ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

$17.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 12/15/2023

A note from øjeRum : "Your Soft Absence is a suite of processed sine waves and sampled wind instruments. It's a narrative of a particular feeling of absence that's haunting me; perhaps best described as the longing for a childhood emotion, a feeling of unconscious wonder, a state of simply being without an essence or perhaps like a memory continuously receding whenever I try recalling it, seemingly closest and most present at a certain distance, with a certain absence."

$17.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 12/15/2023

"Let`s go back to the pre-orthodox world, the ancient one, which gave us mythology, extreme experiences, congealed in stories. Echo was a storyteller herself, distracting from what was going on around her, up to the point when she got punished, and from then she was only able to repeat the last words spoken to her, to her, to her... A loop is a loop is a loop and it`s all about roses. A rose is arrows, is errors... Echo -- is a potential, endless space. We need this construction towards an actual eternity we cannot grasp. This layer was up above the countless expressions. I could hear it from the very first moment to the last. Searching in transitions, lost in transitions. The idea of a space behind the next space helps us get through, in order not to get lost in such constructions. If We Could Hear has seven pieces, a beginning, and an end. It`s a poem and not a Matryoshka even though it sounds like one. 'A strange footprint on the shores of the unknown, out there extending from nowhere, turning in on itself to a place which is both an ending and a beginning." --Robert Smithson

$17.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 12/1/2023

A note from Daniel Wilfred, David Wilfred, Aviva Endean, Sunny Kim and Peter Knight: "The process of making music together in Hand to Earth is unlike any other we have experienced. It is not free improvisation but it is not composed either. It is somewhere in between, and it feels like 'weaving.' Through Hand to Earth, we weave the threads of our different histories, different lives, and different perspectives together, and become family. Daniel weaves the 'Manikay' (public songs) in his first language, Wagiläk -- into the syntax of our shared practices. He talks about the 'raki,' the string that is used to make the dilly bag that the Mokuy (spirit) can be seen carrying in many of the paintings by Djambu Burra Burra, Wally Wilfred, and others. Raki exists in the world we can touch, but it is also a metaphysical connecting thread that draws us together to the 'buŋgul' (ceremony, or gathering ground). When we play music, the raki pulls us all together -- Yolnu and balander -- we are joined by this invisible thread, and under its guidance, we gather to sing, play, dance, and listen. Like the wind that blows through different countries to bring people together -- which Daniel sings about in 'Wata Dharranhayŋu' -- raki traverses time and place and connects all of us no matter where we come from. The songlines Daniel and David care for stretch back for perhaps 60,000 years and form the oldest continuously practiced music tradition on the planet. But the songlines are also always being renewed. In Mokuy, the songs spring up with new sounds and energy inspired by each of our own relationships to country, and born of our shared learning and friendship. Each of our stories are part of these songlines now. As we close our eyes to listen to one another we feel the silent draw of the raki and it propels our imaginations to soar and intertwine. Like a diary written in the aether, Mokuy carves a record of our coming together, animated by Daniel and Sunny's voices; the breath of the trumpet and woodwinds; the insistent pulse of the yiḏaki."

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A note from Yuko Araki: "This might sound a little antithetical, but I am interested in making noise music that is free from unnecessary noise. I do realize how this sounds, but it is absolutely at the core of my new recording. I want to create maximum impact and dynamics in the music through using only the essential elements and materials. I am a huge fan of noise music, and in many cases I enjoy the excessive nature of that music. For my own work though I am interested in reducing this, boiling it down, to the very critical parts that can allow the music to profoundly affect those who choose to listen to it. I want to use what I have at my disposal with intent and with force. I also wanted to deepen my connection to, and place in, this music. To this end I have started to explore how it is I fit into the work. I explored how is my body part of this project beyond being a gestural interface between the various machines I use to make it. I've started to think about voice a lot and this has come into the process of the recording. I'm not so much interested in the way voice can speak to stories or singing for that matter. I'm more interested in how voice might haunt the music. I invited another artist, Taichi Nagura from the band Endon, to contribute some voice to this album too. He is featured on 'Sloshing' and his voice absolutely captures this quality I am interested in exploring. It's as if he is trapped in that piece, fight for and against the other materials in the sound. This tension captures, for me at least, the relationships I think are so powerful about making, and also listening to music."

