the phone with my mum, during which, out of the blue, she requested I spread her ashes on the farm Pan-as after she passed.
I realised I would never really know how that would feel until it happened, and I wondered what kind of ritual I would perform to help me celebrate the life of one of the dearest people to me. I thought that perhaps dancing to rhythms similar to this one would feel right.
The track 'Mansaka' was inspired by the Mansaka tribe in Compostela Valley, I fell in love with the music I heard from them. The piece developed into something entirely different, something that felt like me. Being a drummer, I usually compose from the drum kit as a starting point, but this album was an attempt at composing on the synthesizer and harmonically matching the overtones from singing bowls, bowed cymbals, and bells.
The album is dedicated to my mother, Leolanda.
12,00€
In stock
CD
Christina GIANNONE
“Zone 7”
Notes from Christina Giannone:
While I was making this record, I found myself coming back to the idea of escapism and how focused psychological exploration plays a role in that. The primary purpose of the project became a process of seeking to encourage a disengagement from the forefront of conscious awareness, and allow a willingness to take flight into the subconscious. In some ways perhaps, it was like the idea of falling away from consciousness into this other state and through that falling away we are able to begin this process of escape.
It’s in this place, away from consciousness that you will find the soul’s domain, where there are “zones” and “portals” to other dimensions within the trenches of the psyche. I wanted this album to offer a chance for people to reach into these trenches, to begin to know them and to be invited to reside there, even for just a moment.
Each piece, I hope, helps to facilitate transcendence into these rooms and spaces within the subconscious world, where one's perception can transform or evolve into any direction of their choosing, allowing free range of expression and self-reflection. It is in the subconscious that new possibilities for freedom can be found, and perhaps even cultivated more generally.
Often we are afraid to observe the worlds within ourselves, but they can serve a higher purpose and provide tools for basic awareness and survival. By allowing ourselves to visit our inner dimensions we may find an oasis of peace and eternal self-assurance. This work is a soundtrack to those places, to the promise they hold and to the journey we all take into our own minds.
14,00€
In stock
CD
Jeph JERMAN – Tim BARNES
“Hiss Lift”
A note from Jeph Jerman
What I remember …
…a car on fire alongside the highway in the middle of the night. Waking in someone else’s bed in London with an entire poem spilling into my head, and then recording it with Tim in the kitchen after breakfast.
Seemingly endless car, bus and train rides full of the country side splintered and refracted through glass and fatigue, always the same, always different. The screaming woman at the airport who pulled the fire alarm, evacuating the terminal. Some guy in Brooklyn talking through our entire set…
…smoking rope and playing chess with Jean-Herve Peron. Playing in that giant concrete bunker on Mare Island, our sounds smeared by endless reverberation. People smoking heroin in the bathroom in Oslo, setting off the fire alarm toward the end of our set, and the freezing room in Den Haag. Improvising in the back seat of Tim’s car while he drove and recorded it, somewhere in Indiana. The guy shooting up in the stairwell of that dilapidated squat in Berlin, and the whirlwind tour of the city at 3 AM. Chocolate you could snort in Antwerp. Crossing the English Channel through the Chunnel, and our entire train loaded onto a ferry to cross the Baltic Sea.
Spending a lot of time together, without ever running out of things to talk about.
It was Tim who said that our next record should be called hiss lift. We saw it on a sign pointing to an elevator in some hotel, the two words in different languages. For me, that phrase conjures up vague thoughts about tape manipulation, a finger on a switch so marked. We talked about the record a lot, mostly on trains, and came up with other titles launched from subtle in-jokes. What we didn’t talk about in any detailed way, was what it would sound like.
Lounging on-board and resting, not focusing on any one thing I could watch the landscape from two or three different directions at once, all rolling into and out of each other’s reflection. Different surfaces displayed aspects on the inside of our compartment, highly distorted by their curvature. It struck me that it was very similar to the music that Tim and I had been making, and that spark set off the fire you now hold.
Every tour that Tim and I did is represented here: Two runs through California and two up the east coast, a tight circle in the mid-west, and three weeks in Europe and Scandinavia. The spoken word bit is the recording we made in the apartment in London, and the rest is a melange of places and times superimposed. Sounds reoccur, jutting up in varied combinations, ghosts peeled and pasted. Sudden thwacks announce shifts of scenery, a door closes, another opens.
