ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

$23.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/15/2021

The sound of an ember of recollection that smolders without extinction. An atomic pressure wave of memory, blurred through hypnogogia. An unwritten transcription of speculative consciousness. A slit through which of materials erupt.

A note from Lawrence English: "When I was child I had two recurring dreams. Both these dreams were tethered to the house I lived in. It was a rambling home which was high set but underneath it was largely unfinished. The underside of the house was a labyrinth of small rooms, concrete pits and a collection of building materials, piping and leftover furniture sat alongside beds of dirt that had a consistency of lunar dust. The first recurring dream was of a burning bird, falling from the sky past the kitchen window in the early hours of the morning . . . This dream has never returned to me as an adult, though I can vividly recount it. The second dream has recently emerged, albeit a distant hazy reference to the tangible intensity that I experienced when I was younger. This dream was one buried deep within the labyrinthian, unfinished features that existed under my house. The dream usually started with me playing on the lunar dirt and gradually a sound would emerge from a large concrete pit that was in the center of the space. The sound would get louder and eventually I would have to go and inspect it. It called me in, there's no other way to describe it. As I looked into the pit, there was always some kind of hatch, often resembling a pressure door, the type you might see in a submarine film, and the sound would emanate from underneath that hatch. It was also a throbbing, hammering type of sound, deeply diminished and buried, like hearing bass music from a car parked up the block . . . I was surprised that, over the past year, this dream has returned to me. Perhaps it's a result of the general quietening of the world and that innate way our ears can open up to even the most subtle acoustic shifts when we are sleeping. Remote sounds, usually hidden in the din of the urban nightscape, were filtering into my dreams and triggering some kind of speculative consciousness . . . Last year, I mentioned this dream to Jamie, and he too reported unsteady sleep patterns. This got us to thinking about how the dynamics of the world have recently shifted towards the emergence of the natural world. Equally though it has shifted in favor of its shadow; those ongoing industrial, mechanical and other acoustic by-products of human (and unhuman) labor reach out from the hushed ambient noise floor..."

$23.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/15/2021

Flare Blues reimagines two of Merzbow's long out-of-print EPs from 1994, Flare Gun and White Blues. Revisiting the original pieces and adding previously unreleased materials recorded during these sessions, Flare Blues tethers together a set of Merzbow's most exploratory work, creating a visceral linkage between a pair of vital works. Originally recorded in June 1994, Merzbow's Flare Gun is a pulsating and hammering collection of pieces that grinds ever forward with a sense of bludgeoning determination. By contrast, White Blues recorded the following month (which draws its title from several of the samples used as raw material that originate from blues inspired British rock bands), maintains a more unsteady sense of movement and musicality, matching degraded samples against a flurry of theremin and electronics which are overdriven and saturated in ways that would later go on to become some of the trademark sonic actions of Merzbow's live performances. On Flare Blues not only are the pieces remastered by Merzbow, but they are recontextualized and when heard together with the previously unreleased bonus materials open up a new sense of his studio experimentation at the time. What marks these recordings as critical is they trace a line through a period of significant discovery and refinement for Merzbow. Having been recorded just months after Venereology, this set of works bares the marks of Merzbow's deepening awareness of extreme forms of distortion, compression and also his dynamic mixing approaches that simultaneously allow multiple or singular elements to occupy the entirety of the available sound spectrum. Ultimately, these works are morphic, often churning and erupting with a magma like quality. When they do fall into waves of pulse, those patterns are never held long and the intense sense of cutting into the sound creates a feeling of endless anticipation as Merzbow guides you through an ever-evolving sound world that is uncompromisingly restless and relentless.

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Will Long's work as Celer traverses a nebulous and morphing galaxy of sound that centers around textured ambience and extended durational pieces. A long-time resident in Tokyo, his work explores the way in which sound can operate in an evolving atmosphere, coalescing with everything, and everyone, around it. With In Light Of Blues, Long pivots away from long-form works to create a series of vignettes that capture the essence of his aesthetics interests. The record condenses and refines his compositional methodologies forming each piece as an acoustic miniature speckled in hazy harmony and evocative tonality.

From Will Long: "It was months ago, but it could have been weeks, days, or even hours since then. I stopped wanting to hear loops, I wanted to stop it. I added brass; trumpets, trombones, and more horns. I cut it out like words from a book, and sewed it back together. Burroughs. These movements are merely to stay alive, to stay moving. You wake up from a truck horn passing in the early morning hours on the nearby freeway, or from a dream that you can't tell was a nightmare or a loving memory. Someone walks by on the street wearing the same perfume. I drew out each place, each scene, and put the story there. It might have been with you, or without you. All I know is that you were there some-how the whole time, even if you weren't. I saw rainbows from under the bridge by the river, and the sun shot up through the clouds of the golden hour. It didn't help, and there was no one around. Your chest is even with your knees, and you're sitting in the dirt. The sun keeps going down, and eventually you make your way home. It's not very much the same as it was anymore. The horns are deafening, but after, the echoes let me see the way away. The light keeps coming, and it keeps going. Songs of surroundings, the silent, the heartbeats, the tears. We've all had them, and we'll never be rid of them."

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In August 2013, David Toop and Akio Suzuki visited Australia. During a residency on Tamborine Mountain (an anglicized version of the Yugambeh word Jambreen), the pair were joined by Lawrence English for a series of site specific, environment-led improvisations created around the fringes of the Tamborine plateau. Embedded in place, these recordings flow from and merge into the land on which they were created. Aural emissions answering back to the frenetic songforms of Lyre birds, the murmuring waterfalls and the hushed ambiences of night insects amongst the foliage. Includes 24-page book with text by David Toop, drawings by Akio Suzuki and photography by Lawrence English.