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A note From Fabio Perletta: "This release borrows its title Nessun Legame con la Polvere (No Attachment To Dust) from a Zen story as well as from a small wooden box, namely one of ten sculptures of my project I Fiori Non Vedono Mai I Propri Semi (Flowers Don't Ever See Their Own Seeds). This artwork was exhibited in 2020 at Pollinaria's forest, Italy as part of Aequusol Autumnus MMXX. The exhibition had no sound. It is now clear that life, the matter we are made of, and the objects we use every day cannot be considered entities in their own right but rather as relationships between these things, the way they affect each other. Even their own tangibility and particular properties are nothing but the way they influence and act on other things. It is a perspective that quantum physics has adopted for many years, but also the basis of our biology, of our feelings. When we perceive the world we establish a strictly localized perspective which in turn can generate a more extended and widespread resonance within and around us. Nessun Legame con la Polvere is a web of mutual influences; encounters that come and go forever; sounds that intersect with others in unpredictable ways, fragments sedimented over time and resurfaced, personal happenings that unwittingly steered the rudder towards one course rather than another. Nessun Legame con la Polvere is a meditation on lost friends, death and its counterpart, the extraordinary force of life. Although the title of this work seems to betray what I have stated so far, it is in its paradoxical, bizarre riddle that I learnt to really appreciate the value of things. I embraced a perspective that contemplates life's complexity in a broader sense, without looking for a purpose, an alleged answer to our existence, a meaning or God. Having no attachment to dust opens up to possibilities, it welcomes likelihoods. I hope that this work can generate some light while listening, and create new relationships between you and the shadows of the world, their ripples and little openings, between the infinitely small and the unknowable vastness of the universe."

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A note from Kate Carr: "All the birds I never recorded, and some I did. Re-imagined. Stretched and stuttering, glitching and morphing, swirling and sputtering. Artifact and performance, digital bits all. I imagine them swooping and calling in these scaffolds of sound I have made for them. Gleaming amid technicolor jungles. Alive, unassailable; in a world we haven't ruined. In a field recording I never made."

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A Note from Lawrence English: "The work of Amby Downs, aka Murri/European artist Tahlia Palmer, occupies an intensely personal and unique space in the Australian music landscape. It is a project that speaks as much to trauma, as it does to aspiration or hope. It is work that recognizes the complexities of intergenerational exchange; emotionally, socially, politically and culturally. For the past half decade, Tahlia has been seeking to trace unspoken, and in some cases deeply fragmented histories, and thread a linage that is heavily worn by the weight of colonial aggression and obfuscation. She is a collector, a researcher and a surgeon, stitching together these pieces of connective tissue, and through doing so she creates the opportunity to imagine, perhaps even re-imagine, the stories that have forged her very being. 'Ngunmal' and 'I Am Holding My Breath' are two long form works that exist both as sound pieces and as audio visual installations. They are pieces that operate in the realm of the physical. They are loaded with a low frequency energy that breathes, sighs and yearns. There's a sense of simultaneous constriction and expansion in her compositions, a quality that draws you in deeper and deeper. This depth is sensed as pressure. In some respects, her sound works mimic the research that feeds into them; even the smallest crack, the tiniest murmuring, can be split open to reveal an entire cavern of sound. Amby Downs, and Palmer's practice more broadly, asks us to make ourselves available. It asks us to be vulnerable to places and situations of not knowing, to be uncertain, to being unsettled. It prompts us to recognize within ourselves the way we operate in the day to day, and through doing so opens us up to experience these wildly intense, provocative and ultimately beautiful works."

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A Note from JW Paton: "Anyone who knows me, knows my obsession with the 1981 film Thief. The opening scenes show a cold, methodical, neon lit diamond heist soundtracked by Tangerine Dream. Contrasted with, the thief sharing a danish with a stranger fishing on an endless ocean at dawn. The heist is technical and calculated. The fishing is grounded and ancient. I'm sure that I'm projecting some of my personal experiences onto the film unfairly. As over time I've come to see the line between these two scenes more and more blurred. The contrast between night and day, city and ocean, drill and rod, I see these less as a dichotomy and more as a merging of worlds that slowly collapse in on each other. Choosing tracks for this release highlighted ideas that I've returned to for years. Technology and its place in the natural world. The way labor and skill shape identity. How my ancestors were in many ways more advanced than the society I live in today. A kind of ancient futurism."