In Schiphorst, there was a William S. Burroughs book lying on the sofa. Burroughs once talked about all human experience being a cut-up. You walk down the street and your eyes alight on different things as you scan your surroundings: don’t walk/DRUGS/“spare change?”/ PLAY on the side of a bus, now the street through flashing glass. This idea also illuminates hiss lift, spotlighting the notion that what you remember is not what happened.
Here then are our cut-ups, mnemonic prods diced and displaced. The residue of experience passed hand-to-hand.
Jeph Jerman & Tim Barnes: percussion and field recordings.
Recorded mostly on tour 2014-2017 with assistance from: Billy Gomberg, Barry Weisblat, Jean-Herve Peron, Zappi Diermaier, Mike Majkowski, Chris Heenan, Joachim Nordwall, Ted Byrnes, Bill Hutson and Mitchell Brown. We'd like to thank everyone who put on a show or hosted us during our tours. Thank You Lawrence English for releasing our work.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
Ian WELLMAN
“On The Darkest Day, You took My Hand and Swore It Will Be Okay”
A note from Ian Wellman
‘On The Darkest Day, You took My Hand and Swore It Will Be Okay’ spawns out of reflections and realizations from the past year. The musical pieces themselves teeter between anger, anxiety, and hope, usually turning to distortion and noise. These were often an attempt to make sense of the happenings around the world. At times this process was a way to soothe my own frustrations with life at a standstill.
A big influence on this album was watching events unfold online. Technology made it incredibly easy to ‘experience’ something without having actually been there via live streaming and second-to-second updates on social media. You can now watch the world burn without leaving your home, and I did. With work on hiatus, I would obsessively watch how the world was fairing with the crises on our hands.
For an escape, I would often venture out for field recording. Unlike the reports I had heard about the silent cities, human-generated noise in Los Angeles never ceased. As people slowed their movement, the sound of LAPD helicopters were amplified. During the height of the fire season, I had recorded several areas to see how the air pollution had affected the soundscape. In North Hollywood, the electrical wires felt particularly loud as ash fell from the sky. Even as our forests burned, we continued to pump oil behind public parks and across the street from homes, only to speed up our own decline.
Through the year’s ups and downs, and navigating lots of unknowns, friends and family reassured me that it will be ok. This period was a constant reminder of how important it was to keep the folks you love close, physically or otherwise. Please hold on to each other.
12,00€
In stock
CD
Olivia BLOCK
“Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea”
From Olivia
During the lockdown, unable to do anything in the world, I turned inward, adopting a regular practice of listening with intention while on psychedelic mushrooms. The mushrooms helped me to listen somatically, pulling my ears towards low tonal patterns and the warped sounds of a broken Mellotron I had recorded earlier.
I started playing in my studio, creating bass-driven pieces on my vintage Korg synth organ, using a very limited tonal palette.
The pandemic seemed like a strange dream or a surrealistic science fiction story. As a thought-exercise, I imagined this moment as a film; a mental lens through which I could conceive of this pandemic and all of the complex factors which converged to make it happen.
I approached this music as the soundtrack to this speculative science fiction film, an attempt to translate my emotions.
Composed and performed by Olivia Block in 2021 on Korg CX3 organ, Organelle, tapes, field recordings and Mellotron.
Mellotron was recorded at Electrical Audio, Chicago, engineered by Greg Norman.
Mastering and some mixing by Tomas Korber.
14,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Marina ROSENFELD
“Index”
For over two decades, New York-based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld has pioneered a specific language for turntable music, based on an ever-expanding collection of dub plates she creates.
The dubplate is a one-off, hand-cut record. Each dubplate can be made to contain any array of sounds decided on by its creator. For Rosenfeld, her discovery of the dubplate in the late 1990s was a pivotal moment, when she recognised the material instability of the medium as critical tool for performance and composition.
On Index, the investigation of this materiality is paramount. The physical intimacy that colors the relation between the hand and the plate is revealed through a very particular reading of the turntable, one which sits in parallel to the more recognised ways in which that technology has been deployed as a performative tool.