From Lawrence English: "I am ceaselessly fascinated by how memory operates and, I'm regularly struck by how individually subjective a collective experience can be when recalled by its participants. Lynch's Lost Highway comes to mind here, specifically Bill Pullman's character Fred Madison who says 'I like to remember things my own way. How I remembered them, not necessarily the way they happened.' Like Madison, I can't help but sense that memory takes shape through an accumulative process that reflects how each of us have lived (and maybe even wanted to live) up to that point in time. Going back to listen again to these recordings of which I was a part with David and Akio, I was surprised by what elements had stayed with me and what others had slipped into the eternal greying of my mind. I have vivid recollections of listening to a Lyre bird before recording the pieces together at Witches Falls. I remember both Akio and David finding musicality in decaying palm fronds. I remember Akio's voice, amplified through his Analpos, bouncing off the stones and trees. I remember David's flute, so quiet in the pitch black of the night forest as to appear like a hushed tone of wind or a distant animal calling. I also remember trying to match my modest hand-held electronics with the pulsing and pitching of the insects around me . . . Breathing Spirit Forms represents a distinctive exchange between friends and collaborators. Tamborine commands a special presence and encourages a deep patience from those who are willing to give time to its varied environments. For the three of us, we were fortunate to share these moments together, fleeting in our lives as they might be, to sense the mountain's unique qualities, to respond to them through our exchanges and to form memories (as disparate as they might be) we carry forward with us in time."

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From Lawrence English: "In late months of 2008, I had the great fortune to spend some weeks in the Amazon. The visit, facilitated through Francisco Lopez's Mamori Artlab residency, remains one of the most deeply affecting experiences I have had . . . Living in Australia, tropical rainforests are not foreign to me. I would even say I am rather at home in them. My family, who lived and worked on the land of the Ngajanji people, had an admiration for, or in the very least a respect of, the rainforest. What makes time spent in the jungles of the Amazon different however is the scale and sheer volume (metaphoric and literal) of the life that inhabits it. Hundreds of thousands of narratives are in play moment to moment, their interactions flow together forming a perpetual cascade of arrival and departure, fertility and decay -- these fundamental states are intrinsically linked and constantly informing one another . . . To listen in the jungle is to listen in close relief -- in every square meter, thousands of insects cry out, their voices reducing the horizon of listening to a matter of centimeters at certain times of the day (and night) . . . The abundance of birds, mammals, beetles, flies, ants and so many other creatures are a source of constant and evolving fascination. In the lakes and rivers too, the hydro-sonic environments are perpetual and effortlessly deep . . . A Mirror Holds The Sky is in some ways an act of acoustic and temporal compression. It is a rendering down of the lived-in moments and environments that became points of intense listenership. If I am to be honest, it has taken me the better part of a decade to know how to approach this archive of materials. I owe a debt of gratitude to Chico Dub at Festival Novas Frequências, who very gently encouraged me to realize a piece for diffusion as part of his program in 2019. That invitation retuned my ears and in the process unlocked a way of approaching the mammoth 50+ hours of recordings I had gathered during my time there. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife Rebecca, who was instrumental in gathering some of these recordings. Her ears reflected an entirely other set of interests than my own and without that, this piece would be substantially less than what it is." 48-page perfect bound book featuring photographs by English, taken on location in the Amazon.

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Megan Alice Clune's If You Do is a work of restrained ecstasy. Drawing on her interests in extended minimalist traditions, especially explorations into variable tunings featured in the works orbiting those involved in the Theatre Of Eternal Music, Clune devises a record of constant deepening. Each piece unfolds into the next, and whilst existing individually, they also operate as a collected mass of sound. If You Do is a constant, almost stream of consciousness, flow of voice, drones, keyboards and electronics.

From Megan Alice Clune; "On the 9th of August 2020 I had a dream I wrote an opera. I had been unable to write much music since February, when I returned from three-months in Tokyo where this album was initially conceived. It was possibly the longest creative break I have undergone in the last five years. But suddenly, the small melodies I had been singing closely into my microphone late at night, quietly so my neighbors wouldn't hear, took on a larger scale, and one that seemed to echo the scale engendered by 2020. The confinement to the home, the epic events going on outside. My small, timid voice filtered through a myriad of technologies as I talked to friends, taught online; amplified, distorted, compressed, equalized. Sped up, slowed down as my Wi-Fi drops in and out. If You Do became an album for solo voice and an ensemble of technologies. An album about contorting the body (voice) through time (rhythm, pulse), repetition and form. The work is nostalgic for past futures: wishing for the technological optimism of the late '70s and early '80s, of Timothy Leary believing the computer would offer a liberation to the masses. A time before Big Tech, Big Data. It's a record made alone, dreaming of unmediated interaction with an audience that may never arrive . . . Back in Tokyo, I noticed how physical and digital spaces were being dislocated. I was wondering how we got here, thinking about where that leaves my music in light of this. I began collecting each of the track names from my surroundings -- things read or overheard or gathered both in Japan (the title If You Do came from a necklace found at Ohi Racecourse Flea Market) and, later, at home, online. As such, the album occupies an amorphous space. Within the genre of ambient music but only just. It creates a space that is still heavily mediated, but hopes to locate and communicate directly. Then, at my computer, stuck in a glitching, echoing loop, I was looking for signs to keep writing. I listened to Laurie Anderson's Big Science or David Bowie's Subterraneans or Underworld's Born Slippy..."