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"Occasionally ideas present themselves in ways that no one can expect. This recording from Australia's Eugene Carchesio and the UK's Adam Betts is one such unexpected presentation. A couple of years ago, Eugene passed me a collection of recordings that he explained were in the orbit of his now legendary Circle Music series. The recordings, in Eugene's particular manner, maintained an intensely rhythmic quality rooted in a deep and unwavering sense of minimalism. Eugene has a way of making a tiny cosmos from just the barest of materials. He wondered though, about mixing it up and adding something unexpected to the pieces, and asked about some drums being added. At almost exactly the same moment, I had been reminded of the amazing work of Adam Betts, who I have been fortunate to be in the orbit of for more than a decade now. We'd first met at Bad Bonne, sharing a bill, and then crossed paths most recently in Tbilisi where he was performing with Squarepusher. The reason Adam was on my radar though was entirely unrelated to music and it was down to the fact that he had just participated in a welsh toss competition and done quite brilliantly. Somehow, watching Adam lug those weights made me think he'd be the perfect candidate to work with Eugene on this project. To my delight, he agreed. What results here is a melding of two incredible musical spirits, each of whom have an unerring sense of restrained energy and rhythmic ferocity. It is a parallel reading of how minimal motion can create giant affective waves of energy. It's also a record of careful listening and generous exploration. It's not everyday music can emerge from such curious orbits of thought, but when it does it is a cause for celebration. With that in heart I am so pleased to share this incredible edition with you." -- Lawrence English

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"I'm not really sure when I first heard Beatriz Ferreyra's music. My best guess would be in the early to mid-2000s when I was working alongside the curatorial team at Liquid Architecture. Given the focus of the festival at that time, GRM and musique concrète more generally was very much a point of focus. That said, it wasn't until this decade that her work was sharply in focus for me (and I am guessing a great many others). 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 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 handful of 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. UFO Forest + collects together works from both her practices in tape-based music and also computer-based works. The pieces featured here epitomize her prowess in create dynamically rich sound works that are effortless in their sense of otherworldliness. Beatriz Ferreyra has created a sonic terrain all her own, and here lies the proof." --Lawrence English

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A note from Lawrence English: "Some time in the early '00s John Chantler, who was living in Japan at the time, sent me a couple of curious sound pieces he'd just recorded with musicians he'd met from Tokyo -- Tenniscoats. This was my first introduction to Saya and Ueno, who have subsequently gone on to become longtime friends and a wellspring of sonic inspiration. In 2005, through their connections to Guy Blackman in Melbourne, Tenniscoats under took a tour of Australia and as part of that visit I arranged a concert for them in Brisbane. Their show, held at Rics Cafe in Fortitude Valley, was a wildly-flowing flux of song, improvisation and sheer melodic freedom. Following the performance Saya, Ueno and drummer Yoshinari Kishida spent a few additional days in Brisbane, and it's during this time that the majority of Totemo Aimasho was recorded. The recording itself took place in a reappropriated office building, where my friend Heinz Riegler had set up a small recording space. We were able to use the various offices as somewhat isolated recording zones. The results were surprisingly rich, a testament to office room design I suppose. For this special 15th anniversary edition, I spent some time going back over the recordings to remaster them. This version is perhaps a bit more faithful to the dynamics of those sessions. I also spent some days going through archival materials that were not included in the original Totemo Aimasho sessions. To my surprise I found a couple of demo versions of "Cacoy," one of my favorite pieces from the record, as well as some variations of other album pieces and also a couple of experiments not included on the record. There's a certain radiant joy to this music. The record is equal parts curiosity, porousness and generosity. It's a mixed methodology that informed this collaboration, and equally the creation of Totemo Aimasho itself. I want to send a special note of thanks to John, without whom this project, and many subsequent other connections, would not have occurred."

Monochrome printed, matte laminated and embossed sleeve with insert card. Includes previously unreleased demos and outtakes.

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A note from Lawrence English : "When I was preparing the 15th anniversary re-issue of Totemo Aimasho I spent a few days doing a deep dive through the room40 archive. There's a hell of a lot of material that has been collected over the years, and truth be told I don't exactly remember a lot of it. About a day into this search, I came across this recording. Tasmania Bootleg was recorded on Sunday the 15th of February 2009, at The Brisbane Hotel in Hobart. The visit to Hobart came about pretty last minute, so my email chain from the time seems to suggest. I'd invited Tenniscoats down to Australia to help celebrate the finale of the Fabrique series I was curating at Brisbane Powerhouse. Some folks from Hobart reached out once the other tour dates were announced and then before we knew it, we were headed there. As part of the Hobart visit we recorded a suite of material using the same 'field recording' style we used to create Temporacha in Tokyo the previous year. We also took the chance to record the show at The Brisbane Hotel. This recording is 100% bootleg territory. I must confess to being a huge fan of this style of recording. I was an enormous cassette trader back in my teen years and I put down a lot of my interests in texture and noise to the quality of duplicated bootlegs I listened to back then. This recording was made in the audience by a friendly local and is an entirely faithful capture of the atmosphere that surrounded Tenniscoats during this time. You can literally hear the audience becoming completely entranced by Saya and Ueno's performance. I was honored to play alongside them for this show. It's not something I talk about much, but my first life in music was as a drummer and a flicker of that life is captured here. The edition also comes with a digital phonebook, containing photos in 110 and other formats, that were captured in Tasmania during that time."