This edition features a series of live recordings and related materials that trace the development of Rosenfeld’s tactile approach and her shifting collection of sound materials. The recordings are published alongside a book featuring extensive archival documentation, photography and a long-form conversation between Marina Rosenfeld and Lawrence English.
18,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Magda MAYAS & Tina DOUGLAS
“Objects of Interest”
From Magda Mayas
Tina and I met around 10 years ago in Melbourne through mutual musician friends.
Tina has heard me perform in various context and I have visited her studio and seen her perform on multiple occasions. There was an immediate personal and aesthetic connection and conversations over the years revealed shared ways of working - a collaboration seemed natural and exciting.
We are both drawn to improvisational and intuitive processes and we both use individualised objects or tools to create and develop close relationships with these. For me, it’s a symbiotic process: the objects generate ideas, they afford and limit what I do and structure a piece in a fundamental way. Tina’s scores are very sculptural and tactile - the piano and my objects and preparations in them likewise feel sculptural, tactile, embodied -objects, materials and relationships crossing over.
When I started recording music to respond to Tina’s scores, I had a wish to slowing things down, to expose a certain fragility or imperfection and to let one melody or one chord or one little noise be enough. With the piano you can have such an orchestral approach, and I often do that, but with this collaboration I didn’t feel like I wanted this kind of complexity.
There is a certain fragility that I like about the project and the scores: the fact that they are thin paper scores and I transported them from Australia to Berlin, the cut-outs… it’s all very fragile and beautiful and I kind of felt that I wanted to allow the music to be like that too.
Tina Douglas: scores, 2019 -2020
Magda Mayas: piano, clavinet, rhodes, objects
Recorded in Berlin January 2021
Tony Buck: Recording and Mixing
Lawrence English: Mastering
18,00€
In stock
CD
Kristof HAHN
“Six Pieces”
From Lawrence English
In 2012, I had the good fortune to be in Sydney when SWANS toured on the back of their most recent master work The Seer. The show was, as one would expect, an all out consumption of body and ears.
Before SWANS took the stage however, Kristof Hahn performed a solo set. It was in many respects a stark contrast to what would come from SWANS, but it also laid bare the role Kristof plays in the group. As Kristof moved through the phases of his performance, he staked out a territory of tonal and timbral activity that was deeply revealing, not just of the very personal language he had developed for his instrument of choice, but moreover for how he created unexpected pairings between harmony, texture and even melody.
Six Pieces, a record that is essentially born from the ashes of the final SWANS reformation line-up tour, uses various found elements, stored loops, thematic notes and other acoustic debris as a means for launching off a series of interrogation into solo guitar composition.
The pieces bare the marks of touring life, sometimes intensely claustrophobic, other moments languid and at times euphoric, each pieces creates a vista of sound that describes a kind of fluid landscape without relying on the perceptual land-marks we might fall back on.
Hahn’s music is one of repetition and unfolding variation, it is unsettled, but never rushed or careless. He knows that music is an art form of time and is not afraid to allow his compositions to build, evolve and finally arrive with a casual sense of hushed determination.
Kristof Hahn: lapsteel guitars, electric guitar, recording, editing, mixing
Instruments used: 10-string lap-steel, 8-string lap-steel, 7-string hybrid lap-steel, electric guitar, eBow, simple loop pedal, slightly more advanced loop pedal, delay pedal, tremolo pedal, volume pedals, guitar amplifiers
Lawrence English: Production
12,00€
In stock
CD
Robert CROUCH
“Jubilee”
All tracks composed and performed by Robert Takahashi Crouch.
“A Ritual” is based on a recording of an improvised, private performance from 2014.
The title for “I’ve been a part of evil doing.” is in reference to “People Like Us,” a track written, performed, and recorded by The Dears for their 2007 EP “You And I Are A Gang of Losers.”
“Reconciliation” contains a sample from “Excerpts from Memorial Day” by Ted Berrigan, taken from “The Dial-A-Poem Poets: Biting off the Tongue of a Corpse,” 1975 (Giorno Poetry Systems records).
