132 Ranks
132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played…
Light Pipe
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years. Many would recognize Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorization. With Unearth, he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his…
Illustrations For Those Who
Polish producer Tomasz Bednarczyk returns to Room40 with Illustrations For Those Who, his first full length edition in almost a decade. Across the late 2000s, Bednarczyk created a series of acclaimed ambient recordings that married the unsteadiness of archival technologies with an extensive palette of pastoral timbres. These recordings quietly set a particular tenor of work for a new generation of Middle Eastern European ambient composers. Following these recordings, however, Bednarczyk's energi…
At The Still Point Of The Turning World
Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes's new offering At The Still Point Of The Turning World, borrows its title from T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton". It is a record of restless motion, lilting and pulsing with a sense of gentle determination. Born out of a period of mutual loss, the works carry a bittersweet sentiment. Bitter in the sense of loss; sweet in the sense of lingering memory and influences recognized of those departed. It is also a record that, like the poem from which it takes its title, m…
Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9)
Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is the latest edition from Tokyo-based artist Toshimaru Nakamura. The "No-Input Mixing Board" is a unique instrument pioneered by Nakamura. As its name suggests, it is a mixing console within which external no input exists. The instrument is fueled only by its own feedback. Initially used by Nakamura as a more tonal instrument, creating incredibly high frequency outputs, over time the mixing board has become decidedly more rhythmic and harmonic. It is this son…
Love Songs
The music of Australian artist Thembi Soddell resides in a zone of unrelenting darkness and physical affect. Working at the nexus of raw emotion, sound design, and musique concrete, she creates sound worlds that are effortlessly dense and abyss-like. In her performances, she explores sonic environments which swallow the audience. By utilizing intense sound pressure and varying dynamics she creates profoundly unsettling, but fulfilling, experiences for her audiences. Love Songs, her latest work, …
Indelicate Slices
All is lost, all is lost. Or is it? A poignant question from Pinkcourtesyphone. A haunting strain. A coat of gloss smeared. A scene recalled, a fond memory, a terrible lie in this new dark age of love. Suspended in that lush, lonely feeling, Pinkcourtesyphone implores you to hang breathless on the line, above the chandeliers in shimmering stasis that belie those desperate, shadowy passions underneath. A creak, a glance. Nothing is for certain anymore. That sentimental something echoed across cor…
Unearth
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years. Many would recognize Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorization. With Unearth, he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his…
Smoke Under The Water
"I confess to being in a state of ceaseless awe when it comes to Tokyo guitarist, Ueno Takashi. I have had the pleasure to know Ueno now for well over ten years. In that time he has remained a source of constant curiosity and surprise. Just when I think I have the man pegged, he throws out some unexpected musical gesture that completely catches me off guard. Whether it be his work with Saya in Tenniscoats, or his almost endless stream of solo releases, many of which exist in very short run editi…
Moon Field
On Moon Field, Rafael Toral breaks new ground, it is his first edition that moves outward, beyond the Space Program series. This collection of three extended and interlocking works, mark the beginning of a transitional period into a new phase. Building on the explorations of his almost decade and a half of work with the Space Program, Mood Field seeks a more open sensibility and integrates a range of new elements and new directions. These elements reposition the potential interplays of his chose…
Psychic Stress
After leaving Iran with his family at the age of 6, Emad Dabiri (Sarin) lived in Toronto before moving to Berlin in 2014. Though Toronto provided Dabiri with the foundation to pursue his music, he knew he had to move overseas to explore his art further. “The depth of the underground electronic scene [in Berlin] is vast,” says Dabiri. “There’s also a good sense of community and support among the artists and musicians here.” The current sounds coming out of Berlin, combined with Dabiri’s fixation …
