ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

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With Slowly Dismantling, Los Angeles based artist Yann Novak problematizes understandings of ambience as homogenous and static. Slowly Dismantling deconstructs ambient, pulling it way from the blank and the atmospheric, refusing the perceived luxury of sound within which context is erased. Reflecting on his formative experiences as a queer youth in middle America, he explores the idea of these acoustic and social spaces as zones of liberation within which a spectrum of identity is formed.

From Yann Novak: "The cover of Slowly Dismantling features the remnants of Hotel Washington, home to the LGBTQ+ community in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin from the '70s until 1996 when it burned down . . . I was 17 when the hotel burned down and had only gone to the cafe a handful of times. What I expected to be the formative site for exploring my newfound queer identity was suddenly lost to the past, and I was left wondering how such a space would have influenced me. What remained in Madison after the fire was only the mainstream version of gay culture . . . Art and music are often identified as 'queer' when they share these same core aesthetics, tropes, and character stereotypes . . . This led me to withdraw; the alienation that came with my introversion made it hard for me to take up space in the world. As my work as an artist and composer progressed, this lack of self confidence became part of my practice. I began using field recordings as a way for me to limit my decision making. I could shape and mold this source material to an extent, but there was always an external structure. While this allowed me to create work that was autobiographical, I was never totally in control of what I was making; thus, I was never fully visible in the work. This all changed following a transformative experience at a queer music gathering in the spring of 2019. I was finally immersed in a queer community that existed outside all dominant cultures, finally allowing me to feel seen as queer without any of the shortcomings the mainstream culture would have me believe . . . As I worked through Slowly Dismantling, it became a liberation from and a reinterpretation of myself. It allowed me to shed my insecurities and routines: grounding my work and process in something outside myself. Instead I choose to utilize digital and analog synthesis, recorded at my studio in Los Angeles and reprocessing recordings captured at MESS in Melbourne and EMS in Stockholm."

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LP version. Australian born, Sweden-based 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 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 bears witness to Chantler's uncompromising sonic articulations. John Chantler's recorded works for electronics are a dichotomy. Each of his editions, whilst entirely refined and composed, maintains a distinct sense of experimentation. Chantler's willingness to forgo the familiar in favor of the unknown or the unexpected has become a recurrent methodology which has resulted in a body of work that is simultaneously united and sprawling; Tomorrow Is Too Late typifies this dichotomy. Across each of the long-form pieces, he brings together unexpectedly vibrant sonic materials that converge and occupy attention with a dynamic intensity that exceeds all of his previous offerings. Rather than considering dynamics purely in terms of amplitude, Chantler uses frequency as means for creating elegant moments where stability is removed and we, as listeners, are left to find our own way amidst the towering, complex patterns he devises. The record also maintains a surrealist sensibility; audio hallucinations manifest, buried within the acoustic substrata. Voices, submerged within electronics hint at some imagined place. They bubble away at the very threshold of audibility. Similarly, stacked oscillating tones create hazy acoustic visions that suggest concrète landscapes, a nod to the storied history of the INA GRM studio. Tomorrow Is Too Late resolves a great many of John Chantler's interrogations into sound. It also opens a new chapter for his work, an aesthetic deepening that is sure to sustain him for many years to come. Chantler works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics. Originally from Australia, he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small festival His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM center for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.

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Tokyo ambient maestro Chihei Hatakeyama's Forgotten Hill is a record about the melting of time. He creates an impressionist meditation on his journey through the Asuka region of Japan; an area known for its burial mounds, epic Buddhist monuments, and quietly poetic landscapes.

From Chihei Hatakeyama: "A few years ago I went on a trip to the Asuka region. This album, Forgotten Hill, draws all of its inspiration from this trip. The experiences I had on this journey were used as compositional guides to compile the sonic impressions I experienced during this time. The Asuka region was once land that hosted the capital of Japan from the Sixth to Seventh centuries. Today, it is an unpopular rice-drenched rural area, and although there are few tourists compared to Kyoto and the northern part of Nara, the region still draws people as there it features various burial mounds, known as 'Kofun'. One of these old burial mounds is called the 'Ishibutai Kofun', which loosely translates as Stone Stage. When I was a child, I learned about the existence of this old burial mound through Tezuka Osamu's Manga and since that time, I always wanted to visit there . . . It was the spring when I visited there, and yet I was the only person in sight. I have no idea what kind of stories are trapped within this tomb, all those things seen and heard by the rock. When I stood in front of it, I was captured by the feeling that I wanted to get on the stone stage, to be consumed by the burial mound. As I went inside the stone chamber I felt a strong sense of pressure. While getting down the stairs leading to the dark stone chamber, this pressure grew stronger, it was a very particular and strange sensation . . .The interior of the stone chamber was like an alien landscape. I couldn't help but think about the Monolith from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey . . . With this record, I aimed to create music, like a labyrinth, based on these days spent in the Asuka region. This is a record about time, about losing direction in time and wondering where it is exactly the past, the present and the future might meet, and under what circumstances this might happen."