On Jubilee, Los Angeles based artist Robert Takahashi Crouch conjures a profoundly personal vibrational landscape. The edition, which is a mediation on, and suture for experiences of conflict and violence, Jubilee merges longform low-frequency drone work against a reductive sense of harmony. It is a record of hushed intensity, punctuated with moments of ascendant dynamism. Jubilee, whilst innately personal at its heart, is ultimately invitational in that it affords a space in which the listener becomes paramount, their narrative and reflections in the moment as critical and valuable as those of the album’s creator.
12,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Philip SAMARTZIS + Eugene UGHETTI
“Polar Force”
From Eugene Ughetti
As Philip was preparing to leave for his second Australian Antarctic Division residency, he invited me to lunch to discuss the possibility of collaborating on a new work. He recounted his first experience on the ice, where the surrounding landscapes seemed to articulate avant-garde percussion works of an epic scale. On this visit, he wanted his field work to explicitly shape the formation of a new performance work with a particular focus on katabatic winds in and around Casey Base station.
Intrigued, I accepted the challenge provided I could create a live performance utilising the same recorded materials of ice, air and water. We undertook an ambitious collaboration with sound, instrument, lighting and industrial designers, a dramaturg and percussionist.
For Polar Force we built an environment, a white inflatable structure reminiscent of a remote research station on the ice. Emanating from outside the space come the complex and foreboding sounds of the natural environment, inside, a live event akin to scientific research in sound occurs. This hour-long performance installation work gives rise to a hyper-realistic sensing of Antarctica, bursting with natural beauty, power and the audible evidence of human impact.
Concept, Composition & Instrument Design - Eugene Ughetti
Direction - Clare Britton and Eugene Ughetti
Field Recordings - Philip Samartzis
Performance - Matthias Schack-Arnott & Eugene Ughetti
18,00€
Out of stock
CD
Toshimaru NAKAMURA
“Culvert – No-Input Mixing Board 10”
From Toshimaru Nakamura
There used to be several small streams in west Tokyo, where I live. Some of them were natural rivers flowing from springs in this area. Others were from further west.
Towards the east, down to the sea of Tokyo Bay, there are others which were man-made, created to distribute water. Now, most of these rivers are covered by concrete lids and many parts of them are converted into pathways with nicely lined-up trees and benches. Some stretches of these rivers even have an artificial brooks on top of the lids to recreate the landscape of the old days. Sort of a “double decker river”.
Sitting on one of those benches, I think of the water flowing below, in the dark.
Played, recorded, edited, processed and mastered by Toshimaru Nakamura at his home in Tokyo from April to June, 2021
12,00€
In stock
CD
Megan Alice CLUNE
“If You Do”
From Megan
On the 9th of August 2020 I had a dream I wrote an opera. I had been unable to write much music since February, when I returned from 3-months in Tokyo where this album was initially conceived. It was possibly the longest creative break I have undergone in the last 5 years. But suddenly, the small melodies I had been singing closely into my microphone late at night, quietly so my neighbours wouldn’t hear, took on a larger scale, and one that seemed to echo the scale engendered by 2020. The confinement to the home, the epic events going on outside. My small, timid voice filtered through a myriad of technologies as I talked to friends, taught online; amplified, distorted, compressed, equalised. Sped up, slowed down as my wifi drops in and out.
If You Do became an album for solo voice and an ensemble of technologies. An album about contorting the body (voice) through time (rhythm, pulse), repetition and form. The work is nostalgic for past futures: wishing for the technological optimism of the late 70’s and early 80’s, of Timothy Leary believing the computer would offer a liberation to the masses. A time before Big Tech, Big Data. It’s a record made alone, dreaming of unmediated interaction with an audience that may never arrive. A sense of longing for the future that could have been, sung by a wordless choir and sometimes a clarinet. A return to my first instrument, and another kind of technology, I guess.
Back in Tokyo, I noticed how physical and digital spaces were being dislocated. I was wondering how we got here, thinking about where that leaves my music in light of this. I began collecting each of the track names from my surroundings - things read or overheard or gathered both in Japan (the title If You Do came from a necklace found at Ohi Racecourse Flea Market) and, later, at home, online. As such, the album occupies an amorphous space. Within the genre of ambient music but only just. It creates a space that is still heavily mediated, but hopes to locate and communicate directly.