Nihon No Wave
Limited edition of 525 copies on double vinyl with printed inner sleeves and insert with photos and credits. Housed in a deluxe jacket designed with synthetic paper silk-screened and sewn. Nihon No Wave’ surveys a secretive niche of ’70s/‘80s Japanese DIY music inspired by experimental electronic and post punk styles from Europe and North America. All material originally appeared on flexidisc, vinyl and tapes, and is newly remastered and made available for the first time beyond the Japanese dome…
Cabinets de Curiosité
“Wunderkammern or ‘cabinets of curiosities,’ of the 16th and 17th centuries, were fabulous collections of objects brought together, ordered and displayed to inspire curiosity and wonder. They might include religious relics, stuffed birds and animals, shells, artefacts from distant and ancient cultures, mineral and plant specimens, paintings and drawings. In fact, almost anything. As a small boy, the ‘cabinet of curiosity’ that intrigued me was the large, tabletop radio in our kitchen, with its ‘…
Cycle Nautique
3rd solo album by Canadian composer David Berezan living in the United Kingdom. “Nautical Cycle” (2011-17). After completing a BA in History (1988) at the University of Calgary, a Diploma in Composition (1996) at Grant MacEwan College (Edmonton) and an MMus in Composition (2000) at the University of Calgary, David Berezan moved to the UK and completed a PhD in Electroacoustic Composition (2003) at the University of Birmingham (UK). In 2012 he was appointed Professor in Electroacoustic Music Comp…
Mistpouffers
Mistpouffers is a selection of three compositions completed between 2014-16, composed by French artist and improviser eRikm. Each piece runs approximately 17-18 minutes in length with two based on 8-channel fixed medium and one in stereo. “Draugalimur” (2014-15, 16). Draugalimur (Phantom Limb, in English) is a crossing from the intimate to vast open spaces, traversed by the elements in motion. Ice, air, gas and fire are in perpetual activity in the chaotic and primitive far off. It resembles the…
Troubles
Monique Jean is a composer whose
dense and raw sound universe will inevitably deeply engage the
listener. Her musical discourse is flawless, meticulously written,
giving sound the time needed to accurately deploy in all its sensory
perception. It is An honest sensory, refusing routine, is giving each
pieces of this disc a unique color. This is her third full-length effort with Canadian imprint empreintes DIGITALes, it was mastered by Christian Bouchard and offers two works on Troubles: T.A.…
Ténébrisme
Adam Stanović (né Stansbie) started composing electronic music over twenty years ago. Initial experiments with tape recorders and a four-track mini-disc player led him to read music and technology at both Leeds College of Music (England, UK) and University of Leeds (England, UK), where he was introduced to computer music by Dale Jonathan Perkins. During this time, he started to enjoy international performances of his musical works, and he ultimately graduated with a university prize for outstand…
Grains
4th solo disc by Swedish composer Åke Parmerud. Rerelease of 4 of his major acousmatic works. These works had been recorded in 1994 and ’96 on discs that have been sold out for many years. “Grains of Voices” (1994-95). “Jeux imaginaires” (1993). “Les objets obscurs” (1991). “Alias” (1990). Åke Parmerud has successfully pursued a professional career in contemporary music and multimedia art since the late 70s. Although he originally trained as a photographer (1972-74) he went on to study music at …
Cutheart
**Incredible pioneering recording of extended synthesiser and percussion technique from the Australian experimental underground. Edition of 500** Welcome to the strange musical world of Tolley & Dara, an experimental duo whose incredible music held a marginal yet vital position on the fringe of the Australian music industry during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Consisting of jazz bassist and synthesist David Tolley and percussionist Dure Dara, their union was a relationship of romance and inten…
Field Music
A fluid dream logic runs deep in William Fowler Collins’ Field Music.
The New Mexican composer of dark minimalism has long centered his
practices upon the slow burn of the drone through guitar, electronics,
etc. That remains the case for Field Music, with Collins extending his
strategies through compositional exercises into rhythm and a diverse
array of conceptual signposts that push his work along unfixed, sometime
oppositional directions. The idea of ‘field music’ can relate to the
arch…