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Australian born, Sweden-based 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 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 bears witness to Chantler's uncompromising sonic articulations. John Chantler's recorded works for electronics are a dichotomy. Each of his editions, whilst entirely refined and composed, maintains a distinct sense of experimentation. Chantler's willingness to forgo the familiar in favor of the unknown or the unexpected has become a recurrent methodology which has resulted in a body of work that is simultaneously united and sprawling; Tomorrow Is Too Late typifies this dichotomy. Across each of the long-form pieces, he brings together unexpectedly vibrant sonic materials that converge and occupy attention with a dynamic intensity that exceeds all of his previous offerings. Rather than considering dynamics purely in terms of amplitude, Chantler uses frequency as means for creating elegant moments where stability is removed and we, as listeners, are left to find our own way amidst the towering, complex patterns he devises. The record also maintains a surrealist sensibility; audio hallucinations manifest, buried within the acoustic substrata. Voices, submerged within electronics hint at some imagined place. They bubble away at the very threshold of audibility. Similarly, stacked oscillating tones create hazy acoustic visions that suggest concrète landscapes, a nod to the storied history of the INA GRM studio. Tomorrow Is Too Late resolves a great many of John Chantler's interrogations into sound. It also opens a new chapter for his work, an aesthetic deepening that is sure to sustain him for many years to come. Chantler works with synthesizers and electronics to create unpredictable, highly dynamic music where passages of spare, alien beauty bridge distorted washes of masses harmonics. Originally from Australia, he spent a decade in London before moving to Sweden where he directs a small festival His work has been commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway; Organ for the Senses, San Diego, USA; ElbPhilharmonie, Hamburg, Germany and Tectonics, Glasgow, UK. Chantler has also been artist-in-residence at the ZKM center for media arts in Karlsruhe, Germany and NOTAM in Oslo, Norway.

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For well over a decade, Erkki Veltheim has been involved in some of the most critical contemporary sound works performed in Australia. Celebrated widely for his performance approach, that orbits outward from his extended violin practice, Erkki Veltheim's recorded works are grossly under represented. With Ganzfeld Experiment, his first published solo recording, he lays out his methodology for creating music that is intense and provocatively extrasensory. Veltheim's Ganzfeld experiment is an audiovisual work for electric violin, video, and signal processing. In parapsychology, a Ganzfeld experiment is a test for evidence of extrasensory perception, particularly telepathic communication. It is based on the Ganzfeld (German for "total field") effect, which describes the tendency of our central nervous system to invent patterns in random, uniform sensory data, for instance hearing voices in white noise or seeing images in visual static. In a Ganzfeld experiment, a test subject is exposed to such a continuous uniform stimulus field, while another person attempts to send them telepathic messages. Using this premise as a starting point, this edition replicates elements of this experiment in order to explore synaesthetic hallucinations. The electric violin's signal acts as a tool for gradually manipulating and transforming static noise in both the audio and visual domains. Drawing influence from esoteric and occult numerology, Tony Conrad and Brion Gysin's experiments with flicker and the Dreamachine, and Terry Riley's Persian Surgery Dervishes (1972), which fuses composition with improvisation in a long-form ecstatic and trance-like work, Ganzfeld Experiment resides in a tradition of transcendental minimalism.

From Erkki: "I'm always interested in how structure interacts with randomness, form with formlessness, and ways in which sound can be used to transform a listener's perception and sense of time and place. I'm also often looking for ways to expand my musical ideas to other media, through ritual, installation, or visual elements. An important motive in my work is the idea that through sound (and these other elements) we can enter different realms of experience: the mystical, the magical, the shamanistic. In Ganzfeld Experiment, as in many other of my works, I'm particularly searching for an ecstatic experience, one that transports the audience outside of their rational, everyday selves. The constantly panning white noise and visual flicker are intended to induce a hallucinatory state where one's sense of time and perception are disoriented, becoming prone to suggestibility by the repetitive but subtly morphing sounds and images."

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Australian electronic composer Todd Anderson-Kunert creates a deeply reductive electronic drone work for Moog System 55. Every recording project explores a gap that exists between uncertainty and realisation. It can be a treacherous zone of investigation, one that can frustrate as easily as it can reward. In this expanse of possibility, artists and musicians traverse a particular set of variables within which the potentials for their chosen work are realised. When Australia artist Todd Anderson-Kunert, commenced work on his debut edition for Room40, Conjectures, he was intent on approaching this zone of entanglement with equal doses of curiosity and strategy. Undertaking a residency at Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, which is run by Room40 comrade Robin Fox and artist Byron Scullin, Anderson-Kunert began trawling through the vast array of synthesisers within the facility. After some time, he began to realise the answer to the creation of Conjectures did not lie in some survey of modern electronics, but rather an interrogation of one machine. With this strategy in grasp, he sat at their Moog System 55 Synthesizer, one of only a few existing in the world and set about creating a delicate but richly timbral album of reductive electronics.

From Todd: "I feel I don't know much, it's not that I feel stupid, but often I feel like I'm trying to engage with the world while simultaneously trying to understand it. It's a gap in some form of knowledge I've learnt to appreciate, a contemplation of details and how they relate, but where many are still unknown. When trying to translate this feeling into linear form, the word 'Conjecture' feels appropriate, mainly due to a complimentary duality of meaning. There is the 'formation of conclusions based on incomplete evidence', and so there is a form of understanding and comprehension without knowing. However there was also what was referred to as an 'obsolete' use, which was the interpretation of occult signs. And so here there is a similar type of guesswork happening, however the material that is being considered could be described as ephemeral, experiential, or maybe at times non-tangible . . . Sonically it uses only electronic sounds in order to interrogate frequency, dynamics, and timbre, being influenced by genres of noise, modern classical, ambient and varieties of electronic experimentation. Recordings that were close to me during this period include works by Eliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi, Pan Sonic, Stephen O'Malley, Okkyung Lee, and The Haters..."