Then, at my computer, stuck in a glitching, echoing loop, I was looking for signs to keep writing. I listened to Laurie Anderson’s Big Science or David Bowie’s Subterraneans or Underworld’s Born Slippy.Nuxx once more. I thought about re-reading Homesick for Another World; I watched some interviews with Laurie Spiegel on YouTube. After the dream, in the verge outside, clover kept appearing and suddenly it was Spring and there are flowers. And here we are: If You Do.
Vocals, clarinet, production, recording and mixing by Megan Alice Clune
12,00€
In stock
Book + CD
Lawrence ENGLISH
“A Mirror Holds The Sky”
From Lawrence English
In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez’s Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had. Each time I hear a Screaming Piha, which many would identify instantly thanks to their prevalence in Werner Herzog’s Aguirre Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo, I am transported back into a place that, to this day, features regularly in my daydreams.
The reason this place made such an impression is simple; the Amazon dwarfs us. This is not some vulgar display of power on its behalf, rather its a tangible reminder of our place in, and on, this planet. Once you step into the Amazon it prompts us (strongly) to refocus the perspective we hold of ourselves, of our ways of being, of our understandings and it (not so gently) reminds us that we are but one very minor function in an equation that extends in all directions across time, and space.
Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am rather at home in them. My family, who lived and worked on the land of the Ngajanji people, had an admiration for, or in the very least a respect of, the rainforest. What makes time spent in the jungles of the Amazon different however is the scale and sheer volume (metaphoric and literal) of the life that inhabits it. Hundreds of thousands of narratives are in play moment to moment, their interactions flow together forming a perpetual cascade of arrival and departure, fertility and decay - these fundamental states are intrinsically linked and constantly informing one another.
The jungle is never silent. Even when you might expect the Amazon to be hushed, in those hours before dawn or in the heat of the midday sun, it is hardly what could be described as quiet. What might be true to say though is during these moments where the chorus of insects takes a step back, the jungle opens just a little. To listen in the jungle is to listen in close relief - in every square metre, thousands of insect cry out, their voices reducing the horizon of listening to a matter of centimetres at certain times of the day (and night). The sensation is sensorially disorienting and frankly, overpowering.
In those moments where you can get a sense of dimension and depth, the dynamism of the environment comes to the for. The abundance of birds, mammals, beetles, flies, ants and so many other creatures are a source of constant and evolving fascination. In the lakes and rivers too, the hydro-sonic environments are perpetual and effortlessly deep. It’s humbling to acknowledge how little we come to know of that which lies just below us.
A Mirror Holds The Sky is in some ways an act of acoustic and temporal compression. It is a rendering down of the lived in moments and environments that became points of intense listenership. If I am to be honest, it has taken me the better part of a decade to know how to approach this archive of materials. I owe a debt of gratitude to Chico Dub at Festival Novas Frequências, who very gently encouraged me to realise a piece for diffusion as part of his program in 2019. That invitation retuned my ears and in the process unlocked a way of approaching the mammoth 50+ hours of recordings I had gathered during my time there. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife Rebecca, who was instrumental in gathering some of these recordings. Her ears reflected an entirely other set of interests than my own and without that, this piece would be substantially less than what it is.
Recorded in Dec 2008, Lago Mamori, Amazonas.
18,00€
Out of stock
Book + CD
David TOOP – Akio SUZUKI – Lawrence ENGLISH
“Breathing Spirit Forms”
From Lawrence English
I am ceaselessly fascinated by how memory operates and, I’m regularly struck by how individually subjective a collective experience can be when recalled by its participants. Lynch’s Lost Highway comes to mind here, specifically Bill Pullman’s character Fred Madison who says “I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.” Like Madison, I can’t help but sense that memory takes shape through an accumulative process that reflects how each of us have lived (and maybe even wanted to live) up to that point in time.
Going back to listen again to these recordings of which I was a part with David and Akio, I was surprised by what elements had stayed with me and what others had slipped into the eternal greying of my mind. I have vivid recollections of listening to a Lyre bird before recording the pieces together at Witches Falls. I remember both Akio and David finding musicality in decaying palm fronds. I remember Akio’s voice, amplified through his Analpos, bouncing off the stones and trees. I remember David’s flute, so quiet in the pitch black of the night forest as to appear like a hushed tone of wind or a distant animal calling. I also remember trying to match my modest hand held electronics with the pulsing and pitching of the insects around me.
