★Room40
47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing
2008 release ** Eugene Carchesio's renown as a visual artist has unjustly eclipsed his extraordinary output as a soundmaker. Since the mid 80s, the Brisbane artist has steadfastly proliferated a sack full of barely released cassettes and cdrs under the D.N.E. moniker.Twenty years ago, he emptied his wallet to press 250 copies of the appropriately titled LP 47 Songs Humans Shouldn't Sing'. Then compact discs arrived. The local pressing plant closed and the master tape went with it. Copies were ci…
Painting Sky Together
Wroclaw based sound artist Tomasz Bednarczyk has a penchant for capturing the emotion in moments of stasis. It's this acute sense of expanding fleeting moments and exploring their detail that informs the sonic palette of his latest full length recording Painting Sky Together. Akin to his acclaimed debut edition 'Summer Feelings' (Room40), which elegantly documented a uniquely Polish experience of summer replete with distantly warm bursts of piano, and crisp glitch ridden pulses, Painting Sky Tog…
U
Tujiko Noriko joins with collaborators Lawrence English and John Chantler for ‘U’, a record of orbiting themes, esoteric lyrical wordplays and warm analog-infused song-forms. Following on from the acclaimed ‘Blurred In My Mirror (ROOM40), ‘U’ is a record of phases and exchanges between Paris and Brisbane over a three year period. A record of extended technique and unconventional process, U is most of all a swelling passage through the rare and exotic reality Tujiko Noriko evokes through her curi…
Basis
'Basis' is based on recordings of acoustic instruments. All sounds were processed and layered into compositions by Steinbrüchel. Through this processing Steinbrüchel revealed hidden structures and melodies and isolated them, creating new melodic and organic textures without losing the soul of the original. These seven tracks reveal a new side in his music. Tonal harmonics have never before played such an important role and each track contains layers of subtle shifting and interweaving melodies, …
Norberg
Recorded at the Norberg Festival (Sweden) amidst the mineshafts and cluttered buildings strewn throughout parts the city, this 21 minute live piece summarises much of what makes Tim Hecker’s music so vital and compelling. Adept at counter-pointing the most ferocious of distorted platters with smooth beds of ambient sound and potent melodic overtones, Tim Hecker creates music with a vast depth. On Norberg, this depth seems almost endless, as layer upon layer of sound are compiled into a swelling …
11 Easy Pieces
Since 1995, Brisbane resident Leighton Craig has etched out a varied musical existence, from solo keyboard studies to an extensive body of collaborative work. His solo works, which span delicate ambient keyboard excursions through to site specific live documents and most recently song based explorations, have mapped out a focus of tone, duration and 'situations' for sound. On 11 Easy Pieces, his first widely available solo LP, Craig offers an intimate yet robust collection of works recorded on a…
Audible Geography
Geography is an ongoing force shaping our understandings of the environments around us and, in turn, experiences ongoing transformation and development. Considering not only the natural world, but also culture, economy and politics in diverse settings and across many scales, contemporary geography acts as a glue - integrating disparate research streams and continuing to provide insights into our relations with space and place. On Audible Geography, 11 sound artists were asked to consider the sco…
Rhythmic Movement Disorder
Robbie Avenaim's RMD has been a long time in the making. His debut solo release to surface in a career that stretches back to the late 1980s, collects together the better part of a decade's worth of experimentation with the possibilities of prepared percussion, irregular rhythm, modulated pulse and low-tech electronics. Avenaim is perhaps best known for his improvised collaborations alongside the likes of Otomo Yoshihide, Oren Ambarchi (with whom he released the transcendental 'Clockwork') and K…
Oceanic Feeling - Like
It’s this musical whisper that is amplified on Oceanic Feeling-Like, as Italian based musician Mike Cooper and Australia’s Chris Abrahams unite for the first time to create what could be described as a picturesque horizon of melodic ocean swell. Stretching out wide, Oceanic Feeling-Like is generously coloured by Cooper’s unique approaches to the guitar and Abrahams' distinctive piano motions. Both bring a wealth of technique and improvised flare, creating a series of island-like compositions tha…
Thrown
Abrahams relentless and steady patterning started to metamorphose the nature of the piano, the upper chords sounding like a distant locomotive hoot, and then an accordion weaving in and out of a shimmering bank of flutes.
