★Room40
For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name
For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name is the forthcoming solo album by Peter Knight, released through Lawrence English’s Room40 label. Written and recorded partly outdoors on Krowathunkooloong land in southeastern Australia—a landscape tied to Knight’s childhood—the album merges field recordings, trumpet, and live electronic processing to construct an evocative meditation on environment, memory, and belonging. Across four expansive compositions, the trumpeter’s tones intertwine with insects, wind, a…
Is Spring a Sculpture?
"Is Spring a Sculpture?" is a collaboration between David Toop and Rie Nakajima, released as a limited edition CD and book on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The work consists of a series of sound pieces and text fragments exploring the poetics of objects, ephemeral phenomena, and the ambiguous boundaries between sound, environment, and tactile form. Together, Toop and Nakajima sculpt a listening experience that is elusive and sensorially charged, extending their mutual fascination with the int…
Smelter
Smelter by Faith Coloccia and Daniel Menche constructs a temporal architecture that explores water in its myriad states—snow, ice, streams, and storm. Moving between spontaneous, voice-laced vignettes and epic drone formations, the record serves as an aural archive that suspends the listener in crystalline moments, as if each piece is fixed in time yet endlessly malleable.
Steelwound (20th Anniversary Edition)
"If I’m not mistaken, Ben Frost and I first talked about the ideas of what would become Steelwound sometime in mid 2002. In the early 00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realised in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at an…
Within Without
"I first owned a fender rhodes electric piano in the late 1970s. It was a Mark 1 model (wooden key action). I had a band with my younger brother and my best friend from school and this was my ‘portable’ gigging instrument that weighed ‘a ton,’ and only just fitted in our small car. (I eventually got smart and left the 15 kg lid at home.) I had one effects pedal, a Boss chorus. Sadly—due to the rise of synthesisers and electronic keyboard instruments—I sold this lovely instrument in the late 1980…
WhiteOut
"Even without visiting a place, we often think we know it. It’s a syndrome of the modern age. The world is right before us, on screen, summarised and sensorially curated into a particular vision that casts light across ‘just so much’ of an impression of a place and a time. In some ways, I realised this phenomenon most strongly when I visited Antarctica in the summer of 2010. In my mind’s ear (and eye) certain features of that place were front and centre – imagined, as to be real. The stark colou…
Steel Wound
Twenty years after its original release, Ben Frost's "Steel Wound" returns as a testament to isolation transformed into transcendence. Born from solitude at a derelict cabin on Australia's windswept coast, this masterpiece of textural guitar manipulation still sounds like a transmission from another world—one where beauty emerges from the marriage of abandonment and obsession.
Elemental View
Few contemporary composers have created instruments as singular as Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, and fewer still have explored its possibilities with the depth and invention documented on Elemental View. This six-movement work, performed in collaboration with The Living Earth Show, transforms an industrial-sized space into a resonating chamber where 136 precisely tuned strings create what can only be described as environmental music in its most literal sense. Fullman has spent decades …
In the Depth of Illusion: A Soundtrack for Nervous Magic Lantern
"Ken Jacobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschac…
Njurra Wänja
"The process of making music together in Hand to Earth is unlike any other we have experienced. It is not free improvisation but it is not composed either. It is somewhere in between, and it feels like ‘weaving.’ Through Hand to Earth, we weave the threads of our different histories, different lives, and different perspectives together, and become family. Daniel weaves the ‘Manikay’ (public songs) in his first language, Wagiläk - into the syntax of our shared practices. He talks about the ‘rak…
A Book of Waves
"After playing together for years, our tide was turning. What began as a happy rhythm of show dates in Berlin, from cozy trios in Klaus’ home studio to ten-piece ensembles at Ausland, was now ebbing away thanks to Andy’s move to the US. Whenever an accustomed pattern shifts it can take time to readjust, to find the gravity that will pull to shape an orbit again. What had been working well between us remained on both our minds for a few years after: the tension between complimentary forms and ref…
Archival Recordings: Primal Image / Beauty
Time is a mysterious companion in Alan Lamb’s Primal Image/Beauty. Recorded on abandoned telephone wires in Western Australia, these works explore harmony and materiality, blending dynamic sonic environments with deep listening. Lamb’s music invites us to experience the world’s hidden sounds, unlocking inner reflection.
Milan
"In 2016, I invited Norman Westberg to Australia for his first solo tour. He’d been in Australia a few years before that, touring The Seer with Swans, and it was during this tour that I’d had the fortune to meet him. Since that time Norman and I have worked on a number of projects together. He very kindly played some of the central themes on my Cruel Optimism album and I had the pleasure to produced his After Vacation Album. Last year Norman shared a multichannel live recording with me from a to…
Caligo
"What remains after mutilating and reassembling an essential historical recording? How is it connected to a particular event in a grotesque and cyclical novella riddled with medical procedures of an aesthetic and deforming nature? Malakoot – this spiral, centres on a decision made one afternoon by a character. On a similar afternoon, full of anxiety, pressed by an unknowable presence in this city , I decided that the soundscape for such an inspiring work of fiction was a mutilated one; things co…
The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue
Matte laminate and embossed sleeve, with insert card and fold out poster + vinyl sticker (20cm long). Recorded in 1996, Merzbow's The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented. During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound world…
Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds
From Lawrence English: "I like to think that sound haunts architecture. It's one of the truly magical interactions afforded by sound's immateriality. It's also something that has captivated us from the earliest times. It's not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of our early ancestors calling to one another in the dark cathedral like caves which held wonder, and security, for them. Today the ways in which sound occupies space, the so-called liquid architecture, holds just as much wonder, albei…
Journey to the Cave of Guanyin
The inspiration for these pieces comes from the Chinese folklore of Guanyin, a deity whose name translates to ‘the one who perceives all the sounds, or cries, of the world’. Also known as Guanshiyin 觀世音, she is the embodiment of infinite compassion. I grew up knowing of Guanyin as a female deity, but recently discovered that she had transformed through the centuries from the male Hindu bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara. I instantly found an affinity for this gender-fluid figure, who was said to have a…
I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea
I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea is the first collaboration of Lea Bertucci and Olivia Block. This collaboration was set into slow motion some years ago, in 2017, when Lea and Olivia connected through an interview facilitated by writer Steve Smith. In 2022, the artists finally had a chance to collaborate, performing an improvised set at Pioneer Works in New York City. Since then, the New York based Bertucci and Chicago based Block remotely built out ideas stemming from th…
View
"View was first presented as part of a solo exhibition at the jennjoy gallery in San Francisco, the show also included paintings, drawings, and a silent video work. For the installation, I asked Jenn to record for me the sounds of the View from one of the gallery windows. "sounds were recorded from ledge just above radiator on various days and times in april" sometimes the window was open, sometimes closed. I used fragments of these recordings as both a compositional cue as well as the entire so…
Archeology // Archeologia
Biiiiiiiig Tip! "It has taken me over 50 years to write these words. Since my initial successes in the 1970’s many have urged me to “release” unpublished works from the same period, pieces that featured the VCS3 synths or the amazing Serge (which I regret not having used enough) or pieces featuring soundscapes from my classic environmental composition style. For reasons of persistence and empathy, Lawrence English at Room 40 was the most persuasive; now, nearly 3 years after our agreement, a new…