★Room40
Petra (Tape)
Tip! Milanese sound artist Alberto Boccardi explores eerie electro-acoustic interstices reflecting his time spent in Cairo, and move back home to Italy, for Room 40. ‘Petra’ unpackages the artist’s mind in quiet, spectral designs after spending five years in the humid swelter and febrility of the Egyptian capital. Recording in a Milan studio he set up years before, Boccardi embraces silence after so long without, prizing his studio’s relative familiarity and controlled settings as a space to ru…
Agitas Al Sol
Rafael Anton Irisarri’s works from Room40 have always dwelled in a place of pressure. His low fre-quency excursions have charted out a unique voyage into a territory in which texture and density are equally matched to create a visceral, but ultimately comforting zone of entanglement. At the same time as completing his Solastalgia edition, Irisarri recorded Agitas Al Sol. Like its sibling work, this album is an enveloping sonic drift that traces across the unsteady topographies of the anthro-poce…
Of Which One Knows
Of Which One Knows is a collection of works by Natalie Beridze that sit outside the easy categorisation of ‘al-bum’. They are of course, an album, but they are more than that, in that they represent a kind of multiplicity in sound, an accumulation of experience, of emotion, of life, transposed into sound. It is only together that the stories that sit between them might start to be assembled. Spanning a decade and a half, these works chart a trajectory of investigation and curiosity that charts t…
Singles
Finland’s Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay has been responsible for some of the most radically positioned rhythmic electronic music of the past few decades. His willingness to abandon mea-sured and progression senses of repetition in favour of multi-layered unfolding pulses has become a touchstone for a new sensing of time. In a similar way, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset has reappraised the harmonic and timbral ca-pacities of his chosen instrument, the guitar, and unlocked new perspectives o…
Spectral Organ / Feedback Gong
Finnish artist Antti Tolvi operates at the nexus of performance and installation. His work, which is concerned with how sound operates in the spaces that contain it, is a meditation on how sound reveals itself, in time and in space to the listener. Each of the works captured on this edition dwell in the reductive, the subtle and the sus-tained. The pieces seek to draw attention to microtonal variation and flutter. They arc in a slow reveal that high-lights Tolvi’s patience and his unwavering des…
Deafened By The Noise Of Time
Pierce Warnecke’s work springs forth from the nexus of sound and vision. With Deafened By The Noise Of Time, he undertakes a deep interrogation of sound, which mirrors many of his approaches to visual ma-terials. Seeking to test how elements of music are altered through interference and deterioration, he uses a range of methods to reveal new densities, timbres and melodies from within his original source materi-als . Rather than becoming fragmented or overtly degraded though, Warknecke’s work on…
Spectral
Madeleine Cocolas’s Spectral is a reimagining of the familiar. It is an attentiveness to the inciden-tal, and a reaching out towards the unheard. Taking these acoustic microcosms as a source of focus, she unpacks these transient flickers and memories, and repositions them; exploding them outward and shifting perspective. Spectral, celebrates the shadows of melody and the after-thoughts of rhythm. It breaths with a sense of calculated intensity that reflects on Cocolas’s focus throughout the proc…
Too Ne
Yui Onodera’s work is patient. He invites a sense of dwelling with his pieces, an encouragement to pause and to allow sound to swell up around you. On Too Ne, he charts out a very specific sonic exploration. Across these five works he creates a lilting passage of sound, a liouidous flow that confirms the adage of Ambient music existing as constant, but never solid. Too Ne also invites a sensing of the self, in that the works ask us to examine our own memories as a way to unlocking a deeper reson…
Array / Polar Force (LP + CD with Book bundle)
This special bundle includes the two collaborative releases by Philip Samartzis and Eugene Ughetti recently released on Room40:"Array" (LP)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 Eu…
Inshallahlaland
*In process of stocking* A note from Saint Abdullah: 'In the 22 minute piece 'glamour factory', we start things off by sampling the voice of one of Iran's pre-eminent film voiceover artists, whose career lasted decades in Iranian cinema. Here he was, receiving a lifetime achievement award for his services to the film industry. And in his speech, he started off by saying that society does not accept us for having multiple identities. They want us to keep as one. Understandable. Measurable. And w…
Guitar Studies I-III
Swiss artist Zimoun is known for creating effortlessly deep and fluid sound works and sculptures. On Guitar Studies I-III he limits his acoustic focus to just one instrument, arguably the most iconic of the modern age. In doing so, he begins a vertical study of the guitar, seeking deeper and deeper into its tonal and timbral qualities, pushing to reveal the dynamic possibilities of the instrument. Using a wide variety of techniques and settings, he unlocks an entirely personal and profound readi…
All Intensive Purposes
Richard Chartier’s Pinkcourtesyphone operates at nexus of recollecting 20th century anxiety and opulence. Over the course of this project he has created a lush and overtly queer sound world of drifting rouge atmospheres, smudged lipstick electronics and cavernous architectures that dwarf the sense of human interaction in favour of omnipotent acoustic voyeurism. All Intensive Purposes aches with a deep sense of longing, held aloft with tangible suspension. Voices and sounds float, haunting a murk…
Ghosts and Others
'Ghosts And Others is a singular work in the Phill Niblock canon. It’s singular not just in its material content, but also in its methodology and approach. It represents a highly focused exercise in editing, location recording and acoustic observation. In many ways, this work reflects a kind of acoustic mirroring of his practices as a film maker. It makes itself available to the world and in doing so reveals a particular perspective that says as much about its creator as it does about its subjec…
Viento
'In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos. What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm ble…
On The Darkest Day, You Took My Hand & Swore It Will Be Okay
‘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 incredibl…
Hiss Lift
"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 t…
Tomorrow Is Too Late
Australian born, Sweden based artist John Chantler returns to Room40 with his fifth solo edition. Tomorrow Is Too Late was commissioned by INA GRM for their Présences Électronique festival in 2018 and sees Chantler significantly expand the horizons of his acoustic palette. Moving from subtle microtonal movements to passages of intense harmonic saturation, Tomorrow Is Too Late is his most dynamic work to date. A powerhouse of reductive intensity that bares witness to Chantler’s uncompromising son…
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 r…
Zone 7
Overview 'On Zone 7 New York artist Christina Giannone creates sound worlds that act as portals to the interiority of our lived experiences. These portals appear like shimmering nebula, distant but compelling, calling our attention and sparking us to reach out towards them. Through a series of drifting passages her record maps out a possible trajectory into the recesses of our often under explored subconscious. This is not a didactic music, rather it is invitational and maintains a constant flow…
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, abo…