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A note from Lawrence English: "To attempt to summarize the journey of Annea Lockwood's life, as a composer and performer, is difficult if not impossible. For six decades now, she has carved out a multifarious and fluid existence that has orbited various musical movements and approaches. Hers is a life led by intuition, curiosity and listening, one in which passion is paramount and wonderment abounds. If you were to reflect upon one aspect of her way of being that holds the greatest gravity in her day to day, it is perhaps listening that resonates most vibrantly. It is a practice that she has sought to deepen, with an unwavering dedication across her life, and a it is practice that has sustained her in the absolute. It's here that Glass World comes into focus for it documents some of her first significant studies into sound, object and listening. It is a recording that captures her in a moment of profound fascination with a rather familiar material, glass. This recording celebrates many things, amongst them Lockwood's willingness to allow single sounds to resonate, fully. Across each of the 23 vignettes captured here, Annea Lockwood invites us to lean into the material nature of sound with her. Glass World shimmers with an almost fanatical incandescence. It radiates a vibrational intensity that holds as strongly today as it did upon its original release in 1970 on Tangent Records. I had the privilege to re-master these recordings, under the guidance of Annea, and sitting with them so intensely was nothing but a delight. In tandem with this project, Annea and I have undertaken a long-form in conversation, which is collected in the book which sits alongside this edition. The conversation splays outward from Annea's work on Glass World and it deliberately seeks to visit upon her interests and passions, and through doing so revel a certain perspective that has guided her ways of being, and ways of making. It's an honor to have the opportunity to share this edition with you. I hope you too can catch Annea's resonate curiosity and be as captivated by these sounds as I (and many others) have been."

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A note from Lawrence English: "I first met David Toop some 20 years ago. I think we were in touch shortly before that, but our first meeting took place when I invited him to Australia to perform and to speak as part of REV, a festival held at Brisbane Power-house. It was a memorable meeting, I vividly remember his solo performance and the edition A Picturesque View, Ignored documents an improvised meeting during that time. Over the years, David and I have shared an interest in both the material and immaterial implications of sound (amongst other things). Moreover, we've connected many times on matters which lies at the fringes of how we might choose to think about audition, our interests seeking in the affective realm that haunts, rather than de-scribes, experience. The Shell That Speaks The Sea very much resonates from this shared fascination. I'm not exactly sure when we first mooted this duet, but I sense its initial trace is now more than a decade ago. I tend to live by the motto of 'right place, right time' and I believe David likely also subscribes to this methodology. A couple of years ago, David and I reignited the duet conversation and began exchanging materials. As a jumping off point, I explored a series of field recordings that, for me at least, captured something of this affective haunting that I mentioned previously. One such recording was of a tawny frogmouth at Nugum (White Rock) on the lands of the Yugarabul people. The frogmouth is an utterly elusive creature whose voice is like a modulating low frequency oscillator. They are a magical bird, and like the Potoo, have captivated David and I at various points if our lives. The recording seemed to suggest a whole way of approaching sound and, for me at least, it opened an entirely new range of sound worlds which are present in the final version of this recording. This edition is the product of spontaneous burst of exchanges, buffered by periods of tempered silence. A patient work, charged with unexpected dynamics. It's with great pleasure we share this recording with you."

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Jérôme Noetinger's connection in contemporary musique concrète is lengthy and well documented. As one of its most vital and compelling creators, Noetinger is also well recognized for his tireless efforts advocating for the profundity of this work. With Outside Supercolor he creates a pair of compositions that extend his interests in timbre and electronic sound. Both pieces, created whilst reflecting on his ongoing collaboration with film maker Lionel Palun, are dynamic journeys through unsteady electronic environments. There's a sense of active investigation here, Noetinger leans into the pieces and considers even the finest of textures. The results are both powerful and subtle, a sensitive drive that highlights Noetinger's unique approaches to performance, and composition.

A note from Jérôme Noetinger: "Lionel Palun and I met in 2003 in a context of social struggle. Aware of an inevitable downfall, we decided to discuss our respective practices. Sound for me and image for him. Then there were the basic questions: 'What does it do if you connect a video output to a sound input?'; 'What does a sound output do to a video input?' Then the tinkering that goes with it, like opening a SCART socket and plugging directly into it. And to finish, we discovered that as always, everything has already been done! But in the end it's like rock music, it's always the same, and what counts is how to appropriate it, how to live it. These discussions and first experiences led Lionel to develop his own video feedback software. He has a scientific background and a taste for computers which helps! In this record, I wanted to draw inspiration from this work with Supercolor Palunar, the name of our duo, to better examine CRT parasites and virtual instruments whose purpose I still don't quite understand. I dedicate this record to Lionel Palun who, afterwards, made two videos echoing the two pieces."