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Argentine born, French based composer Beatriz Ferreyra has played a hushed but utterly critical role in the development of musique concrète since its early days. Working alongside Pierre Schaeffer during the writing of Solfège de l'Objet Sonore, Ferreyra left GRM to pursue her compositional research outside the confines of the institution. Canto+, one of only a few collections of her work available on vinyl, collects work across four decades and demonstrates her immense capacities both as a composer and a sonic explorer.

From Lawrence English: "... In 2017, I had the great pleasure to meet Beatriz in Braga, where we both were performing as part of the excellent Semibreve Festival. Subsequent to that I invited her to perform in Australia and we also had the pleasure to send time together this year in Rio during the Novas Frequencies Festival. Across these meetings, I have come to realize the incredible focus, generosity and vision that Beatriz has maintained across her life in sound. Beatriz Ferreyra is one of only a few female concrète composers who were active across the second half of the 20th century through to today. Her work, which is still very much an active investigation, is simultaneously complex and elegantly simple. Often drawing upon singular object of focus, Ferreyra's use of tape and other forms of manipulation radically reconfigure her chosen sound materials, opening them outward. Canto+, collects works from almost 40 years of her life in music and pays homage to her unerring interests in dynamism, rhythm, voice and the morphic potentials of concrète materials. Two of the works are also dedication to close friends; "Jingle Bayle's" (to François Bayle) and "Au revoir l'Ami" (to Bernard Bashet). This edition picks up where Echos+ leaves off and opens her sound worlds even further.

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On Lifeblood of Light And Rapture, Los Angeles artist Yann Novak contours a phosphorescent listening experience that shimmers with a hazy glow; like neon in fog. Each piece bares his trademarked sense of patience and unerring harmony, but more so than any previous editions Novak opens up the presence of these elements to create a more absorbing sensibility. "A Biochemical Cascade" captures the experience in a snapshot, as gentle eruptions of harmony fold and melt over the top of one another, each eruption seemingly more luminous than the wave before it. The result is a wholly consuming sense of tidal ecstasy.

From Yann Novak: "When I began working on Lifeblood of Light and Rapture I was thinking a lot about both my personal and society's tendencies towards nihilism. When I was in grade school, I was taught that 2020 would be the turning point in our collective fight against climate change -- that if we did not change by then, there would be no turning back. After learning this at a young age, I watched helplessly as little was done to save the planet. It made me certain that I would not live to see past 2020 . . . Now that 2020 has come and gone, I have the luxury of hindsight. I can look back and see that so many of my decisions were made not to destroy myself, but in order to self-medicate. In my teens and twenties, the world was a difficult place to inhabit, but I could use chemicals and other distractions to cope. Similarly, as it turns out, this is also the story of the industrial, technological, and digital revolutions. Even though the intention of these eras was to make the world an easier place to live in, most of the progress attributed to them over the last two centuries has directly contributed to the climate crisis. On Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I wanted to explore this parallel -- that so many of the things we do to try and make this world livable also contribute to its destruction. Formally, this album follows the path I set out on with Slowly Dismantling (RM 4112LP, 2019). I sought to express myself in a more immediate and honest way through the use of digital and analog synthesis. With Lifeblood of Light and Rapture, I built upon this same path; but I also tried to imagine the listening experience over the process of making it, focusing solely on the pure pleasure of listening..."

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Scandal collects together three newly unearthed and revised pieces from Merzbow recorded between 1992 and 1995. Each of the pieces here typifies work that sits at a nexus between the experimental cassette and electronic collisions of Masami Akita's late 1980s works and the emergent noise language that resolved into a series of now legendary recordings completed during the mid-1990s. Scandal marks out a decidedly tandem path and acts as a critical linkage, forging the trajectory of Merzbow's music across that decade. One critical aspect these recordings capture, in a very essential way, is the role that field recordings and tape manipulation play in his music. Throughout the 1980s, cassettes, tape editing and found sound played a significant role in the development of Merzbow's sound. On "Tokyo Blue Sky", Merzbow collates a series of field recordings made around his home during a period of construction in his neighborhood and merges these with sampled recordings from various ritual records. In these recordings are striking, hammered blasts that feel innately tied to the aggressive metal percussion work that was featured heavily on numerous live recordings during this time. They also maintain a sense of dynamic eruption that characterizes the shifts between states of intense noise that are the core of Merzbow recording strategies. The editions final piece "Evening Scandal" was originally released in 1992 on RRR as part of their recycled music project; a project that sought to reuse thrown away cassettes, re-recording over them with various recordings including some of those heard here. "Scandal" bares the marks of its medium, tape wow and flutter flicker across various sections of this piece, revealing a tactile relationship with the medium. The version collected here is different to that which was released in 1992, this version being uninterrupted by the pop song from which it borrows its name. This piece, in moments, maintains a decidedly minimalist compositional form, using repeated single strikes as a means of creating a deep sense of unease and recurrent tension. It's a technique later deployed with devastating ferocity later in the 1990s. This edition is also published with a special fold out poster featuring a previously unseen collage from Masami Akita.

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From Siavash Amini: "A series of distressing dreams started this whole thing. A few years ago someone pointed out that my repeating dreams of being lost in what seemed to be a maze of pits, reminded them of stories about wonders of wells and pits in the Book of Marvels. More than a year ago I started having those dreams again, so I read the book. There were similarities with a few of the stories but nothing more. One of the stories made an impression on me more than the others. After being done with the vein project of finding my dreams in a book from 12th century, I started obsessing about every detail of that certain story. Borrowing from distressing artifacts of my own subconscious and mixing them with all the details described or all the things left out of that particular one story, a musical project was starting to take shape in my mind. Working outside the systems suggested by 12 tone equal temperament, has been a passion of mine from the start of my musical life. I released one track on my first EP doing that, a failed experiment. After that I kept on studying the subject. Whenever I got the chance, I tested out an idea borrowing from other systems of tuning and their suggested compositional techniques. Imagining a musical equivalent to those distressing dreams and the scenes from the book was a very good opportunity to test out the oddest juxtapositions of the said systems, a formidable but suitable task. The sound, in my mind had to be murky, hazy, highly textured, crackling, resonant yet dingy and distant. It eventually took the shape of an album. The techniques I learned and used during the making of these pieces will remain in use in my musical activities for a long time. This album with all its shortcomings is about distressing dreams/realities of being lost in the darkness of a pit and the sounds/creatures that lead you to it, based on my own dreams and a few lines from an old book."