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Noise Mass matches previously unavailable Merzbow works from 1994 with pieces from the limited-edition Hole album of the same year. This new edition charts the through line between records such as Venereology (1994) and Pulse Demon (1996), and includes a 28-page book, with exclusive photographs, and a long-form interview with Masami Akita charting the continuum of Merzbow from 1979 to the present day. On Noise Mass in the late 1980s, Masami Akita's Merzbow began to shift from being a studio project into a fully-fledged performative undertaking. It was a decisive period that began opening up new possibilities for his very particular approach to sound. Across the first half of the 1990s, Merzbow began touring extensively across Europe, the United States, and also in his homeland. It was during this period that the dynamism of Merzbow exploded and the physicality of volume became a primary driver for the experiential capacity of the work. Simultaneously, Merzbow began developing a range of self-made instruments and techniques for exploiting found objects as sound sources, which he used in combination with amplifiers to create a unique spectrum of noise and feedback both in the studio and live. Noise Mass catalogs a critical period within the continuum of Merzbow. It typifies the radical approaches he developed not just through his music, but also through mastering, pushing the very medium of digital audio to its limit through extreme post-production approaches. Of Noise, Masami Akita remarks, "This was around the time Venereology was released from Relapse and the work of Merzbow became more well known to the world. Far greater quantities of that Relapse release were pressed, and much more promotion along with it. In other words, the image of Merzbow's music as it is best known in the world today came from this time. The music of Merzbow has always been a continuum, the piece added this time to Noise Mass, the revised version of Hole, is a work utilizing a voice similar in style to Venereology. Listening to both Hole and Venereology, one can appreciate how these works constitute a thread of continuity through this period." Noise Mass is just that, a ritual of intensity and ferocity that denotes the force that is Merzbow's approach to noise in the absolute.

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Portuguese electronic composer Luís Fernandes creates his debut edition Demora comprised of deep pulsations and cycling harmony, all smeared with an echoing dreaminess of kosmische musik. André Almeida Santos on Demora: "For the first solo record under his own name, Luís Fernandes chose an on-point title that echoes in one word a constant feeling throughout Demora. Demora means 'delay' in Portuguese. Depending on the way you use it on a sentence, it can also mean that something is taking too long or it's making someone wait for someone or something. Demora doesn't take too long to show you its intentions, but it leaves you waiting. It tricks you to think to wait for the take-off until you realize you're already in mid-journey. It's all part of the process that Luís embarked to create Demora. For this piece he decided to work in a different way from what he's used to. The desire to create a piece with a constant flow with little variations was the starting point for his new album. Armed with a modular synthesizer, he recorded everything in one take to give the core structure of the album a unified sound that would create a permanent relationship with the listener. Doing it in one take shaped the fundamentals for Demora. The flow of the improvisation gave room for Luís to play around with the structure and refine the sounds that now populate the main narrative of this 35-minute piece, separated in five different chapters. The middle sections of Demora, 'Demora Pt. 1' and 'Demora Pt. 2', sound like a reward. Not that you needed one. If you arrived there and felt tricked about the take-off, the slow and glimmering harmonies will provide the comfort you needed all along. It's here that Demora shows how beautifully crafted it is, how the details aren't just details. They're the tiny screws that make the machine operate into a subtle kosmische lullaby. The details aren't there to distract you from the main thing, they are there for you to embrace the core and follow the same flow, the same path, that Luís did when Demora took off in his synthesizer. It took time for Luís to publish something solo under his own name. After years under various aliases and three beautiful releases with Joana Gama, Luís Fernandes has flourished with this mesmerizing sonic experience."

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Room40 offer a re-mastered, re-edited 2019 version of Rayon Hula, originally released in 2004. From Mike Cooper: "After several trips, beginning in 1994, to the Pacific and its Island Nations, Australia and subsequently to South East Asia, I conceived the idea of making an updated more 'now' version of some of the Exotica music that originated in 1950's America. Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny were the two I mostly had in mind at the time, but I didn't want it to sound like them and the two words 'Ambient' and 'Electronic' had to figure large. I was deeply influenced by the ambience of the places I was visiting (Australian birds are scarily creative) and lo-fi electronics were something I had been working with in my free improvisation gigs since the '80s . . . No-one was issuing recorded work by me, so I started my own DIY cd.r. label, Hipshot, and sold them via the internet. I was free to record whatever I wanted and I did, starting in 1999 with Kiribati . . . The summer of 2004 house sitting in Palombara, 40 minutes outside of Rome, at our friend Jo Campbell's house, in the company of several dogs and numerous cats, I set to work outside in the shed with a Zoom Sampletrack ST-224, two mini disc recorders and a Tascam four track cassette machine; a pile of Arthur Lyman and Martin Denny CDs and my lap steel. My intention was to create a kind of music that I had hoped to hear when we visited Hawaii in the early '90s (some kind of Hawaiian Futurism maybe?) which we never did. Rayon Hula appeared from the shed and was initially released as Hipshot c.d.r. HIP-007. I submitted it to the Ars Electronica awards in Austria and was very surprised when it received some kind of a prize. I think that David Toop had something to do with that, as he was on the jury (thanks David). It was picked up by Cabin Records, a new label initiated by Pete Fowler and Graham Erickson and released as a double 10-inch vinyl set . . . Although the idea was an homage to Arthur Lyman, it was also an homage to Steve Feld who introduced me to the concept of 'lift up over sounding' in his book Sound and Sentiment, a study of the Kaluli people of Papua and their relationship with their aural environment. From it I gleaned, among other things, the idea of looped sounds played simultaneously but out of sync. An idea which had in fact guided me from the beginning of the series."

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Iranian composer Siavash Amini creates an ode to night; literal and metaphorical. Using textural electronics and post classical arrangements, he asks you to dwell in the "dark" of sound and forgo the sensory certainty of light. From Siavash: "The Idea of this album, when I first started drafting it, was to continue what struck me as very interesting yet simple idea; night. I became interested in different definitions of what night is, our perception of it and what night means physically to us as well as symbolically. I came across the idea of 'other night' described by Maurice Blanchot, during my research. It started me recognizing night as something we experience as 'the night of sleep'; it is night that we resist in sleep, by way of dreaming. Things became more interesting for me during many nights of not sleeping and intoxication, and an eventual nervous breakdown. This experience, culminating in me spending three days in ICU, gave me pause to think about Blanchot's words. Slipping in and out of consciousness my mind, which had already experienced a blurring of what one might call the 'other night' and the night itself, by being in half sleep most of the time. I felt myself far away from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me. It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim. A feeling to describe this sensation, the word for which I only came across later, is Serus. There was a sense of repetition and familiarity in some feelings and emotions that I had towards some objects like sensing I knew them but not exactly from where or when. It was as if my body was resisting sleep and my sleepy mind was resisting being awake, only to dream of another type of the world that I could be awake in." Personnel: Nima Aghiani - violin; Pouya Pour-Amin - electric double-bass. Artwork and visuals by Tereza Bartůňková.