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"From eel to eel," Oskar thinks, standing by the coffin, "for eel thou art, to eel returnest." --The Tin Drum, Günter Grass

Eel is the second set of sound works from Berlin based Korean American composer, Hyunhye Seo. Known widely for her contributions to the now legendary unit Xiu Xiu, Seo's solo pre-occupations dwell in an altogether more timbral and gestural domain. Each of the two pieces that compromise Eel are visceral deep dives into a turbulence of sound flows. Uniting her interests in ecstatic piano performance, dynamic percussion, and cavernous acoustic treatments, Seo's pieces are dense, instinctive, and vertical. This is a music that skates at the edge of the abyss without fear of knowing what lies over the edge.

A note from Hyunhye Seo: "Every year, the eels arrive in Sargasso. The eels that sprang to life when the sun god Atum warmed the Nile, the eels generated within the entrails of the earth, from the rubbing of the rocks and dew drops on riverbanks, they travel thousands of kilometers to Sargasso to breed. Their larvae, eels of glass, move to freshwater homes, crawling across land or up waterfalls if necessary, breathing through their skins, to get to where they want to go, although no one knows exactly where or why. Sometimes, they eat snakes and birds. After decades, when they're ready to breed, they stop eating and develop sex organs, and they travel back to Sargasso. If they can't go back to Sargasso, they never fully mature. They just stop ageing. No human has seen eels breed. Freud dissected over 400 eels in search of eel testicles. Aristotle thought they grew from earthworms in dirt. No one knows why they go where they go, or how they find their way back. Creatures of mud and rain, fluid in time and age, unabashed in its metamorphosis, unknown yet always found."

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To work against a-priori positions, to interrogate that which seems concrete, is never an easy undertaking. It comes with certain personal and even political costs, and it is these concerns that form part of the basis for New York based composer Christina Giannone's latest edition, Reality Opposition. Tracing out her own unsteady movements through the day to day, Giannone examines the waves of dissociation that haunt her interactions with the world around her. These examinations, by their very nature, exceed that of a pure self-reflexivity and rather invite the listener to consider their own positions and pre-occupations in the moment. Working with intensely sculpted walls of sound, Giannone's compositions are works of density, scale, and harmony. They are macro-sonic miniature realities, simultaneously outside and inside reality -- restless and indifferent to restraint.

A note from Christina Giannone: "Dissociation is the driving force behind the composition. The act of surrendering, the attempt to observe our existence from the outside. Giving in feels like giving up. Acceptance feels like resignation. The process included digital sound experimentation by means of observance and detail orientation and the idea of sound presenting itself in different identities depending on the listener. This attention to detail acts as a hologram, changing shapes depending on the angle. Ideas of multidimensional existences and indifference in its purest form. Slow, digital evaporation. An attempt to recreate what 'nothing' means. It might be a gaze out the window, conversations in passing, an incomplete thought. Fleeting, meaningless moments that fill the gaps. Things we are only subconsciously aware of. The periphery. The forgotten. The static in between."

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A note from Valerio Tricoli: "It is always very, very difficult for me to write about the music I was personally involved in making. As a matter of fact, a good reason for me to make music is precisely that I don't want to be a writer, and also to be able to shut up... for once. Yet, once a record is finished, invariably arrives the request from the publisher - in this case the great Lawrence English -- asking for a 'press sheet', a very weird, but apparently necessary form of literature in which you (me, in this case) have to say something about the record, and this something will then be taken up by those who will eventually write about the record in fanzines specializing in avant-garde or electronic music, so that this text -- this miserable text that stinks so much of an exercise in style and that you are unfortunately reading and I'm unfortunately writing -- will be repeated, again and again, in different forms for as long (generally not very long) as someone else writes about it (the record? Or perhaps only this wretched text in Italo-English?). And so happens that all those tales of more or less real influences and half-read epiphanic books; of networks of poetic and political references and off-hand quotations from Mark Fisher will be repeated ad libitum while the music is hiding in shame from the paper (or from the screen-paper-simulacrum or whatever we might call that thing). We have a special word in Italian for this stuff: supercazzola. If I think about all the supercazzole I wrote, this one included, I want to hang myself. And yet, I'll have to write more. And so, dear listeners of the avant-garde, I say what's there's to say: all that matters to me in that elusive fact we call music, hear hear, is its unspeakable. What digs a crater in my soul, and settles somewhere in the neuronal circuit, is a nameless spirit. Anyway. That dreaded moment, the press-sheet-request moment, took the form of a message from Werner: 'Lawrence needs a press sheet. I am full with work. Can you write something about our nightmares?' Yes Werner, I can: I don't want to, but I can. And by the way, you've already done all the work. Thanks and bis bald. And so, I leave you, dear listeners, with Der Krater, recorded live in an improvised fashion and then re-composed in the Bavarian autumn: two nightmares -- Werner says -- for double bass, synthesizer and live-manipulated Revox tape recorder, which we hope you'll enjoy as much as we do."