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For over two decades, Richard Chartier has interrogated an ever-deepening thread of minimalist sonics that forge together questions of stasis, pulse and timbre. The results of this work are some of the most quietly intense compositions of this century. His is a music of subtle variation, unwavering concentration and also patience. At his 50th year, Chartier's focus continues to deepen and Interreferences is easily his most resolved work in that it brings together his appreciation for pulsing low energy matched against a restrained upper frequency detail. It is a work of perceptual contrast, but sonic accumulation.

A note from Richard Chartier: "I find myself at the collision of an inflection point and more over a reflection point. 50 years on this planet. I still find it difficult to write about my work. This is not because I cannot, but because I want the listener to approach my compositions of sound as such. Focus on the sensorial nature rather than an explicit narrative or reasoning. I do not see my work as abstraction but rather purely abstract. I chose sound as my medium after many years as a painter. I slowly came to conclusion that I no longer understood how to communicate sensation via a pigmented surface. The visual language I was using had become foreign to me. Sound allowed me a language that was wordless, open, moving, shapeless yet full of forms, connections, and progressions. It raised questions though and these are still part of what I struggle with in the ways I chose to create and then speak of my work why these sounds? what is the attraction to these sounds? how did I arrive at these compositions and their placements? The pieces exist then as less of a statement, more of a question, but a question that will be different for each listener. For me, listening to them over and over, they will take another form as time passes. They evolve. For now, though, they are in limbo on a piece of plastic or a series of lines of data Often i am puzzled by how other artists create their work, how they come to decide arrangements, sequences of sounds or just the sounds themselves. That is the magic of music."

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Yuko Araki is one of a number of young female artists emerging from Japan that are redefining the outer boundaries of noise, post-industrial techno and experimental electronics. Raised as a pianist, Araki's teenage obsession with metal opened a gateway towards various types of intense sonics. Exploring a range of diverse music projects over the past decade, her solo work resolved in 2019 after she developed an approach to freeform analog noise. Working with a reductive set of tools, her methodology was to create work that created a sense of timbral density and complexity through a weaving together of competing elements. End Of Trilogy pushes this approach outward, taking in almost kosmiche sensibilities, creating a sound that glints with the unsteady radiation of a dissolving pulsar. The album is an offering of competing states of tension and release. It merges polychromatic pulses against waves of sheering noise and uneasy ruptures of sound. End Of Trilogy is a record of unpredictable momentum and tempered ferocity. Even at its most intense. Yuko Araki's work maintains a sense of playfulness, and a determination not to succumb to mere sonic nihilism. Drawing on techniques borrowed from 70s prog-rock and even free jazz, she dissolves expectation and, in the process, reveals an utterly personal approach to noise and experimental electronics. End Of Trilogy is not merely a conclusion, but rather an interrogation of what comes next.

Multi-instrumentalist/composer based in Tokyo, Yuko Araki started playing piano when she was a small child and in her teenage years was inspired by hardcore and metal music, but she soon became really eclectic and took on a diverse range of projects, including drummer of the oriental/tribal dream psych band Kuunatic and founding members of the neo classical noise duo Concierto de la Familia and her solo project: harsh noise drones layered by analog synthesizers, cymbals and samples of Japanese traditional instruments creating abstract rhythms and dissonant harmonies that sound like a noise orchestra. Her exceptional sensibility in processing extremely heavy and dense sounds makes the result sounding like nothing else you heard before: a thousand leaves oscillation sound at the same time rooted in Japanese noise but also totally different. Intergalactic noisescapes.

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David Shea's The Thousand Buddha Caves explores his deep and continuous interest in the nexus of eastern and western musical forms. The recording charts his life-long fascination with the caves and their connection to sound, ritual and Buddhist teachings. The record transposes those interests and is an evocation to the mythologies spinning forth from the caves.

A note from David: "My path to the caves began when I was about 14, with my passion for reading Taoist, Buddhist and Zen texts, my love of Hong Kong films, Bruce Lee's influence, martial arts more broadly and meditation practice which has continued since that time. In 1980 the series of films The Silk Road produced as a collaboration between NHK television in Japan and CCTV in China explored areas of the 'Silk Road' in great detail and knocked me sideways. It laid the foundation for a life of exploring what these trading routes were and what the reality of the people living along it, travelers on it and the culture, music, art, history and rituals they created. My works Hsi -Yu Chi, The Tower of Mirrors, Satyricon and Rituals were all recordings based on adaptations of the myths, historical adaptations and connections to the many trading routes throughout the ancient world and its connection and relevance to current technological culture, through the process of building a new work on the structure of an existing novel, film adaptations or sets of ritual practices. The more I explored the specific history of the trading route from ancient Xian to Rome, the clearer it became that the Silk Road itself was a myth, a simplified 19th century explanation for a vast and very complex network of information, religious teachings, economic trade, spices and silks etc. that involved thousands of tribes, nation states, indigenous cultures, belief systems and spanned what only much later historically do we now speak of as the divide between east and west. The mountain of archaeological finds and research over the last two centuries is just beginning to be unraveled and the complexity of the purposes of the trade routes is exposing many new connections between the ancient realities of Africa, Asia, India, Europe and the Pacific region. The trading was contact and interest in difference, what does your culture have that we need, an economy of difference with less need to synthesize the traditions than to find practical connections to the value each culture may or may not have for another culture..."

