★Room40
The Luminous Ground
Limited edition of 320 copies, mastered and cut by LUPO at D&M. Includes free download code for FLAC or MP3 redeemable from the label** John Chantler offers his most substantial solo recordings in over seven years. Housed in lustrous, silk-screened sleeve, 'The Luminous Ground' glows with a deeply instinctive feel for bewildering, alien harmonics and psychoactivated tunings arising from processes of modular synthesis. A pulsing and glimmering collision of oscillated tone, filtered texture…
Zone Sensible 2 - Dundee 2
For the best part of a decade, Éric La Casa's attention to sonic phenomena has resulted in some of the finest contemporary Musique Concréte to come out of France. A listener of the highest order, La Casa's methodology for sound recording allows for a versatile examination of both urban and natural environments and it is these interests which are captured on this new edition for Room40. With an ability to find unique perspectives on his sound subjects La Casa's site specific works 'Zone Sensible'…
A field for mixing
'Richard Chartier's monochromatic aesthetic has come to define an audio culture surrounding minimalism. His craftsmanship, working predominately with sounds that exist at the edges of perception is a powerful, albeit subtle statement about notions of space and sound density. With A Field For Mixing', chartier brings the physicality of space directly into his compositional practise. Recording a variety of small and large spaces in Australia, Japan and the USA (amongst other locations), chartier …
Plastic Materials
THE WIRE'S BEST OF 2010 Over the past decade, Marina Rosenfeld's work has come to represent one of the most progressive approaches to experimental sound emanating from New York. Rosenfeld is equally known as a composer for large-scale performances and groundbreaking turntablist. Her sonic palette - entirely drawn from hand-crafted dub plates she imprints with blips of vinyl static, bursts of instrumental noise, conversation, and other audio detritus - evokes both the ecstatic electronic artifice…
May
May is the latest collaboration between New York composers Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner. Recorded on May 9, 2008 at the OFFF Festival in Lisbon, Portugal, the album represents the first available live recording of Deupree and Kirschner's concert performances. Continuing in the direction of their acclaimed post_piano series, Deupree and Kirschner's live work explores the intersection between piano and digital music technology. For this performance, Deupree and Kirschner took an even more …
47 songs humans shouldn't sing
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 circulated to frie…
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, …
Revers ouest*
"This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood… Or perhaps is it the story of this woman coming here to meet a beloved stranger, at the Grange-Auloup street ? or maybe their story ?" Sébastien Roux. Revers Ouest* is a radiophonic work based on text fragments drawing a futuristic and mental description of the Nantes city. It’s an isolated utopist vision of architecture, buildings made like concrete waves. The texts are read by two actors, whose voices are used as a musical materi…
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 …
Stéme
Between his reputation as swift shifting improviser, concréte composer and turntable deconstructionist, Marseilles based artist ERIKM has earned himself an enviable position in the European music community. With Stéme, his most ambitious and fully realised compositional work to date, he devolves and recontextualises the boundaries between sound source and sound media. In essence, Stème originates from a selection of ten one minute long sound pieces burned on a CD which was deliberately damaged. …
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…