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Room40 presents Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug)'s Sirens, his solo debut. "When I was 22 I managed to acquire Techno Animal's Demonoid 12"; I can still recall the intensities of sound that marked the first moments of listening to it. The sense of bass as a tactile surface, that rolling groove and the howling sine waves and dub sirens that scorched with a type of sonic burning sensation that to this day makes my hairs stand on end. A year later I heard Ice's Bad Blood, from there I discovered The Bug, a band called God, a sound movement called isolationism and much more; all of these projects had one nexus point. In 2015, Kevin and I book-ended a series of concerts at Berghain for CTM festival. For his performance, Kevin debuted a new work I'd heard very little about called Sirens. I remember two things distinctly about the performance. The first: he opened the set with a blazing passage of bass and dub sirens that transported me back to those initial moments of encountering his work. The second was the feeling of absolute, crushing bass. Not before, or since, have I felt a sense of sound pressure like this. Unlike his other work with The Bug, the consistent bass carrying in the space was literally breathtaking and there were moments when it seemed difficult to see clearly as my eye sockets were vibrating in a way I'd never experienced. Sirens, which documents the intensities surrounding the delivery and early days of his first child, carries in it a sense of deep affect. The album, unlike the live work, traces out a dynamic sound world that is both tender and caustic. Within each piece, microcosms of sensation unfold, Kevin deftly maneuvers us through the tumultuous journey. Sirens somehow creates a sense of time that is without anchor and foggy in a way that is profoundly unique. Martin has remained a point of constant inspiration for me over several decades now; to have the opportunity to share his first ever solo recording brings me the utmost pride. His new work Sirens is a life journey transposed into sound that is truly personal, but effortlessly universal. It is the start of a new chapter, one that I know will only strengthen his place as one of the critical voices in contemporary electronic music." --Lawrence English, March 2019 Mastered by Stefan Betke at Scape Mastering.

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"We find ourselves increasingly in a swell of solastalgia, which is not a new phenomenon; it has haunted us over the centuries. Change has never been humanity's strong suit, but it has been our shadow; it's here, at this fractious nexus of unpredictability that Rafael Anton Irisarri has created his latest work, Solastalgia. Building on the echoes of landscape that guided his previous Room40 editions, Solastalgia imagines that which is not yet known. Utilizing a range of unexpected variables, automations and uncontrolled systems in the creation of the recordings, Irisarri has developed a new approach to his work, seamlessly weaving together intense layers of texture and saturated harmony. Within these works, distant melodies emerge and in their wake the listeners' focus shifts again and again. A never-ending loop of the unconscious feeding into the conscious is formed. Whilst the skeletal form of pieces such as "Coastal Trapped Disturbance" might remain, the organic matter that is the body of the music is in a process of persistent transformation. These subconscious variations morph the pieces from within. This is a record of sublimation, and dwells in states of transition and becoming. Recorded in two suites, each section is a distorted mirror reflection of the other. Solastalgia stands as a landmark undertaking for Irisarri, it encourages us to remain unsettled and attentive in the moment, and prompts us to listen deeper and imagine what lies beyond or in excess of our expectations." Written and produced by Rafael Anton Irisarri in New York, USA during Autumn 2018.

Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer living in New York. Described as one of contemporary ambient music's most celebrated practitioners, Irisarri's music often has a mournful, elegiac quality where ostinato phrases tap into minimalist ideals while atmospheric layers of effects suggest a more cinematic approach. In all, his compositions are deeply emotive and epic, like a symphony recording that's been rescued from attic entombment after half a century. Irisarri concerts at museums, churches, synagogues, and other non-traditional performance spaces explore the physicality of sound. Combining an array of heavy metal bass amplifiers, multiple loudspeaker configurations, synthesizers, bowed guitars, notebook computers, video images, and lighting, Irisarri decontextualizes the audience's relationship to the venue, creating an immersive, otherworldly environment. Irisarri's recorded works are widely published internationally.

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"I think the first time I heard Merzbow must have been 1994. I remember not really knowing what to make of it. It was effortlessly deep and aggressive, but also emotive and lyrical in the way the waves of sound would erupt and decay. It wasn't easy then to discover information about artists, but within a few months I had learned as much as I could. In the mid 2000s, I had the chance to meet Masami Akita, aka Merzbow and present him live when I was co-producing the What Is Music? Festival. It was a pretty special event; the first (sonic) meeting of Merzbow and Keiji Haino took place here in Brisbane. Merzbow's solo performance was as transformative an experience as hearing his music for the first time. MONOAkuma is a live recording made in Brisbane in 2012; this was the second time I had the pleasure to present him live in Australia. To me, this performance epitomizes the physiology of Merzbow's sound work. He creates in absolutes; sonically he generates a tidal wave of frequency that sweeps across the spectra with tireless frenzy. Merzbow's capacity to conjure a massive swirling mesh of analog and digital sources is without comparison; his work is one of intensity, a seething, psychedelic and utterly visceral noise-ocean. What MONOAkuma represents is a resolution of Merzbow's work across both analog and digital noise mediums. Here, he brings together his formidable pulsing analog noise and his more recent digital approach. On MONOAkuma, he resolves these modes of operation into an ontology of noise in the absolute. There is no question - this is about the body and the ears being overwhelmed. In those moments of being wholly consumed comes an incredible bodily sense of euphoria that is a truly unique and profound experience. MONOAkuma which epitomizes Merzbow's 40 years as the most important noise musician of our time, demonstrating the intense and complex audio world he's created. It's the perfect starting point from which to wade into the noise ocean that is Merzbow's vast output." --Lawrence English. All proceeds from MONOAkuma will be used to fund research and preservation attempts for the Tasmanian Devil; which in recent years has suffered greatly due to effects of a transmissible facial cancer.