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To understand tuning systems, to peer into the infinity of microtonal compositional strategies, is to imagine a sense of musicality that extends far out beyond the familiar harmonies of the western ear. Iranian composer Siavash Amini, a self-confessed tuning obsessive, has dedicated much of his musical investigations over the past half decade to unlocking new relationships between harmonic events. Moreover, he has sought new timbral relations too and in doing so has honed a particular sonic-aesthetic that is increasingly haunting and spectral in nature. Amini's music is vertical, it reveals itself in ways which are unexpected and requires a certain auditory availability in its listener. Eidolon goes further than any other composition he has completed. It creates a contoured landscape in sound that is equal parts beautiful and overwhelming.

A note from Siavash Amini: "Let me get this out of the way; I'm obsessed with Safi-al-din Urmavi's theory of tuning, rhythm, and maqam. It started in my last year of high school, at the time there was a lot of back and forth between Iranian music scholars about his 17-tone scale and whether it had any use or relevance to Iranian music of that day. I've been thinking about those discussions and more general discussions of tuning in the maqam system of the 13th century a lot in the past half-decade. I didn't know how to approach these tunings, but I started to get a sense of it while making A Trail of Laughters (RM 4144CD, 2021). I decided that the relevance of these tunings couldn't be explored with conventional instruments and composition techniques. I do not want to approach them in a historical sense, either. I want to use these as my raw material and find my approach, borrowing from experimental and electronic music of our time. The apparition, an image appearing and disappearing, taking shape in an instant and gone in the next, something you're not sure you've seen, needs a particular setting to be experienced. Something seen or felt in an undetermined space like Redon's drawings. I tried to see if these tuning systems (mostly Urmavi's 17-tone scale) could be a starting point for creating such a space for myself by letting their frequencies and intervals roll over each other, and letting the resulting sound and textures float, crash, spill and bleed. Maybe my other obsessions, namely darkness, light, and death, can be at least in some sense contemplated in this shadowy undetermined space and just maybe something here and there makes its presence felt."

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In a radical re-approach to his musical output, Yann Novak devises his most dynamic sonic offering to date. The Voice of Theseus, expands his mode of operation, inviting in key contributions from vocalists Dorian Wood and G.Brenner, both of whom contribute to the core compositional elements of the record. Starting at voice as a point of departure, The Voice of Theseus traces sensation and sense making as a primary means to understanding the reality you find yourself within, a reality that is fraught by, and forged by, physiological and psychological ways of being. This record significantly expands Novak's oeuvre and in doing so opens an entirely new chapter in his practice.

A note from Yann Novak: "In Greek mythology, the legend of Theseus describes how the king-founder of ancient Athens rescues the children of his city from King Minos' minotaur on the island of Crete. In commemoration, Athenians began a pilgrimage to honor his victory, taking the ship of Theseus and sailing it from Athens to Delos. It was with this tradition that a philosophical paradox about the historic ship was raised: As the ship was repaired, piece by piece, until it was no longer composed of any original parts, at what point could the ship no longer be considered the same entity? In recent years, I've become interested in exploring the perceptual differences I experience. While some of these differences? partial color blindness and dyslexia -- have been with me my entire life, tinnitus caused by hearing damage is a relatively new change to how I experience the world. It is these sensory challenges which have shaped my artistic practice by creating what I call a perceptual insecurity -- an uncertainty of how accurately I discern the world around me. The Voice of Theseus is my attempt to explore the obstacles I face in processing external sensory information. If I have trouble perceiving reds and greens, if I have trouble hearing certain frequencies, if I don't interpret written language in a standard way, how closely can I experience reality in the way that others experience it? The album asks the listener to question how their unique means of perception and interpretation might differ from that of others. For The Voice of Theseus, I asked two of my favorite vocalists to assist with this experiment. Both Dorian Wood and G.Brenner recorded vocals for me to manipulate throughout the album . . . The myth of Theseus' ship allowed me to tease at the nuances of how reality can be observed, interpreted, and altered in an indeterminate number of ways; it can be dismantled and rebuilt, many times over..."

