★Room40
A Fragile Geography
Rafael Anton Irisarri's A Fragile Geography is a record cast in a climate of unsteadiness and transition, reflecting upon the current state of everyday living. Recorded over 2014 and '15, the record bears the marks of difficult terrain -- personal, political, social, and cultural. It tips its hat to the complex and unpredictable dynamics of the contemporary world, correlating concerns both macro and micro. Compositionally, the music mirrors the tensions of contemporary America, contrastin…
Interlacing
Ross Manning is one of Australia's best-kept secrets. Since 2010, Manning has been behind a series of increasingly profound explorations into light and movement. These installation works seek to reveal spectrum and frequency in patterns that often go unrecognized. With Interlacing, his first LP for Room40, Manning showcases his deeply personal sonic works. Having been an active experimentalist for much of the 2000s across Australia, with projects such as 4 Layers of Nine, Sky Needle, and F…
13
Room40 inaugurates its series of works by American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg with 13. Best known for his work with the seminal outfit Swans, Westberg's output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City's music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema of Transgression to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westb…
Steel Wound
2015 repress. Room40 presents the vinyl edition of this classic Ben Frost album from 2007. Since his earliest days, Ben Frost has been fascinated by the cinematic qualities of the guitar. His output to this point has hinted at this, but with Steel Wound, he makes a bold statement of intent. Finding his way to a deserted stretch of Johanna Beach along the Great Ocean Road (Victoria, Australia) in early 2003, Frost set up a remote studio at a derelict cabin overlooking the icy waters of Bass …
Norberg/Apondalifa
**shipping the next week** Two of Hecker rarest and most sought after EPs, finally reissued in LP, both of the releases have been out of print ever since selling out almost immediately after being released, so this reissue should be a treat for those longing after these two EPs having missed out the first time round In 2015, Room40 celebrates 15 years of editions and events; as part of the celebrations, the label is reissuing a number of editions in various formats that are out of print…
Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains
On Moon Light Reflecting Over Mountains, Tokyo's Chihei Hatakeyama evokes an instrumental poetic grace that marks him out as one of the icons of his generation. Drawing upon a broad swath of aesthetic references, he seamlessly melts glacial ambient drifts with richly harmonic guitar strata that echo the gliding motions of My Bloody Valentine, Ride, and Cocteau Twins. Never resolving to clear melody, his interest in unrestrained harmonics creates a depth to his compositions and moreover a pr…
Fratello Mare
Fratello Mare, which takes its title from Folco Quilici's classic 1975 film, continues UK-born, Italy-based musician Mike Cooper's ode to the Pacific, its people, and the traditions that have flowed from that part of the world into seemingly endless iterations within contemporary culture. Recorded across 2014, the tropical opus dovetails neatly with Cooper's other Room40 editions, White Shadows in the South Seas (RM 454CD, 2013) and the post-everything classic Rayon Hula (2004). It expands h…
The Spaces Contained in Each
Steve Roden and Stephen Vitiello are sound artists working at the nexus of sculpture and acoustics. They are professional listeners, embedding themselves in the auditory and relishing that which is encompassed in their horizon of listening. It's a shared horizon, then, that is at the core of The Spaces Contained in Each. Recorded as part of their joint residency on Governors Island in New York, this edition documents their installation work created for the unique acoustics of the island'…
Wilderness of Mirrors
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…
Even Clean Hands Damage The Work
Mindblowing!!!!!! Even Clean Hands Damage the Work is the new LP from UK-based artist John Chantler. Following on from The Luminous Ground, his critically-acclaimed album from 2011, Even Clean Hands Damage the Work sees Chantler delve ever deeper into the inner zones of audible electricity. Like its predecessor, this is an album generous in texture and dimension, but moreover it is a record of incendiary dynamic force; shifting and arcing with a relentless ferocity. Recorded across a range o…
P.A./Hard Love
