ROOM40 - Forced Exposure

$17.50 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 3/3/2023

"In the half-light stillness, the old piano rattles. Vibrations set forth into the expanse, at first empty, then expanding, set free then collapsing. This one note, appearing in a fleeting moment, an analog for the beginning of time, but really what is time? Some human construct to interpret chaos, to put some shape to what is happening around us, to associate memory and distance?"

West Australian artist Matt Rösner was amongst the first artists to be released by Room40. His Alluvial album of the mid '00s set out a methodology, guided by a deep interest in spatiality and texture, that still haunts much of his work to this day. Empty, Expanding, Collapsing his latest album, sees Rösner refine the working methods and approaches recently tested on his 2021 edition, No Lasting Form. Being led by a series of improvised melodies and movements, recorded on a borrowed upright piano, this album is simultaneously freeform and highly directed. It documents and tests the tensions that sit at the nexus of creation and composition. Mixed by Taylor Deupree. Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space. Cover Image by Traianos Pakioufakis.

From Matt Rösner: "Empty, Expanding, Collapsing was recorded in the months after the release of 2021's No Lasting Form. Whilst No Lasting Form documented a return to the creative process after a long period away, Empty, Expanding, Collapsing comes from a more confident and assured place. At the heart of this record is an upright piano, loaned from a dear friend for safe keeping. Built in the 1898, the piano is heavy, laden with time, a resonant lead sound board and the carefully restored hammers and strings. These pieces started as loose piano improvisations played in the early morning light to be later assembled alongside an array of guitars, electronics, synthesizers, and percussion. Whilst the basis of the tracks started as tentative improvisations, the overdubbed parts were very much painstakingly written, rewritten and aged with sounds of the surrounding dune systems seeping through the wafer thin studio walls."

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From Cat Hope: "This is the second Room40 release of collaborations between Australian chamber ensemble Decibel, and French music concrète composer Lionel Marchetti, after The Last Days of Reality in 2018. This release consists of two pieces: 'Inland Lake (le lac intérieur' (2019), and 'La Patience' (2020). Working with Lionel is magical. 'Inland Lake' was devised with the ensemble when Lionel visited Australia in 2019. As he sometimes does, he came with a 'partition concrète' that was part score, part ensemble member, part fixed media. The music is coaxed from the ensemble, without score, but with discussions, listening and experiments. In the live performances, Marchetti efficiently and imaginatively positions speakers in strange directions, heights and places and somehow, the sounds melt together, intertwining and indiscernible -- as on this recording. Marchetti adapts the partition concrète after first rehearsals and performances, integrating recordings of the acoustic instruments with synthesizers, tape, and electronic manipulations in his home studio. The recording of 'Inland Lake' occurred in two places at once: at the Digital Hub, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University, Melbourne and Soundfield Studio in Perth, Western Australia. Marchetti joined from France. Determined to make this recording despite the ongoing border closures within Australia and the world, the group came together telematically -- using software to reduce the perception of latency and improve the sound quality 'down the line' for the performers. The ensemble was split in half between the east and west coasts of Australia, listening together over the Internet, recording locally. Marchetti later mixed and mastered the track in his own studio. Listening to the piece once the recording and mixing process was complete was like hearing it for the first time, again..."

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Long Drove, the title of Simon Scott's first edition for Room40, is a location in the Fens close to the home of British composer, multi-instrumentalist, and mastering engineer. It is the connective pathway between two nature reserves, called Holme Fen and New Decoy, and both sites are part of a habit restoration project called The Great Fen Project and is close to where Scott grew up as a child. This area first became a location of compositional inspiration over a decade ago, when Scott created Below Sea Level on 12k (later reissued on Touch). His return to the Fens has produced a number of new works, presented here on Long Drove, that are intimate sonic narratives of place and rural trauma. Long Drove is a site-specific sound study which shifts the Anthropocene discourse from spectatorship to musical participation, accountability, and creative engagement. The near future of the Fens, with concerns of further subsidence and threat of flooding, remains a palpable concern. One can almost hear Scott's thought processes within these five compositions, of what the Fens would sound like if submerged and flooded by water again, returning to its original marshland state as a result of climate change, as the field recordings dissipate and unfurl with melancholic washes of decaying tape loops and digitally processed textures of Fenland sonorities. "Holme Fen Posts" traces out looped recordings taken from one of two of the famous steel Holme Fen nature reserve posts, which are located at the lowest cartographical location in England (six feet below mean sea level). The posts were driven into the ground in 1851 to take ground readings of subsidence by local landowner William Wells. Metal placards were attached to the posts to depict the subsequent dates of the level of the ground and Scott wedged two contact microphones in between the horizontal posts to capture its sonorities. The recordings reveal not only the slow and deep vibratory sounds of the steel sculptures but also the rhythmic dynamics created by natural phenomena, such as the downpour occurring as Scott recorded, and the resonances within the surrounding area. The natural phenomena of wind became aeolian sound characteristics, as heard in "The Whistling Wire", and the soft rhythm of the bridge being struck became the long-pitched drones and reverberant textures that these vibrations produced reveals the complex sonic topography of the Fens. From capturing the symphonic glory of the wind which, without any human intervention, ignites the holes in the wires. This triggers shifting planes of transmissible climate change induced musicality. "The Black Fen" traces sound fields through cassette tape loops of aeolian field recordings which are manipulated when fed into Scott's modular synth system to gradually tease out submerged hidden melodies.