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Austrian composer and musician Werner Dafeldecker has carved out a pathway through the avant-garde that takes in the artforms most intensive and evocative characteristics. A founding member of contemporary sound unit Polwechsel and collaborator to artists such as John Tilbury, Sachiko M, Fennesz, and Lawrence English (amongst others), his solo output has picked up intensity over recent years. Neural, a career defining edition from him, pairs two works that highlights his pre-occupation with timbre, stillness and subtle dynamism. They are works of patience and delicate but inescapable tension, a profound balancing act that lands the pieces deep within our minds ear. Features: Nicholas Bussmann (cello); Judith Hamann - cello; John Heilbron - double bass; Lucio Capece - bass clarinet; Wolfgang Seidl - gongs.

A note from Werner Dafeldecker: "For whatever reason, I have always found the idea of using alien material as the structuring element of an artistic process exciting. That doesn't mean the elements always stay, but rather I often remove them right at the end of the creative process. This working method creates areas of tension that reflect the artistic process on a different emotional level. It reduces the sense of creation and moves more toward accomplishment. This method applies to both pieces of this phonogram in a similar way. Neural places sound surfaces as its central focus and is inspired by the idea that neural networks develop a memory when they repeatedly send information. The ensemble focuses on vibrations and rhythmic variations of the overtones, which are caused by dynamics and pitch shifts in the microtonal range. With the passage of time and performance practice, spherical, acoustic stamps become established, caused by the conscious perception of when rhythm changes into sound sensation and vice versa. For 'Tape 231' I re-discovered a long-forgotten music cassette in my archive which contained peculiar percussive electronic sounds. As Lucio and I worked on the recordings of his elongated tones and multi-phonics I again was drawn to the idea to use the tape sounds primarily as a structuring element for the piece, (time, density, dynamics) only to be left out afterwards. The targeted handling of hidden structures evokes a somewhat stubborn emotionality when dealing with creative processes, I like that."

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A note from Mike Cooper: "Collaboration, improvisation, innovation. The remit for Black Flamingo. During the Covid lockdown period I started long distance collaborations with a team of friends and made Oceans Of Milk And Treacle for Room40 (RM 4176CD). A family of long-time associates plus some more recent and one that I have never met in person. All of them with a unique ability to respond creatively, in any genre or context, in a creative, spontaneous and improvised manner . . . Featuring Geoff Hawkins on tenor sax. Our 60 year friendship goes back to the 1960s and my first band The Blues Committee then on through the 1970s to Trout Steel and The Machine Gun Company on the Dawn label meeting up again in the mid-1990s on my Island Songs CD . . .Elliott Sharp, guitarist, composer, improviser from the Downtown New York music scene. We first played together in Rome many years ago. We have a duo digital collection on my Bandcamp site and here on Black Flamingo, Elliott plays bass clarinet. Jon Raskin, a founder member of The Rova Saxophone Quartet based in California surprised me one night in London by appearing in the audience at a folk club concert I gave . . . Scot Ray, slidationist; lap steel and pedal steel guitar visionary. We have never met in the real(?) world, only online. I am always seeking audacious players of both those instruments and Scot is a true star . . . Michael Thieke, a fellow parttime Roman parttime Berliner member of the International Nothing brings peace on the clarinet with breathy playing on this most beautiful of wind instruments. Viv Corringham has shared her voice on many past musical roads with me from Greek Rembetronika to an improvising trio with Lol Coxhill and Soundwalks in hills around Hong Kong. Tim Hill on baritone sax. We go back to my 1980s in Reading in the UK. Together we had Beating Time with Paul Burwell on drums and Gary Jones on bass, both sadly gone now and Mayhem Quartet with Pat Thomas on keys and Neil Palmer our improvising DJ both happily still with us. Then we started Trystero System which became a floating membership duo spanning several years and has included both Viv Corringham and Pat Thomas with myself and continues from time to time. Lastly, The Migrant School of Bodies Choir was the result of a workshop in Milan for a performance/dance piece organized by choreographer/dancer Ariella Vidach. The text is each member counting from one to 26 in their own language each one starting to count after the neighbor had reached the number eight. Most of the members were from Africa and shared no common African language..."

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In late 2019 a volcanic system in southern Iceland, dormant since the 12th century, began to show signs of awakening. As swarms of earthquakes rattled through their home in Reykjavík Ben Frost and Francesco Fabris resolved to capture the sonic terrains of this part of the earth and document this moment of transformation. Fagradalsfjall volcano erupted on March 19, 2021 and the pair descended on the site within hours. Vakning is the condensation of their recordings, and charts an intensive and dynamic sound field that celebrates the profundity of field recording and its ability to explode the ways you think about sound existing in our immediate environments.