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Room40 release Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda's Ke I Te Ki. "Akio Suzuki and I have been performing together frequently for the last five years; we have a tendency to perceive sound as space, or to always consider sound in relation to space. We don't usually hear sound sources as they actually are, since they are always modified by a space's acoustics and its reflections, absorptions, and attenuation. Sound is affected by the conditions and characteristics of a particular setting. We respond to the extra acoustics of these phenomena. Our ears have to be wide open, constantly adjusting to ever-changing detail. In performance, we opt for opens space where the audience can surround us or position themselves throughout the space. We also like tailoring site-specific performances to unusual locations, creating a dialogue between us and the environment. Ke I Te Ki was recorded in New York City in 2015 at The Emily Harvey Foundation - a SoHo loft-style art space that was once the studio of Fluxus founder George Maciunas. It is a historic building of New York avant-garde culture, and the last of the artist co-ops that Maciunas created in New York City. We had one day of preparation for the multi-track recording, performing for two nights surrounded by a limited but packed audience. The loft is itself quite constrained, and Akio and I needed a significant portion of the floor to place our gear and roam around. Microphones were everywhere, since our sounds diffused across the space. My role was to set an assortment of "scenes" with field recordings, sustained drones generated by an industrial electric fan, and electronic tones and pulses from radios, et cetera. Akio then built upon these with layers of melodies and rhythmic patterns, while we both engaged in fabricating distinctive texture and timbre. Akio kept changing his instruments, bringing surprises and sudden changes, creating contrast and powerful tension. Ke I Te Ki in Japanese means the sound of an alarm, or a whistle to call attention to a hazardous event. We hoped to develop our style by adopting a set of self-imposed rules related to the multi-directional soundscape, acoustical response to the space, and implementation of visual elements. Akio suggested the name Ke I Te Ki as a reminder to push ourselves further. It was a lesson for us in questioning 'norms' and exploring other possibilities." --Aki Onda.

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Room40 stalwart Erik Griswold returns with Yokohama Flowers, his latest collection of works for prepared piano. For over two decades, Griswold has been crafting a particular and utterly personal language around his instrument of choice. His preparations, which are in a state of perpetual refinement, are like a kind of lens; it is through them that a certain audio reading of his instrument is made possible. It's understandable, then, that Griswold would be inspired by the work of Australian experimental film maker Louise Curham. Like Griswold, she too reveals a very personal reading of her surroundings through a range of preparations and expanded techniques. Discovering her work through a series of collaborations hosted by Room40, Other Film and other groups, the pair slowly developed a strong approach to joint performance. In many ways, these recorded works reflect upon those performances. Similar to her filmic works, which maintain an unfamiliar, yet tangible beauty; Griswold's compositions remind us that the piano is never truly knowable, or known. Each composition collected here reveals another detail or way of knowing the piano. The preparations release something in excess of the instrument itself. It's in these extensions, these ruptures of familiarity, that the language of the piano is born and reborn. It is a state of perpetual discovery and resolution, framed in composition. Griswold on the music: "There's a mystical aura surrounding my old piano. I imagine the 19th century workshop in which it was hand-crafted and the German parlors in which it played Bach, Beethoven, Debussy, Satie, or Joplin. I imagine its journey from Stuttgart, by ship to Sydney harbor, and overland to the semi-tropical heat of Brisbane. Playing it I feel connected to its 131 years of history -- the people, places and music that have come before. The beautiful, hand-treated Super 8 films of Louise Curham are a perfect visual counterpoint to my music. In her Yokohama Flowers (2018), a sense of fragility, intimacy and nostalgia emerges from the superposition of location footage with delicately hand-drawn and painted layers. Her method closely mirrors my own, which combines tactile exploration at the piano keyboard with layering of foreign materials (preparations) onto the strings. By altering and repurposing old technologies in this way, it is as if we are squeezing the last drops of nectar out of these fading flowers."

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Room40 release The Last Days Of Reality, featuring Decibel performing the works of Lionel Marchetti and Cat Hope. "I first met Lionel Marchetti in Australia in 2010. Decibel were touring our Alvin Lucier program, and Lionel was on the same bill performing a live performance set manipulating electro-acoustic materials with dancer Yoko Higashi. I was so taken with Lionel's performances that I asked him if he would write a piece for Decibel. I didn't realize that he hadn't done something like this before. The first work was Première Étude (Les Ombres), communicated as a text score, and premiered in 2012. I was asked by Lionel to make some recordings of ocarinas, harmonicas, and folk instruments; I sent these to him to be featured in the live performance. For this piece, the part comes from speakers beside each performer, and a bass amplifier beneath the piano. Like his own performances I had seen the year before, the work was naturally performative, with unique speaker and performer configurations. It was a remarkable combination of electronic, spatial, acoustic and textural music. The performers use the partition Concrète as a score. I visited Lionel in Lyon in 2014, recording flute improvisations in his studio. He used these as a basis for Une Série De Reflets, again communicating via text instructions and each performer having their own dedicated speaker to interact with. Pour Un Enfant Qui Dort again requested flute sounds that were time part of the live performance as well as the partition Concrète. The next work saw a more 'compositional' collaboration; The Earth Defeats Me began as a graphically scored work written by me and recorded by Decibel. That recording was used to make the partition Concrète which is now an embedded as part of the score. These works exist as live performances, but also as singular Concrète works, without the instruments. Working with Lionel has been remarkable; he has a singular way of thinking about sound and its relationship to works and images. These pieces enable the acoustic instruments to be part of that, extending the ideas in the partition Concrète, using them structurally and texturally, as well as being part of them. It is music that concerns itself with the incredible power of sound, but from the most delicate and dream-like perspective." --Cat Hope.