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Australia's Chris Abrahams, widely known for his work with legendary trio The Necks, has amassed an impressive solo discography over the past three decades. With four electro-acoustic editions already published by Room40, the label announces Chris's first piano solo for the label. Appearance is two longform pieces for piano that weave and mesh to create a sense of flow and subtle shifting which unfolds into eternal variation.

A note from Lawrence English: "I first met Chris Abrahams sometime in the early part of the '00s. In 2003, I had the pleasure of spending a very late night glued to his sofa, lights diminished, being introduced to his solo work. That listening experience became known as Thrown, a record that to this day haunts me with its electronic timbral shifts and wheezing positive organ textures. Since that release, Chris's work has resided at the very heart of Room40. His music captured across his five solo editions is, I believe, both utterly personal and compellingly diverse. It is music that has been a source of respite, provocation and, most of all, inspiration for me (and many of you I am sure). Over the years, I have gently encouraged Chris to consider making a solo piano recording to compliment the series of electro-acoustic works he has made for us. Appearance is the manifestation of this encouragement. Appearance typifies a very particular approach to piano that Chris has cultivated across three decades. He creates a pairing of rippling cascades of tonality with a macro-minimalist compositional form that invites a sense of perpetual release. Notes cycle and gently coalesce to create weaving melodic patterns that accumulate into a slow unfolding of form, across time. Chris Abrahams' pieces, in many respects, defy an easy categorization. He creates music that is unto itself, but profoundly open to the situations in which is it encountered. It's this porous quality that makes his work so intoxicating. It is a music of moments, cycling in memory and accumulating across time in a way that is without compare. I can't recommend Appearance to you strongly enough."

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Room40 release at 15th anniversary edition of Chris Abrahams's Thrown, originally released in 2005. A note from Lawrence English: "I've written quite often about my first experience listening to Thrown at Chris's place in Sydney. On that initial listening I was equal parts terrified and awestruck. The sensation of sitting there, in low light after midnight, listening with Chris and our mutual friend Clayton after an evening out at a NowNow event, is something I can recall vividly. Thrown is a record that, from the very outset, has roused me in a very direct, particular and profound, sense of affect. Recorded using Dx-7, piano and a positive organ, the album exists in some kind of parallel acoustic dimension where these divergent musical timbres are somehow brought together into a unifying (albeit unsettling) whole. It was the first recording Chris had made like it, and in my opinion, it set a benchmark which has guided his numerous releases for Room40. Now 15 years on from its original release, it seemed like a suitable moment to seed this edition back into the sonic consciousness. Time has cast little shadow on this edition - it still sounds absolutely outside of time. It creates its own microcosm upon each listening and remains one of the records from the Room40 catalogue that deeply resonates for me."

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Los Angeles based artist Geneva Skeen returns to Room40 with her second full-length edition. Born out of the ashes of 2020's cascade of heartbreak and uncertainty, Skeen unpacks the chaotic and unruly events with agency, heaping the distorted eruptions of her day to day into a soldering pyre of voice, pulsing rhythm, textured electronics, and masked field recordings. This is a reflexive music, made for unlocking the possibilities of the moment rather than being caged in by their particulars.

Poet Aristilde Kirby writes: "Flower branches dowsing rod against their doubles in the wind's aimless static. Spindled fog verglas plants, caressed by white rays of absolute eyelash. [A wisp of fresh respiration] 'The world has no visible order & all I have is the order of my breath,' says the fifth track on Double Bind. [A ribbon of a scream] It has the incandescent & incantation-like quality of the title of Fushitshusha's 2014 album: Nothing Changes No One Can Change Anything I Am Ever Changing You Can Only Change Yourself. [Asemic voices from anywhere] What can you count on these days in 2020, outside of the pacing of your breath as we all struggle to cleave to each passing beat pair & repair? [Spirals of a finger on glass] Between two right hands, neither really righter than the other, we have no choice but to hold on to the you one holds dearest to: the beads of just being. [Sinewaves in phase] When I comb my hair to get ready for the day, I realize that the black static it collects was always meant to fall away. [Synthetic graupel in flames] Here, Skeen specializes in ambient music as the pellucid space of an emotional landscape, limned in Timothy Morton's ethos of dark ecology & Gloria Anzaldua's idea of nepantla. It is equally phenomenological, psychological, spiritual & visceral. If you ask me, Geneva is a poet who works in sound sculpture. She cures slabs of lived time as if flesh marble & makes of her subconscious an underworld for the listener to locate themselves in. [Bats that clamor as strata of bleeding leather] The through-lines of her past works are clear as a fault crack & in this instance, glimmer like quartz veins. [Tiny harmonic partials prick like an ice pick] Skeen knows that to protect the lit wick, you have to cup the darkness. [Anvil & shelves of overcast guitar drop into a weak bell pulse] She knows that to get past a hard period, like timing a total eclipse's black sun, you have to account for every degree, every granular shift, of lost movement..."

