Music from Australia

An incredible document of an incredible set - the first-time trio of Oren Ambarchi, Neil Campbell and Mick Flower was a truly transcendent thing to behold at TUSK Festival 2013. Now you can hear it on vinyl too. Mixed and mastered by Joe Talia. Illustrations by Karen Constance (front) and Graeme Ross (back). "It's the clash of the improv-rock titans! Antipodean outsider guitar god Oren Ambarchi joined forces with Vibracathedralites Michael "Michael Flower" Flower and Neil "Astral Social Club" Ca…

Wilderness of Mirrors is the new album from Lawrence English. This album has been two years in the making and the first album created since the release of his 2011 ode to J.A. Baker's novel, The Peregrine. It is English's most tectonic auditory offering to date, an unrelenting passage of colliding waves of harmony and dynamic live instrumentation. The phrase, "wilderness of mirrors," draws its root from T.S. Eliot's elegant poem "Gerontion." During the Cold War, the phrase became associated with…

Two raw, ecstatic, face-melting guitar solos recorded in one take in the Ambarchi 'Stacte tradition'. This time around, Ambarchi is backed up by a badass rhythm section from Texas, and together they ride the endless riff into the goddamn sunset.

“Sonja Henies Vei 31" is a profoundly moving document of the personal and artistic union between Crys Cole and Oren Ambarchi. Abandoning their usual instrumental artillery, both performers make themselves vulnerable to the listener, undertaking a committed exploration of pure physical gesture. Surrounding an explicitly intimate duo performance is a hazy collage of field recordings, tape hiss, metallic clinks and wandering voices. This forces the listener to hover in a disorienting psychological …

Oren Ambarchi live recordings assembled on Cheryl Cole's iPhone at her house in Winnipeg. Not really, but it's that's how I first misread the description. Amulet actually presents two iPhone recordings assembled at Chez Cole, Winnipeg, July 2013 by the inestimable Oren Ambarchi. We've no further info but from what we can hear these are rudimentary iPhone recordings excerpted and crudely edited from a live performance (a shard of applause possibly gives the game away) between rippling, dynamicall…

Letterpress sleeve + insert, 2 color. Designed and printed by Ben Owen. Cover image from a photograph by Lawrence English. Recorded in Japan and Australia 2003-2011.

Letterpress sleeve, 2 color. Designed and printed by Ben Owen. Cover image from a photograph by Lawrence English. Hydrophonic recordings made january and august 2007, Stradbroke Island, Queensland.

The Just Reproach documents the second concert given by John Tilbury and Oren Ambarchi as a duo. When they first performed together in Reykjavik, Iceland in March 2012, the aptness of the pairing was evident. When they reprised the duo at London's Cafe OTO in September the same year in the concert presented here, the city was in the midst of a heatwave. With the air-conditioning turned off to accommodate the low volume of the performance, the uncomfortable squirming of the audience members…

When does modern composition become drone?  When the original elements are sunk into a sea of strings, brass and electronics, as they are on this evocative split release.  Each of the artists composes, but in a modern fashion, either by manipulating source elements or by rearranging them to make a different sort of sense.  Both pieces are based on recordings of the Antonio Lomatto choir, conducted by Davide Mainetti.  The phantoms of these recordings remain, spectral yet in…

CD version. "Following on from 2012's acclaimed Imikizushi (BT 007CD/LP), Now While It's Still Warm Let Us Pour in All the Mystery is the fourth release from the established power trio of Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Oren Ambarchi, recorded in January 2012 at their yearly concert at SuperDeluxe, Tokyo. While the trio's two previous double LP releases featured sprawling, side-long performances, the music here is presented in six shorter pieces, each one displaying a different side of the tr…

Beautiful new work from Lawrence English. Pressed in an edition of 500 copies.Somewhere after dark, before dawn, in a place where natural light is shunned and organ is singing. It's voice is that of an arcing clouds of tone, emerging and falling with an uneasy sense of pace and direction. The voice warbles, a vibrato of shifting pulse and subtle variation. The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. …

Presenting a new collaboration featuring Oren Ambarchi on guitar, the electronics of Robin Fox, and both performing on various other instruments. The music on this album came about as the result of the two being asked to co-compose the soundtrack for a new production by renowned Australian contemporary dance company Chunky Move for their Connected production. 'Chunky Move's artistic director Gideon Obarzanek was drawn to the organic and deeply musical qualities of Ambarchi's work and the digital…

"Cat's Squirrel is a live recording of Masami Akita and Oren Ambarchi's performance in Campbelltown, Australia in May 2012. Although Akita and Ambarchi have known one another since 1993 and performed together as part of larger ensembles, this was their first performance as a duo. Together they create a massive wall of sound that moves from the cavernous to the blisteringly psychedelic, laying down shifting low-end structures over which pointillist details ricochet across the stereo field. Akita …

'I had the pleasure to meet and record with Akio Suzuki late in 2005. Having discovered his work a good few years before that, I had always been impressed with his clear passion for the expressive nature of sound - not merely as a vibrational art form, but also for its mystic, perhaps even spiritual qualities. His many experiments with sound, space and environment were a great inspiration for me and still to this day fill me with a great sense of wonder (no doubt a result of Suzuki's magician li…

In 2012, Room40's open frame festival probes this idea of dead silence. asking what role does silence play today across music and art spectra. We bring together a range of artists whose work can be seen to reflect on this idea of absence and presence. Moreover these artists raise questions around the positioning (in political, social, geographic, environmental and other realms) of silence and also what use we might have for it looking into the future - both methodologically and in actuality. The…

Fratto9 under the sky and Kinky Gabber present the second volume of the “seven inch series”, a series of coloured 7 inches in limited and numbered edition that Luminance Ratio shares with different international artists and musicians. While the first volume of this series, released a few months ago, involved the American musician/artist Steve Roden (almost sold out now), this second volume features Luminance ratio with a psychedelic piece of music in between free-folk and ambient and the …

Wreckage is a collaborative work between Australian composers Oren Ambarchi and James Rushford. Cycling through a set of asymmetrical harmonic and rhythmic patterns, the composition is a study in displacement. The material, though repetitive, shifts itself in unpredictable ways to create an amorphous, and extremely delicate, sonic world. Wreckage draws upon both avant-garde and avant pop sensibilities, influenced by a variety of artists including Morton Feldman, Luciano Cilio and Luigi Non…

Line is pleased to announce the upcoming release of a elegant new sound work by Australian artist Lawrence English, inspired by John Cage.In 2011, anticipating John Cage’s centenary, I began thinking about how to approach a work that might act as a homage to the aspects of his life and work that have inspired me over the past two decades (ironically, those in which he has been physical absent, but philosophically more present than ever). John Cage, with that beaming smile and trademarked c…

Raga Ooty unearths three previously unreleased works (each titled with reference to the area in south India where his mother was born) from Oren Ambarchi's archive, showcasing the rawer side of his solo work between 2006 and 2011. The side-long Raga Ooty unspools a twisting, skittering thread of gritty guitar harmonics over a bed of buzzing tambura drone, creating the same paradoxical impression of simultaneous stasis and forward propulsion achieved by minimalist masters such as Henry Flynt, to …

Gatefold double LP version. On Audience Of One, Oren Ambarchi presents a four-part suite which moves from throbbing minimalism to expansive song-craft to ecstatic free-rock. His previous solo albums for Touch exhibited a clear progression towards augmenting and embellishing his signature bass-heavy guitar tones with fragile acoustic instrumentation. Audience Of One, while also existing in clear continuity with these recordings, opens the next chapter. Remarkable in its confidence and bread…