Reading David’s text, which is included in the book published alongside this edition, he recounts several things I had forgotten. Conversations about memory, ironically enough, had vanished from my mind until reading his words. I also didn’t really remember my role as tick surgeon, removing a living insect from David’s ear. I do remember his cooking though, as does Akio (captured aptly in his drawings), no doubt a testament to David’s improvisational culinary expertise.
Breathing Spirit Forms represents a distinctive exchange between friends and collaborators. Tamborine commands a special presence and encourages a deep patience from those who are willing to give time to its varied environments. For the three of us, we were fortunate to share these moments together, fleeting in our lives as they might be, to sense the mountain’s unique qualities, to respond to them through our exchanges and to form memories (as disparate as they might be) we carry forward with us in time.
David Toop - Flutes, sticks
Akio Suzuki - Analapos, flutes, stones, sponge & hand mirror, pocket bottle & mallet
Lawrence English - Shortwave radio, handheld electronics, percussion.
18,00€
In stock
CD
CELER
“In Light Of Blues”
From Will Long
It was months ago, but it could have been weeks, days, or even hours since then. I stopped wanting to hear loops, I wanted to stop it. I added brass; trumpets, trombones, and more horns. I cut it out like words from a book, and sewed it back together. Burroughs. These movements are merely to stay alive, to stay moving.
You wake up from a truck horn passing in the early morning hours on the nearby freeway, or from a dream that you can't tell was a nightmare or a loving memory.
Someone walks by on the street wearing the same perfume. I drew out each place, each scene, and put the story there. It might have been with you, or without you. All I know is that you were there somehow the whole time, even if you weren't.
I saw rainbows from under the bridge by the river, and the sun shot up through the clouds of the golden hour. It didn't help, and there was no one around. Your chest is even with your knees, and you're sitting in the dirt. The sun keeps going down, and eventually you make your way home. It's not very much the same as it was anymore. The horns are deafening, but after, the echoes let me see the way away.
The light keeps coming, and it keeps going. Songs of surroundings, the silent, the heartbeats, the tears. We've all had them, and we'll never be rid of them.
12,00€
In stock
CD
Yann NOVAK
“Lifeblood of Light and Rapture”
When I began working on Lifeblood of Light and Rapture I was thinking a lot about both my personal and society’s tendencies towards nihilism. When I was in grade school, I was taught that 2020 would be the turning point in our collective fight against climate change—that if we did not change by then, there would be no turning back.
After learning this at a young age, I watched helplessly as little was done to save the planet. It made me certain that I would not live to see past 2020. It was this moment in my childhood, along with so many other experiences in the 80s and 90s, that led me to a hedonistic coming of age. I pursued anything that would transport me away from the darkness in the world and its inevitable doom.
Now that 2020 has come and gone, I have the luxury of hindsight. I can look back and see that so many of my decisions were made not to destroy myself, but in order to self-medicate. In my teens and twenties, the world was a difficult place to inhabit, but I could use chemicals and other distractions to cope. Similarly, as it turns out, this is also the story of the industrial, technological, and digital revolutions. Even though the intention of these eras was to make the world an easier place to live in, most of the progress attributed to them over the last two centuries has directly contributed to the climate crisis. On Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I wanted to explore this parallel—that so many of the things we do to try and make this world liveable also contribute to its destruction.
Formally, this album follows the path I set out on with Slowly Dismantling. I sought to express myself in a more immediate and honest way through the use of digital and analog synthesis. With Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I built upon this same path; but I also tried to imagine the listening experience over the process of making it, focusing solely on the pure pleasure of listening. I hope this record breaks that cycle, that it can achieve its intended purpose of bringing light into the world without causing any damage.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
Siavash AMINI
“A Trail of Laughters”
rom Siavash Amini
A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels.
More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more than the others. After being done with the vain project of finding my dreams in a book from 12th century, I started obsessing about every detail of that certain story. Borrowing from distressing artifacts of my own subconscious and mixing them with all the details described or all the things left out of that particular one story, a musical project was starting to take shape in my mind.
Working outside the systems suggested by 12 tone equal temperament, has been a passion of mine from the start of my musical life. I released one track on my first EP doing that, a failed experiment. After that I kept on studying the subject. Whenever I got the chance, I tested out an idea borrowing from other systems of tuning and their suggested compositional techniques.