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From Mike Cooper: "Playing With Water is a novel written by James Hamilton-Paterson. I was introduced to his writing by the Australian poet Peter Bakowski who gave me a copy of his book Seven Tenths - The Sea And Its Thresholds; a book that influenced my record Globe Notes and subsequent works immensely. Another of his books Playing With Water: Passion And Solitude On A Philippine Island is about exactly what the title describes it as and provided me with the title. The first edition on my Hipshot c.d.r label in 1999 was titled Kiribati and was dedicated to the people of that Pacific Island nation as I shared their concern, then as now, with the fact of rising sea levels due to global warming which threatens to destroy or make uninhabitable their low lying island homes. That album was the start of a long musical and artistic journey for me . . . Cities such as Venice, Bangkok, Jakarta, London, Manhattan or any coastal, or near a major river, city will be subject to serious flooding and subsidence and may well become uninhabitable in the same way in the very near future. Bangkok was previously known as 'The Venice Of South East Asia' and its now roads were once canals . . . Jakarta is currently sinking at such an alarming rate that the Indonesian Government is building a new capital city in Kalimantan (Borneo) Several of my albums subsequent to Kiribati -- Globe Notes, Rayon Hula, Reluctant Swimmer/Virtual Surfer, Fratello Mare, Raft, Oceanic Feeling-Like (with Chris Abrahams) and now Playing With Water are all conceptually concerned with this same subject. Another conceptual thread connecting them is my concern for the co-habitation of the human and non-human world expressed through my use of unprocessed avian or insect field recordings of song, signs and signals. Climate change, as well as the destruction by humans of the natural habitat of many species, is disturbing the balanced relationship we need to have with nature. Indigenous and small, often nomadic, coastal communities are very aware of this balance and the incursion of the industrial world into their way of life is having disastrous effects which will (if not already) have similar effects and repercussions on ours. There are field recordings on this edition from Pulau Ubin, Ko Phayan, Ko Lanta, Sri Lanka, Bangkok, St.Lucia and Martinique; all places that can look forward to or are already witnessing the Postdiluvian Future . . . My guitar playing here, as always, draws on a number of styles and genres influenced by Hawaiian Slack-key and lap steel guitar."

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From Akio Suzuki: "In May 1984 I appeared at a German festival called Pro Musica Nova, organized by Radio Bremen. I then travelled to Berlin by car with Rolf Langebertels, the owner of Galerie Giannozzo who had driven to Bremen to hear me perform. I still remember very vividly the experience of passing through the checkpoint to enter West Berlin, a city that floated like an island in the middle of the still socialist GDR. I had previously visited Berlin in 1982 to perform at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien at an event that Rolf had organized. This time too Rolf had organized a concert for me at the Technische Universitat. Playing off the title of the piece ('Study Time') I had performed at Pro Musica Nova, I titled the piece for this concert 'Zeitstudie'. I owe Rolf a great deal of gratitude, as it was him who encouraged me by releasing my very first cassette tape, Zeitstudie von Akio Suzuki. In recent years it has become difficult for me to carry heavy instruments around with me, and I have started to do simpler performances with objects assembled on site . . . On Zeitstudie von A.S. I used an ANALAPOS, the echo instrument I invented in 1970, and the Suzuki-type glass harmonica that I created in 1975. The ANALAPOS resembles the tin-can telephone that children used to play with: two metal cans, open at one end and connected by a coil spring. You play it by stretching out the spring horizontally and then projecting your voice into the open end of one of the cylinders. The second piece features a variation, where I would suspend several ANALAPOS vertically and play them like a percussion instrument. The Suzuki-type glass harmonica is in a simpler form than the pre-existing glass harmonica, and consists of five long glass tubes of varying diameters suspended horizontally in a metal frame. As well as rubbing the tubes with wet hands, I developed my own style of playing it using sticks. Once when I was practicing with it in the Netherlands, outside the window I was surprised to hear a bird imitating my sounds. However, later I discovered that the bird always sang that way, and as a token of my regret for having ever doubted it, I borrowed the bird's Dutch name, De Koolmees, and I still use it for my instrument..."

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From Michalis Moschoutis: "Observing visual and auditory patterns of slowly moving objects, induces a comforting sense. Whether random or organized, complex or simple, intentional or incidental, seen, felt or listened to, most physical movements carry a reassuring message; the receiver is alive, earth is in orbit exerting a gravitational force upon all matter and time has a constant flow which can be measured through the periodic succession of physical phenomena. It was upon these fundamental principles that visual artist Roman Signer built a large body of fascinating works which have had a great impact on me since a young age . . . In the realm of sound, I was recently introduced by orchestra director and good friend Ilan Volkov, to the work of Pierre Berthet and Tetsuya Umeda. In 2018 I invited Pierre Berthet to perform at Borderline Festival and the following year, in the context of Tectonics Athens we programmed, together with Ilan Volkov, Umeda's solo show. Onstage, both artists explored various physical phenomena whose visual and auditory effects were of equal significance. Their seemingly meaningless actions bore an indefinable emotive strength and revealed a profound attachment of artists to sounding objects. As a listener I was totally immersed in the intensity of the moment and found meaning in intended and unintended actions and events . . . Being a bad liar in actual life, I've always inclined to transparent creative processes as experienced in the work of artists like Roman Signer, Pierre Berthet and Tetsuya Umeda. In a similar manner, I see this record as nothing more than a sonic imprint of a series of actions and reactions, assembled and composed into a four-track album. I perceive all of the following sounds simply as movements that have resonated within me over the past few years; the touch of contact microphones on various surfaces, vibrating strings loosened to the extend they no longer produce audible tones, myself swimming in the sea, the underwater crackling of rocks, Thalia Ioannidou's heavy breathing, Ingi Garðar Erlendsson's solo thranophone performance in Reykjavík in 2014, oscillating springs, rotating cymbals, subtle movements of tuning pegs and knobs, scrubbing of piano strings, Sofia Labropoulou playing with the mandals of her qanun, pressing keys, patting strings, moving pedals and knee levers of a pedal steel guitar, Ilan Manouach's close-mic'ed soprano saxophone and soft mouth sounds. With Classical Mechanics I invite the listener to an intimate space I find as immersive as a large venue resonating to the throbbing frequencies of a full-range PA."