A note from Lawrence English on Vakning: "Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, nothing holds for anyone, any time or anything. As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper-thin crust, the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable. There are moments though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the surface of the planet simultaneously delivering destruction and virgin landscapes, as primordial as any we might care to imagine. It is here, in these places, where we can literally see the living planet, that geologic time is condensed and world building is made visible, and audible to us, in an unrestrained and provocative detail. These volcanic ruptures, such as those captured on Vakning by Francesco Fabris and Ben Frost, speak to the very living geology of Earth. These recordings, captured at close range, exist at a nexus where liquid rock becomes solid. They capture moments of transformation, of obliteration and of creation, often all at once. These are recordings of a living, material planet, dynamic and unrestrained."

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With Petra, Alberto Boccardi charts out a sound world that morphs with a geological energy. Swelling electronics spill forth, their sounds splintering to resound within cavernous structures, caves perhaps or something even grander. A city perhaps, but one which is unruly, its architecture creating unexpected reflections and distortions. Distended voices try to cut through these spaces but they are lost, all that remains is their sibilance. Boccardi's works create sound maps of this imagined place, they carve out the secret passages and pathways through which we are led.

From Alberto Boccardi: "Petra is a work that stems from the time I lived in Cairo between 2015 to 2020. I spent almost five years there, surrounded by the frenetic mood of the tireless Egyptian capitol. It's a never-ending cascade of sound and flashing lights, were where I found myself split between the habituation of my daily work and this throbbing sense of life all around me. Petra also comes from the period since I moved back to Milano, my hometown. In some respects, the album is almost me closing one chapter of my life, while opening a new one. All the materials were recorded at Standards, the studio I built five years ago, a place I know well and an environment where everything was available and, by contrast with Cairo, so familiar and under control. It seems a perfect counterpoint, a way to consider these sound memories at distance almost. While starting the set-up I was really keen to work by subtraction and also consider the idea of silence, which had not been a part of my life during my time in Cairo. I was trying to find the breadth between each sonic element and the space they would require. I was first much more focused on the sound itself, than the place it needed to be in relation with the other sounds. While recording I decided to invite a long-time collaborator Cinzia De Lorenzi, a very creative dancer and choreographer, to come into the studio and work with me. She has an incredible talent for voice and this was brought to bare on several of the pieces. We had a very quick understanding of the creative dynamic and I was positive that her voice would be able to fit in the sound interstices that were appearing. I thought the presence of the voice would help me to play with how, as the listener, I would experience a sense of distance across each track. It helped provide an approach to create and fill the empty spaces existing around all the other sounds..."

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From Lawrence English: "It may sound implausible now, but in the early 2000s Australia felt a long way away from the rest of the world. Brisbane, where I still live today, felt even further removed. This remoteness had its challenges, but also its charms. In 2001, Zane Trow then director of the Brisbane Powerhouse invited me to perform at an Open Day for the center with my trio I/O3 and DJ Olive. I didn't realize it at the time, but this engagement would spark a number of connections that tie directly into this edition. Following that live performance (released as Powerhouse Sessions in 2002), I was invited to curate a performance series, Fabrique, focused on new and emergent musics for Brisbane Powerhouse. At the same time, DJ Olive mentioned that he had started a new imprint, Phonomena, with Toshio Kajiwara and one of the first releases they were planning was from Aki Onda, whom Olive described as using a set of Walkmans that make a whole universe. I was intrigued. The following year, Aki Onda not only produced Cassette Memories Volume I 'Ancient And Modern' for Phonomena, but a few months later released a second volume Bon Voyage! with the always inspiring Improvised Music From Japan label. Both of these editions marked out overlapping territories relating to tape music, field recordings and most of all perceptions of memory (how it is lost and then found again, how it can constructed and deconstructed -- sometimes simultaneously). In early 2004, I wrote to Aki and invited him to Australia for a series of performances including two in Brisbane; one at Fabrique and another as part of NineHoursNorth, a dedicated program of Japanese music I was curating at the Judith Wright Centre Of Contemporary Art. Each of Aki's performances typified the expansive nature of his practice. Although the medium and tools may have been identical (cassettes, Walkmans, delay pedals and Fender twin amps), the focus of each performance was markedly different. For NinehoursNorth, Aki deployed the approach he presented on Bon Voyage!, long-form field recordings were re-amped and in the process of their unfolding a perception of time being bent in and out of shape emerged. There was a sense of the strange familiar, as bird songs, cityscapes, voices, instruments and various environments were melted together and reconfigured through the intense volume produced by the amplifiers. For Fabrique, the recording collected on this edition, Aki undertook a more performative method that reflected the sense of pacing and movement collected on Ancient And Modern..."