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Polish producer Tomasz Bednarczyk returns to Room40 with Illustrations For Those Who, his first full length edition in almost a decade. Across the late 2000s, Bednarczyk created a series of acclaimed ambient recordings that married the unsteadiness of archival technologies with an extensive palette of pastoral timbres. These recordings quietly set a particular tenor of work for a new generation of Middle Eastern European ambient composers. Following these recordings, however, Bednarczyk's energies were re-directed with his time being split between a multiple of more techno-oriented electronic music outings. In early 2018, following the success of his New Rome project (RM 478CD) released in 2016, Bednarczyk began exploring a new approach to his more atmospheric works. Using an incredibly reductive set-up, he took single sources and exploded their potentials. Through a process of layering and synthesis, he was able to create incredibly minimal, yet dense sound textures from very singular materials. Within a matter of weeks he had devised a new way of approaching his more ambient compositional interests. Illustrations For Those Who is the result of this first investigation. Each piece is singular in nature, in that its source is one synthesizer or instrument. The resulting pieces though are anything but singular. Rather, each of them maintains a detailed and rich sensibility built around complex cycling of sonic materials. This edition marks out an important new direction for Bednarczyk and firmly asserts him as a continued force for ambient music emanating out of Eastern Europe.
Tomasz Bednarczyk (b.1986) is a musician living in Wroclaw, Poland. Since 2004 he has been writing compositions that present new, melodic sensibilities through a mess of fragile, disintegrating sounds. He work has been called melancholic and offers glimpses into his surroundings and beyond.

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From Scanner, aka Robin Rimbaud: "There were three performers and one witness. I can remember this day well, even though it was some twenty-four years ago. Standing up before a mixing desk in a dark room in an apartment in South London, Jim O'Rourke, Robert Hampson, and myself, literally all hands-on deck as we each took responsibility for the faders on the desk. Introducing sounds to the mix, the accident reigned supreme. Sometimes the high frequency of cellular noise would pervade the atmosphere, at other junctures it would erupt into words and melt down to radio hiss. Mike Harding from Touch stood silently, listening intently. A couple of years earlier we had set up Ash International, an audio project which allowed us to release unusual and exploratory music and sounds that we felt deserved a wider audience, from Runaway Train (1994) to the early Scanner releases. Two mixes were captured directly onto DAT tape, one of which would be released as Mass Observation (1994), an EP that featured a 25-minute version of one of these sessions, but until today the second, longer mix has never been heard. Dehumanized communications, beatless radio signals drawn in live to tape, and accompanied by dial tone pulses and abstract textures, Mass Observation is a highly suggestive picture of a particular place in a city at a specific time. A form of "Sound Polaroid" as I tended to call such recordings. My early work, in the early and mid-1990s, was a study in surveillance. Long before our concerns about data leakage at Facebook, and Siri spying on our private moments, I used the scanner device itself - a modestly sophisticated radio receiver - to explore the relationship between public and private spheres, lending a deep sense of drama to these found cellular conversations within a contextual electronic score. In many ways, this work pre-empted our reality culture, with television now saturated by Love Island and Big Brother. In the experimental techno uprising of Britain in the mid-1990s, this work proved controversial and memorable. Bjork sampled Mass Observation controversially for her "Possibly Maybe" single, whilst Coil and Aphex Twin bought radio scanners and introduced these found voices into their recordings; I continued to create work in this grey area of ambient sound. It's work that still carries great meaning for me, opening up possibilities with sound and introducing the human voice back into experimental electronic music."

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To summarize the work of M.Geddes Gengras is no easy feat. A tireless artist, whose output sprawls across experimental dub, ambient and low-key techno, his wide-ranging discography reveals a curiosity that serves as a primary driver for creation. Light Pipe is arguably Gengras's most ambitious recording project to date. His tenth solo recording is an epic undertaking, spanning over two-and-a-half hours. Across the two CD set, Gengras charts out evocative landscapes of texture and harmony. Working with very simple elements, he creates a tidal like sound space, where sound layers flow seamlessly, rising and falling with an ever-changing sense of motion. These pieces were written across several years responding to site specific performance situations. These include a durational performance in Los Angeles at The Getty Center's Irwin Garden, a special performance alongside the banks of the Los Angeles River and performances at the El Rey and Regent Theatres. Each disc in this edition focuses specifically on either interior or exterior spaces; the indoor and the outdoor, reflecting the specific conditions of how sound operates in these types of situations. Light Pipe is a long-form work within which multiple states of listening are possible, and moreover encouraged. It's music that is ideal for deep immersion; for sleep, for flying and for any creative states within which a sense of expansion is needed. M.Geddes Gengras is an experimental composer and performer living in upstate New York. His works in the medium of modular synthesis comfortably straddle a variety of forms while remaining rooted in a deep affinity for the limitations of hardware synthesis and a keen ear for timbral manipulation. Presenting a spectrum that is very diverse in sonics and mood, the connecting thread between the extended ambient spaces and more jarring aspects is a meditative devotion to sound and process. Since 2011, he has released nine albums of solo material, both under his own name and his dance-music alias, Personable. He has shared stages with William Basiniski, Tim Hecker, Laurel Halo, Curtis Roads, Simian Mobile Disco, David Toop, Jon Hassell, S U R V I V E, and OM, collaborated on stage and in studio with Joe McPhee, Jon Gibson, Sun Araw, Greg Fox, The Congos, and Georgia and Bill Kreutzmann, as well as performing at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, The Getty Center, Moogfest, Mutek_MX, and FORM Arcosanti.