Imagining a musical equivalent to those distressing dreams and the scenes from the book was a very good opportunity to test out the oddest juxtapositions of the said systems, a formidable but suitable task. The sound, in my mind had to be murky, hazy, highly textured, crackling, resonant yet dingy and distant. It eventually took the shape of an album. The techniques I learned and used during the making of these pieces will remain in use in my musical activities for a long time. This album with all its shortcomings is about distressing dreams/realities of being lost in the darkness of a pit and the sounds/creatures that lead you to it, based on my own dreams and a few lines from an old book.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
MERZBOW
“Scandal”
Scandal collects together three newly unearthed and revised pieces from Merzbow recorded between 1992 and 1995.
Each of the pieces here typifies work that sits at a nexus between the experimental cassette and electronic collisions of Masami Akita’s late 1980s works and the emergent noise language that resolved into a series of now legendary recordings completed during the mid 1990s. Scandal marks out a decidedly tandem path and acts as a critical linkage, forging the trajectory of Merzbow’s music across that decade.
One critical aspect these recordings capture, in a very essential way, is the role that field recordings and tape manipulation play in his music. Throughout the 1980s, cassettes, tape editing and found sound played a significant role in the development of Merzbow’s sound.
On Tokyo Blue Sky, Merzbow collates a series of field recordings made around his home during a period of construction in his neighbourhood and merges these with sampled recordings from various ritual records. In these recordings are striking, hammered blasts that feel innately tied to the aggressive metal percussion work that was featured heavily on numerous live recordings during this time. They also maintain a sense of dynamic eruption that characterises the shifts between states of intense noise that are the core of Merzbow recording strategies.
The editions final piece Evening Scandal was originally released in 1992 on RRR as part of their recycled music project; a project that sought to reuse thrown away cassettes, re-recording over them with various recordings including some of those heard here. Scandal bares the marks of its medium, tape wow and flutter flicker across various sections of this piece, revealing a tactile relationship with the medium. The version collected here is different to that which was released in 1992, this version being uninterrupted by the pop song from which it borrows its name. This piece, in moments, maintains a decidedly minimalist compositional form, using repeated single strikes as a means of creating a deep sense of unease and recurrent tension. It’s a technique later deployed with devastating ferocity later in the 1990s.
This edition is also published with a special fold out poster featuring a previously unseen collage from Masami Akita.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
Richard CHARTIER
“Interreferences”
A note from Richard Chartier
I find myself at the collision of an inflection point and more over a reflection point. 50 years on this planet. I still find it difficult to write about my work. This is not because I cannot, but because I want the listener to approach my compositions of sound as such. Focus on the sensorial nature rather than an explicit narrative or reasoning.
I do not see my work as abstraction but rather purely abstract.
I chose sound as my medium after many years as a painter. I slowly came to conclusion that I no longer understood how to communicate sensation via a pigmented surface. The visual language I was using had become foreign to me.
Sound allowed me a language that was wordless, open, moving, shapeless yet full of forms, connections, and progressions. It raised questions though and these are still part of what I struggle with in the ways I chose to create and then speak of my work
why these sounds?
what is the attraction to these sounds?
how did I arrive at these compositions and their placements?
The pieces exist then as less of a statement, more of a question, but a question that will be different for each listener. For me, listening to them over and over, they will take another form as time passes. They evolve. For now though, they are in limbo on a piece of plastic or a series of lines of data
Often i am puzzled by how other artists create their work, how they come to decide arrangements, sequences of sounds or just the sounds themselves.
That is the magic of music.
12,00€
In stock
CD
David SHEA
“The Thousand Buddha Caves”
A Note from David
My path to the caves began when I was about 14, with my passion for reading Taoist, Buddhist and Zen texts, my love of Hong Kong films, Bruce Lee’s influence, martial arts more broadly and meditation practice which has continued since that time.
In 1980 the series of films The Silk Road produced as a collaboration between NHK television in Japan and CCTV in China explored areas of the “Silk Road” in great detail and knocked me sideways. It laid the foundation for a life of exploring what these trading routes were and what the reality of the people living along it, travellers on it and the culture, music, art, history and rituals they created.