Airport Symphony
Double CD Edition housed in Metal Case** This wonderful Lawrence English-curated compilation documents a number of works commissioned by the Queensland Music Festival in conjunction with Brisbane Airport, calling on the compositional talents of all the leading lights in contemporary electronic music, including Tim Hecker, Fennesz, Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier, Francisco Lopez, Marc Behrens and Toshiya Tsunoda, to name but a few. The music here all comes from the starting point of field recor…
On Isolation
The concepts of isolation – in social, geographic and virtual settings have spawned various creative investigations over the centuries. Guided by the philosophical premise of social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman, Room40 and the University Of Tasmania collaborated in the curation of a series of sound artworks, found sound pieces and musical interjections spurred on by the notion of ‘isolation’. The results of the contributions vary widely but all meditate on the states of being alone or in sit…
Incidental Amplifications
For most of us, our every waking moment (and even those where we are unconscious) is surrounded by sound. From the obnoxiously pitched alarm tone that raises us from slumber to the muted sounds of night-time traffic that merge with natural nocturnal transmissions; there is always sound. As a society we have increasingly sought to augment and indeed control the environments around us. All manner of tools have been utilised in this ongoing war against the unfamiliar, the unexpected and the "undesi…
Rotterdam 1
Recorded at the Rotterdam International Film Festival in January 2005, this explosive piece from Text Of Light typifies their abilities as a vivid freeform improvisational unit. Ranaldo and Licht’s measured guitar work sets a basis on which Kreiger’s blaring saxtronics, Barnes’ percussive explorations and DJ Olive’s swirling turntable incursions can intertwine and augment one another. This piece ebbs and flows, each of the players listening intently and guiding the proceedings with disarmingly s…
Opaque (+ re)
In spring 2003 Steinbrüchel received an invitation from the Swiss music festival 'Taktlos' in Berne to contribute a track for their listening room equipped with a surround 5.1 sound system. During the two-day festival in November 2003 Steinbrüchel's track 'Opaque' was played back in cycle mode (among tracks from various other artists). The listening room focused on the experience of being able to listen to music in a very quiet and large environment - unlikely to most home listening situations. …
Substation
Apart from being recognised as two of Australia's leading improvising musical forces, Clayton Thomas and Robin Fox are also acknowledged for their unrelenting experiments and divergent acoustic approaches in relation to their instrument of choice. Over the past 3 years, Robin Fox has developed some of the most powerful live processing tools in Australia through his research with MAXMSP. Clayton Thomas on the other hand has expanded his performance styles, moving between blistering free jazz expl…
Current
Richard Chartier’s sound installation and recorded pieces evoke a state of aural awareness. Working with a variety of minimal structures and refined sound sources, Chartier has been responsible for some of the most austere audio works of recent years. Aesthetically refined and creatively provocative much of his work has focused on the edges of perception, both in frequency range and amplitude. On Current, his latest work to be released in conjunction with his performances in Australia and Japan …
Pech
Pech is the latest duo recording from inside pianist Reinhold Friedl and avant- percussionist Michael Vorfeld. Over the past five years, this pair of German musicians have created some of the most engaging and imaginative electro-acoustic music, exploring the potentials of subtle performance techniques and refined compositional approaches. On Pech, the duo seek to uncover the hidden and masked character of their instruments - the piano is altered via various preparations and unconventional ways …
One plus one
The turntable has enjoyed a varied history in the realm of performance and experimental music. From the early phonographic works of John Cage to the spliced cut-ups of Christian Marclay in the 1980s, the device has proven to be a versatile tool for the creation and transformation of sound. Following a joint billing at Brisbane’s Metro Arts Space in 2002, Melbourne based composer Philip Samartzis and sound artist Lawrence English shared a 30-minute performance that was to become the beginning of …
H ()
Australian electro-acoustic composer Philip Samartzis is an increasingly vital presence in the Australian sound community. His work over the past decade and a half has offered a prophetic vision for each of his chosen formats and aesthetic approaches. On h [ ] Samartzis is joined by minimal Japanese composer Kozo Inada, who brings with him an equally refined and austere sound sensibility. Between them, these two composers collaborate to produce a highly detailed work that juxtaposes, obscures an…