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Over the past decade, Richard Chartier's Pinkcourtesyphone has charted a cruelly lush passage through the extravagant interiors of psyche. A master of the melancholic, Pinkcourtesyphone's Leave Everything To Be Desired carves an effortlessly gorgeous chasm of sound that is profusely abundant with swelling melody, luxuriant texture and a perfume as dampening as one could possibly imagine. The follow-up to Pinkcourtesyphone's previous collection of negative mood music Indelicate Slices (RM 490CD) has arrived and it is even more of a sonic banquet than its predecessor. Leaving Everything To Be Desired is a sumptuous serenade revealing with candor the essence of the many careful adjectives used for situational descriptions. Pinkcourtesyphone swerves range out of another interior from sparkling dream-soft shimmers of strings, creamy arrangements, drifting drones, to dissected cha-chas. Sometimes charmingly flamboyant, sometimes darkly wistful, sometimes deadeningly soothing, sometimes abrasively tender, but always engaging and ultimately engulfing of us. This recording of temporal extravagances is meant to enhance with all the pillow-y richness of high fidelity to bring you every fascinating hue and shade of sound. Its soft-focus aesthetics lull the mind's ear into a state of woozy intoxication, comfortably unsteady underfoot. This could be the album you felt you have been entitled to, designed to be kept nearby. And so... recline... its night, late late night... without sleep the dreamtime has come and gone leaving us with perhaps an uncomfortable predictability suddenly we can no longer deny the shock of each moment.

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From David Toop: "Maybe these titles, torn as they are from cinema screens and the pages of literature and philosophy, give a feeling of romantic or sexual love or some dark pool of nostalgia but that's not it, or it could be if you want it for yourself but not for me, not now; for me it's about the teeming proliferation of complex events in the world, their vivid, hyperreal intensity as this human life steps closer to its end and their sense of fading, like a mist that thins out to leave not a clear bright day but almost nothing of substance as all that beauty is crushed, burned, dug up, wiped out, to be replaced by banality, so it's about a language of love and desire in which we speak openly to all the unknowns, the speculative, the ancestral, the forgotten, the different, the extinct, the unimaginably distant and vast, the incomprehensibly small and intimately close, the fast or the slow, as if as we spoke we were becalmed in a wooden galleon off the coast of Java, sleeping microscopically in soil of a thousand years hence, hearing the voice of a dead person from the rim of a vibrating cup, gliding backwards and weightless through the alleyways of a city unrecognizable yet heartbreaking in its poverty, speaking in conference with winged and amphibious beings, crouching in a cavern whose opening only reveals the specter of many wonders now apprehended as memories of the skin, heard through cheekbones, nostrils, the crepitation as a neck turns, pains of the knee and thumb and some not yet fully understood sensation within the throat which suggests a way of comprehending that which is being lost of this magical place. All I desire is what already exists or once existed, now falling asleep outside the world. Don't ask me about genre or consistency. Who cares? Half the world is drowning; the other half is in flames. Each story is an animal, a plant, something you drink, a surface you touch, a faint line, some memory emanating from a cardboard box . . . Apparition painting is the term used to describe a certain type of ancient Chinese painting of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In these works, often associated with Chan (Zen) teachings, the ink used to depict the subject was exceptionally pale, the background lacking in any detail. As Yukio Lippit has written: 'This combination results in remarkably self-dissembling images that somehow compromise their own visibility. Apparition painting appears to capture its subjects in mid-fade, as if managing to preserve only a dimly translucent afterimage of a bygone entity.'"

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Field Recording and Fox Spirits is a collection of personal recordings -- from the field, from performance, from interviews -- that sketch out the breadth of David Toop's work over the past five decades. The recordings exist both as individual memories and as a hazy auditory daydream-like collage woven together by Lawrence English. Additionally, the edition includes a 40-page book, consisting of an extended in conversation with David Toop, which features extensive visual works and photographs from his archive.

From David Toop: "What are field recordings? 'My memory is not what it used to be, David,' my grandfather, Syd Senior, said to me as we huddled round a fireplace in 1979. Thanks to a cassette tape I have the memory of his gradual loss of memory, hearing him speak of Queen Victoria's funeral and the severity of patriotism back in those old days, 1901. Syd Senior is long dead, no longer part of the field of living relations but still within the field of memories that can be revived by technology, albeit an old one that squeaks like a mouse, hisses like a cat. Where is the field? The field is populated by all the ravishing, painful, poignant, nondescript moments of remembered life. Field recordings forget, just as memories forget. My recording of Ornette Coleman forgets that he fell asleep as we were talking together. I sat quietly, waiting for him to wake; the tape machine continued its work, oblivious. During lockdown, a warm spring day, I sat working in the garden. A small fox appeared close to me, started, retreated into the shelter of plants by my pond. I took a photo with my phone but when I looked at the image no fox was visible. Earlier that day I had been reading Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a collection of short stories written by Pu Songling during the course of his life in the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. In many of these tales, fox spirits inhabit the physical spaces of living humans in a variety of guises. Some are malicious; some benign. Their presence in the material world is wrong and yet accepted as either a temporary nuisance or a blessing that would later be regretted..."