My works Hsi -Yu Chi, The Tower of Mirrors, Satyricon and Rituals were all recordings based on adaptations of the myths, historical adaptations and connections to the many trading routes throughout the ancient world and its connection and relevance to current technological culture, through the process of building a new work on the structure of an existing novel, film adaptations or sets of ritual practices.
The more I explored the specific history of the trading route from ancient Xian to Rome, the clearer it became that the Silk Road itself was a myth, a simplified 19th century explanation for a vast and very complex network of information, religious teachings, economic trade, spices and silks etc. that involved thousands of tribes, nation states, indigenous cultures, belief systems and spanned what only much later historically do we now speak of as the divide between east and west. The mountain of archaeological finds and research over the last two centuries is just beginning to be unravelled and the complexity of the purposes of the trade routes is exposing many new connections between the ancient realities of Africa, Asia, India, Europe and the Pacific region. The trading was contact and interest in difference, what does your culture have that we need, an economy of difference with less need to synthesise the traditions than to find practical connections to the value each culture may or may not have for another culture.
It was this trading of cultural traditions, cosmologies, mysticisms, esoteric knowledge, historical eras and forms of rituals that became the entrance into the Caves for me. I immersed myself in the music, stories, history and Buddhist influences, looking for connections to this century; the technology, the underlying belief systems, the dance, design, architecture, painting, film, mixed forms and including the misunderstandings that create hybrid forms as cultures and time periods absorb, fight, steal, destroy, mythologise and trade from and with each other.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
Chris ABRAHAMS
“Appearance”
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 categorisation. 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.
Chris Abrahams, Piano
Recorded by Phil Punch at electric avenue studios November 28, 2019
12,00€
In stock
CD
Lionel MARCHETTI + Cat HOPE
“The Last Days Of Reality”
2018 release.
From Cat Hope
I first met Lionel Marchetti in Australia during the Liquid Architecture Festival in 2010. Decibel were touring our Alvin Lucier program, and Lionel was on the same bill performing a live performance set manipulating electro-acoustic materials with dancer Yoko Higashi. I was so taken with Lionel’s performances and the resulting music, that I asked him if he would write a piece for Decibel.
I didn’t realise that he hadn’t done something like this before. The first work was “Première étude (les ombres)”, communicated as a text score, and premiered in 2012. I was asked by Lionel to make some recordings of ocarinas, harmonicas, and folk instruments – and I sent these to him for the creation of a ‘partition concrète d'accompagnement’– a fixed media part that is featured in the live performance. For this piece, the part comes from speakers beside each performer, and a bass amplifier beneath the piano. Like his own performances I had seen the year before, the work was naturally performative – with unique speaker and performer configurations, interesting and odd additional instruments. It was such a rich work, a remarkable combination of electronic, spatial, acoustic and textural music. The performers use the partition concrete as a score.
I visited Lionel in Lyon, France in 2014, recording flute improvisations in his studio. He used these as a basis for “Une série de reflets”, again communicating via text instructions and each performer having their own dedicated speaker to interact with. “Pour un enfant qui dort”, which again requested flute sounds that were this time part of the live performance as well as the partition concrète, was also written around that time. The next work saw a more ‘compositional’ collaboration - “The Earth defeats me" began as a graphically scored work written by me and recorded by Decibel in the studio. That recording was used to make the partition concrète which is now an embedded as part of the animated score file, thanks to the software we had developed to do so.
These works exist as live performances, but also as singular concrète works, when heard without the instruments. Working with Lionel has been remarkable: he has a singular way of thinking about sound and its relationship to works and images. Music concrete is a lifestyle for him, it is a way of thinking, communicating and being. These pieces enable the acoustic instruments to be part of that – extending the ideas in the partition concrete, using them structurally and texturally, as well as being part of them.
When I first met Lionel, I didn’t realise he was in Australia because it was originally planned he would be travelling with French composer Éliane Radigue, performing some of her electroacoustic works, as her preferred diffuser. I would commission a work for Decibel from Élaine (“Occam Hexa II”) in 2014 and it was during that process I realised the link between them. Decibel performed Lionel and Eliane’s music together – it is music that concerns itself with the incredible power of sound, but from the most delicate and dream like perspective.
12,00€