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132 Ranks for Pipe Organ was composed by Olivia Block in 2016-2017, as a commission for LAMPO and The Renaissance Society. Block composed the piece specifically for the enormous Skinner Organ at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel in Chicago. The world premiere was performed by Block on April 21, 2017. The concert, free and open to all ages attracted a large crowd. 132 Ranks was conceived as a hybrid of concert and sound installation. Six speakers were placed throughout the chapel. These speakers played white noise, sine tones, and prerecorded organ sounds, designed to interact acoustically with the live performance, and bring out the acoustics of the chapel in unconventional ways. White noise and low bass tones pulsed and sliced through the air, while sine tones and organ clusters created complex beating patterns and inner ear sound phenomena. Audience members were participants, quietly walking through the majestic, dimly lit chapel. Listeners noticed how the acoustics, materials and shape of the space altered the live and recorded organ sounds as Block performed. Some audience members relaxed on the floor of the chapel, listening, while others explored the upper balconies and hallways. 132 Ranks was designed to emphasize the architectural qualities and unique sonic and spatial capacities of the Skinner Organ. The piece included both the lowest pedal notes, felt in the body, as well as the highest bell tones, played at extreme dynamic levels. At times, sounds were isolated in discrete locations to emphasize the chapel's shape. Olivia Block is an American composer and media artist. Her body of work includes electroacoustic recordings, audio-visual installations, performance, sound design for cinema, and scores for orchestra and chamber music concerts. She has performed throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including The Walker Museum concert series, Incubate (Tilburg), Festival del Bosque Germinal (Mexico City), Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Kontraste (Krems), Dissonanze (Rome), Archipel (Geneva) Angelica (Bologna), Sunoni per il Popolo (Montreal), and many others. Additionally, she has presented work at the ICA (London), MCA (Chicago), La Biennale di Venezia 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music, The Kitchen (NYC), ISSUE Project Room, Experimental Intermedia (Brooklyn) and TIFF (Toronto).

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Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes's new offering At The Still Point Of The Turning World, borrows its title from T. S. Eliot's poem "Burnt Norton". It is a record of restless motion, lilting and pulsing with a sense of gentle determination. Born out of a period of mutual loss, the works carry a bittersweet sentiment. Bitter in the sense of loss; sweet in the sense of lingering memory and influences recognized of those departed. It is also a record that, like the poem from which it takes its title, mediates on the nature of time and the way music must be explored as temporal art. The very nature of the compositions, their meaning and structural qualities unfold across the record with a particular and measured temporal gesture. This sense of measure is the result of musicians involved, guided by Gama and Fernandes, working for and against one another within each of the tracks. Pieces such as "Neither Flesh Nor Fleshless" and "Lucid Stillness" capture this essence. The sharp attack of their rhythmic spines, create macro environments within which instruments float into and out of focus. Rather than simply acting as anchor points for the pieces, these markers become buoyant amidst atmospheric layers of strings, percussion, and horns. The music swells and breaths. Commissioned by Câmara Municipal de Guimarães and A Oficina / Westway Lab Festival in 2017, At The Still Point Of The Turning World is the most considered output from this duo to date. Informed by a shared interest in the timbral connections between piano and electronics, these pieces extend outward from Gama and Fernandes and in combination with Orquestra de Guimarães and arrangements from José Alberto Gomes, they create a charged collection of minimalist inspired sound fields. The album was mixed and produced by Lawrence English at Negative Space in late 2017. In 2012, Joana Gama and Luís Fernandes met during the 100Cage show in Lisbon, Portugal. Having not cross paths beforehand, the two immediately felt a kinship born of a mutual interest in experimental music traditions. They began collaborating immediately and in 2014, the pair released work as QUEST, which was widely acclaimed in their home country. The duo has made the soundtrack for a number of prizewinners short-films. On this recording they laid out the groundwork for what was to come of their partnership.

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Norman Westberg is perhaps best recognized for his truly individual approach to guitar with the band Swans. His playing with Swans has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. His particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately informed a great many players. His new solo record, After Vacation, is his first full-length to come in the wake of the final Swans outing in its current configuration. More importantly it is also the first record to see Westberg move beyond a more performative mode of single take composition. After Vacation sees Westberg significantly expand his sonic palette. He opens up the tonal and harmonic possibilities of his instrument in unexpected and profoundly beautiful ways. His guitar, as singular source, becomes transformed through a web of outboard processes. He transforms vibrating strings completely, taking singular gesture and reshapes it through webs of delay, reverb, and other treatments. Moreover, he finds a new sense of space and dimension with these recordings. After Vacation has a decidedly more topographic sense. It charts out the dark contours of places unseen but imagined. It traverses a divergent range of places in search of an ever-opening compositional approach. The results are in excess of anything Westberg has created previously. His melodic capacities come to the fore; matching his distinctly personal approach to the textural qualities of his instrument.

From Norman: "This is the first recording that was not done in my 'one take; it is what it is' method. For me, this was like jumping into the pool with a blindfold on! Due to this shift, After Vacation is something of a collaborative record with the very capable and caring Lawrence English, acting as producer for the sessions; taking my sounds and weaving them into finished pieces. I listen to them more as stand-alone stories, rather than my usual style of bouncing conversation. The title After Vacation came from the feeling that something was changing. Not that playtime was over, just that last week was fun and all, but now is a good time to move around into something more realized."