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Room40 continues its series of archival releases from Tokyo noise maestro Merzbow with an unreleased work originally recorded in 1997. EXD is like some kind of pulse driven industrial electronics experiment. It grinds with an uneasy sense of determination, rupturing outward into caustic waves of Merzbow's trademarked harsh noise. Across the middle years of the 1990s, Merzbow (Masami Akita) refined a stochastic language for harsh noise that had emerged from his studio experiments at the beginning of that decade. This technique, which involved a combination of self-made instruments, synthesizers, tabletop effects and, in the case of EXD, drum machines, often recorded at incredible levels to create a uniquely visceral distortion, has essentially become the benchmark for noise music in the 21st century. A devout archivist, Merzbow's unreleased works from this period are finally getting the attention they deserve. Editions like Noise Mass, issued by Room40 in 2019 (RM 4108CD), are amongst a growing number of releases that document the gradual unfolding of his signature approach to overabundance of frequency and ceaseless sonic chaos. Recorded at the end of 1997 and early 1998, EXD owes its title to the Bias Rockaku-kun EXD 5ch analog drum synthesizer. It is an exercise in maximal minimalism. Using repeated phrases, atmospheric, but reductive drum patterns, and tightly wound pulses, Merzbow calls up a vision proto-industrial technoscape. Bathed in white noise, it is a music in which the reassurance of the kick drum is largely torn away, sending the music into an uneasy orbital decay. It's the sound of warning systems onboard a satellite as it begins to burn up, falling back to earth. An exquisite sonic evisceration. What makes EXD quite unusual is it reveals, in part at least, some of the skeletal structures Merzbow deploys in the creation of his works. It's especially revealing, as this period is mostly recognized for its unending shower of brutalizing harsh noise. On the title track "EXD" a Roland TR-606 drum machine folds into and out of focus. Its grooves ruptured by, and then become gradually consumed in, a field of phasing noise and distortion. Includes poster.

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Australian master percussionist Eugene Ughetti teams up with composers Anthony Pateras, Liza Lim, Robin Fox, and others to create a series of deeply textured and intensely executed solo percussion works. Exploding out the ideas of his chosen instruments, Ughetti's work is relentless in its search for new articulations and extended readings, seeking entirely new methods of approaching percussion.

From Eugene: "This album is a distillation of the many long-term relationships I've had with Australian composers. The music forms a body of work, spanning fifteen years, that provides a glimpse into my percussive language and a 21st century Australian percussion sound. In many instances the pieces on this album were the germ for larger scale compositions and collaborations, forming some of the major works for Speak Percussion, the organisation I currently direct. Sitting around these solo works are other percussion solos, trios, quartets, sextets, twelve-tets, mixed ensemble works and an opera. Each of these projects have cumulatively deepened my creative rapport with the represented artists. Major works of note include Liza Lim's 'Atlas of the Sky' (opera for solo soprano, 3 percussion soloists and 20-person crowd), Alex Garsden's 'tolle lege, tolle lege...' (spatialized percussion quartet with electronics), a co-composition with Robin Fox entitled 'TRANSDUCER' (quartet, live electronics and eight channel speaker system), James Rushford's 'Whorl Would Equal Reaches' (percussion sextet with electronics), Thomas Meadowcroft's 'So Long Country' (mixed ensemble and electronics), and Anthony Pateras' 'Flesh and Ghost' (percussion twelve-tet), among others. I am attracted to sound that speaks more to concept than to musical convention and in performance more than concert. In Agglomeration Of Measurement my artistic practice is articulated through experimental techniques exploring feedback, microtonality, micro-percussion, post instrumental practice and an investigation into broader non-musical concepts. I am indebted to these composers for their exceptional artistry and collaboration and to Speak Percussion for providing the extraordinary platform for these works to flourish."

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Room40 present a reissue of Phill Niblock's G2,44+/X2, originally released in 2002. Matte laminate embossed sleeve; includes insert card and 24-page book with liner notes from Bill Meyer, interview, and photos. Design by Traianos Pakioufakis.

Liner notes from Bill Meyer: "In 2001, Phill Niblock wrote, 'You should play the music very loud. If the neighbors don't complain, it's probably not loud enough.' In 2019, Niblock can no longer host his annual six hour-long solstice concert at the Experimental lntermedia loft; not only did the neighbors complain, the landlord sued. But the validity of his prescription is undiminished, for it takes sonic volume and spatial confinement to unlock his music's true nature. Give the sound waves a boost and something hard to smack against, and they begin to shiver and multiply so that tones transform tones and every turn of the head (or every new room) yields a new listening experience. But 'Guitar Too, For Four' is notable in Niblock's oeuvre for its independence from loudness. While it sounds great turned up, the additive process that yielded the CD's two versions has resulted in music that changes most rewardingly, even when heard at modest volume. Victor Frankl opined that in the hierarchy of essential human motivations, meaning eclipses pleasure. In some ways, this music hews closer to the pleasure principle. Once you let go of the yearning for tunes and grooves, it's a sensuous delight to dunk yourself in the warm sound-bath of his music. And Niblock would be the first person to scotch any efforts to assign the sort of cosmic significance that certain other drone-oriented minimalists did to their art. But consider this notion; Niblock's music is fundamentally social. It only truly happens in spaces where people gather. While he does much of the composing and assembling of this music alone, Niblock didn't treat 'Guitar Too, For Four' as finished until he got some more people in on the act. He asked Rafael ToraI and Jim O'Rourke to contribute to a CD edition. And when O'Rourke declined to play on his own production, but instead invited Kevin Drumm, Alan Licht, Thurston Moore, and Lee Renaldo to do the honors, Niblock's reaction was the more, the merrier. To the extent that connecting people is an essentially meaningful activity, this music is the connective tissue of meaning."