On P.A./Hard Love, New York-based composer and conceptual sound artist Marina Rosenfeld generates an esoteric universe of radical sonic collisions. Developed initially in 2009, the album draws its roots following a series of idiosyncratic quasi-sculptural sound-system installations Rosenfeld installed in various disused and monumental sites including New York's Park Avenue Armory and Liverpool's Renshaw Hall car park. The music she composed for these installations was heterogeneous, reposit…
White shadows in the south seas
It's difficult to know how to summurise the meandering journey that has been the life and times of Mike Cooper. Having just celebrated his 70th year of mischief making here's what we can tell you... A young Mike Cooper can be spotted playing a beatnik guitarist on an anti-nuclear march in London beat cult film 'That Kind Of Girl'. His first band The Blues Committee played with and supported blues legends such John Lee Hooker, Howlin Wolf and Jimmy Reed. Cooper was central in launching several o…
Memory night
Chris Abrahams' Memory Night is his third edition for Room40 - Play Scar and Thrown preceding this album. Widely recognised as the pianist for Australian liminal improvisation trio The Necks, Chris Abrahams' solo work etches out an entirely different universe. It's a place that is entirely his own, unashamedly unique and at times startling - yet always alluring. On Memory Night, Abrahams' expands his sonic palette, building on the uneasy frontiers of the highly regarded Play Scar. Never content …
Dead silence
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…
Liquid Architecture 13 - Antarctic Convergence
Liquid Architecture 13: Antarctic Convergence has been conceived by the curators as a way of investigating the philosophical, social and environmental ramifications of the growing human presence in Antarctica through the activities of a diverse set of artists who have produced works from first hand encounters of the continent. Specially curated by Lawrence English and Philip Samartzis, this program draws on a range of Australian and international artists who have undertaken fieldwork in v…
Vaporware / Scanops
Limited Vinyl Edition - 500 copies only* Having been reasonably quiet on the release front - by his standards - since last year's 'Elegy For Beach Friday' collection on Spectrum Spools, Chris Madak aka Bee Mask turns up on Lawrence English's Room40 imprint with a fine new edition that finds him testing out a new framework for his approach to electronic composition - one that has, we're pleased to report, really enriched and developed his sound. With the help of vocal loops recorded by Aut…
Wege
Wege translates as 'path' and it's a fitting title for the latest rendering from master percussionist and experimental composer Andrea Belfi. The albums' four pieces act as orientation points through some imaginary sonic landscape. Wege is Belfi's forth LP (the first with Room40), and stems entirely from compositions completed at two artist-in-residence projects in Austria (Hotel Pupik) and in Brussels (Q-O2 Werkplatz). The album is built around a cyclic electro-acoustic system, through which Be…
Narrow
Steinbrüchel’s Narrow is an album of reduction and transformation. Like much of Steinbrüchel’s recorded work, the genesis of Narrow stems from a singular idea concerned with the notion of ‘static development’. Working with a limited palette of source material Narrow’s elegance is in its varying perspectives on related sonic materials. The title track is the nexus here - a somewhat more organic sound palette than heard previously in Steinbrüchel’s work - Narrow is a subharmonic oceanic-like compo…
The Oansome Orbit
The Oansome Orbit is the latest work from Australia’s electronic godfather Pimmon (known to friends as Paul Gough). Over the past decade and a half, Pimmon has carved out a unique space for himself amidst through producing a series of masterfully executed excursions into abstract electronic sound. With this new edition, he strikes out at some of his most harmonic territory to date, merging washes of rich tone against irregular grids of texture. The results are wholly individual and utte…
The Peregrine
LP version. Room40 presents a reissue of Australian sound artist Lawrence English's acclaimed 2011 album The Peregrine, inspired by John Alec Baker's 1967 nature writing classic of the same name. "I first discovered The Peregrine when I was visiting my friend David Toop in London. He had the book on his desk and I picked it up and randomly turned to a page. It was an exquisite description of an Owl silently hunting. I was struck by the detail and evocative sense of listening in the writing. It w…