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The music of Australian artist Thembi Soddell resides in a zone of unrelenting darkness and physical affect. Working at the nexus of raw emotion, sound design, and musique concrete, she creates sound worlds that are effortlessly dense and abyss-like. In her performances, she explores sonic environments which swallow the audience. By utilizing intense sound pressure and varying dynamics she creates profoundly unsettling, but fulfilling, experiences for her audiences. Love Songs, her latest work, is easily the clearest articulation of her methodologies. A work of extreme dynamics and intensities, the record is one of the most fierce, sonic expressions to be delivered from an Australian artist in recent years. "The title Love Songs," Thembi explains, "is a little dark humor on my behalf. As the compositional process evolved the work became a meditation on the lived experience of insidious forms of abuse within supposedly loving relationships, in connection to certain forms of mental illness. These experiences are ones of extremes and emotional intensities; the tensions between horror, beauty, rage, desire, confusion, love, and perceptual annihilation. Also, a good deal of the source material for the album is voice. I asked Alice Hui-Sheng Chang to vocalize perceptual collapse, which I sampled and manipulated into expressions of these themes. So, these are my love songs." Published alongside an extensive book, outlining more literal readings of her ideas of sonic affect, contemporary relationships and the nature of becoming, Soddell's Love Songs is an utterly personal and compelling listen. It's equal parts horror, anxiety, relief and exhilaration, often in the same instant. A truly remarkable rendering of sound that extends the possibilities for how we are embraced and engulfed by the acoustics we encounter. Thembi Soddell (b. Australia 1980) is a sound artist and electroacoustic composer with an interest in psychology, perception, subjectivity, and affect in relation to intense encounters with sound. Her distinct approach to composition exploits dynamic extremes, creating volatile, evocative sound experiences with a disquieting edge. She creates works for recording, installation and performance -- including multiple CD releases, presentations at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and City Gallery Wellington, and two European tours in a duo with cellist Anthea Caddy.

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Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is the latest edition from Tokyo-based artist Toshimaru Nakamura. The "No-Input Mixing Board" is a unique instrument pioneered by Nakamura. As its name suggests, it is a mixing console within which external no input exists. The instrument is fueled only by its own feedback. Initially used by Nakamura as a more tonal instrument, creating incredibly high frequency outputs, over time the mixing board has become decidedly more rhythmic and harmonic. It is this sonic territory that is the focus of this edition. Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is by far one of Nakmura's most musical recordings. The board's tonality is front-and-center; low pulses and cavernous pulses fizzle and murmur with a subtle but frenetic energy. Drifting into decidedly dub-oriented directions, Nakamura allows the instrument to breathe; specifically he finds new dimensions to the ways interference can be brought into harmony within the pieces. While the instrument might suggest a sense of indeterminacy, Nakamura's intimate relationship with it means he can maintain an unerring sense of control over it. Re-Verbed (No-Input Mixing Board 9) is evidence of his intense capacity to create profound work with this most unusual of devices. A conjuring of something truly unique from literally nothing. Toshimaru Nakamura's instrument is the no-input mixing board, which describes a way of using a standard mixing board as an electronic music instrument, producing sound without any external audio input. The use of the mixing board in this manner is not only innovative in the sounds it can create but, more importantly, in the approach this method of working with the mixer demands. The unpredictability of the instrument requires an attitude of obedience and resignation to the system and the sounds it produces, bringing a high level of indeterminacy and surprise to the music. Nakamura pioneered this approach to the use of the mixing board in the mid-1990s and has since then appeared on over one hundred audio publications, including nine solo CDs. From 1998 to 2003 Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama ran the concert series Improvisation Series at Bar Aoyama and then later the Meeting at Off Site series of concerts. Both these concert series were crucially important in exposing a new manner to improvised music (referred to as Electro Acoustic Improvisation) to the Japanese public and to foreign musicians visiting Japan, making Tokyo one of the global hotspots for this new approach to music.

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All is lost, all is lost. Or is it? A poignant question from Pinkcourtesyphone. A haunting strain. A coat of gloss smeared. A scene recalled, a fond memory, a terrible lie in this new dark age of love. Suspended in that lush, lonely feeling, Pinkcourtesyphone implores you to hang breathless on the line, above the chandeliers in shimmering stasis that belie those desperate, shadowy passions underneath. A creak, a glance. Nothing is for certain anymore. That sentimental something echoed across corridors, valleys, crevices, and it was never true. That redundant physicality kept it suspended in the lens-trapped hearts of countless thousands. A limited edition. Seven excellent examples of negative mood music. Pinkcourtesyphone's artistry is all lustrous sounds. New meaning and beauty for... oh, you don't even want to know. The answer is buried under centuries of suffocating sweet tonalities we created. Just like romance, the mighty do fall with indelicate slices. Is it dark outside already...

Pinkcourtesyphone is a continuing project by Los Angeles-based sound artist Richard Chartier. He is considered one of the key figures in the current of reductionist sound art which has been termed both microsound and neo-modernist. Chartier's minimalist digital work explores the inter-relationships between the spatial nature of sound, silence, focus, perception and the act of listening itself. Pinkcourtesyphone is a more emotional, dare one say musical side of his work. Pinkcourtesyphone is dark but not arch, with a slight hint of humor. Pinkcourtesyphone is amorphous, changing, and slipping in and out of consciousness. Pinkcourtesyphone operates like a syrupy dream and strives to be both elegant and detached. Pinkcourtesyphone has collaborated with the likes of Cosey Fanni Tutti, Kid Congo Powers, harpist Gwyneth Wentink, AGF, William Basinski, and Evelina Domnitch. Chartier's sound works/installations have been presented in galleries and museums internationally and he has performed his work live across Europe, Japan, Australia, and North America at digital art/electronic music festivals and exhibits. In 2000 he formed the recording label LINE and has since curated its continuing documentation of compositional and installation work by international sound artists/composers exploring the aesthetics of contemporary and digital minimalism.