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A body is bounded. It operates within physical limitations and biological constraints. Whilst some see these physiological boundaries as a terminus, others such as Colin Stetson perceive them as a nexus of possibility, and perhaps even of expansion. It is in this zone of unsteady tension and promise that his new album Chimæra dwells. Collecting a series of extended drone works for saxophone, Chimæra charts an entirely new thread of work for Stetson. This thread simultaneously maintains states of reductive minimalism and reactive maximalism. The album pushes his physical abilities, as a body and also as a player to a new terrain. The pieces reveal his increasingly refined capacity to compose works that push out-ward testing for the boundaries of timbre, harmony and also density. Each of Chimæra's two pieces forge an almost geological sensibility, tracing out the imagined caverns, hidden hollows and surging magma flows of an underworld that exists beyond the everyday we know. His instrument breathes like wind expelled from lava pipes. The pieces are tactile, engulfing the entire body and the ears with equal ferocity. It is a record that melds together a deeply layered sense of sonic strata with an unwavering harmonic delicacy. For more than a decade now, Stetson has been involved an impressively divergent array of works that are concerned with the very physiology of sound. His lungs shaping sound through the coiling metallic pathways of his saxophones. This work is an opening to a new subterranean stream of his playing and resoundingly places him at the very center of an ever-expanding body of work that has come to define the potentials of his instrument of choice.

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Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser. Formed in the early 1980s, Phauss operated amidst of generation of uncharacteristic Swedish artists concerned with reshaping the edges of practices in sound, light, performance and vision. It was a monumentally fertile period for Sweden in that a confluence of factors allowed artists to dedicate themselves to the relentless excavation of ideas, drilling down to the absolute core of their interests and ways of making. Von Hausswolff and Pauser, who both operated across sound and installation, used Phauss as a means for deconstructing ideas of composition, situationalism, site-specific works and extended performance methodologies. Across the second half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, they made connections, through their travels, outward from their homeland into scenes and communities that stretched from the Middle East, through North America and into Asia. Audiodrome collects together two discreet works that sit somewhere between field recording, chance composition and experimental soundscape. Both pieces pre-date the widespread arrival of field recording as a creative practice, and expand outward the work that had been developed by musique concréte and other experimental music approaches concerned with the intersections of found sound and composition. Both works were devised using the same working methodology, whereby an alarm would sound every few days and wherever and whenever it sounded the pair would start recording their surroundings. Those raw material became the basis for the pieces. The first composition "Zürich - Zürich" is a piece that traces a line around the world, Phauss travelling on a round the world air ticket stopping only in countries where conflict was present. This unsettling journey became a meditation on the evolving state of the world in those moments. Voices, traffic, cafes, radios, transportation system and other incidental environments float into one another in a kind of stream of (temporally incongruous) consciousness. The second work "Alger - Lagos" brings to mind some of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs tape cut-ups. Street musicians are splice against bursts of radio, roadside conversations and searing blasts of industrial noise captured from aircraft and other unfamiliar sources. The edition includes a book featuring an exhaustive collection of photographs, documents and artworks made by Von Hausswolff and Pauser during their journeys undertaken to complete each of the compositions. Many of these images and artworks have never been published previously.

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Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser. Formed in the early 1980s, Phauss operated amidst of generation of uncharacteristic Swedish artists concerned with reshaping the edges of practices in sound, light, performance and vision. It was a monumentally fertile period for Sweden in that a confluence of factors allowed artists to dedicate themselves to the relentless excavation of ideas, drilling down to the absolute core of their interests and ways of making. Von Hausswolff and Pauser, who both operated across sound and installation, used Phauss as a means for deconstructing ideas of composition, situationalism, site-specific works and extended performance methodologies. Across the second half of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, they made connections, through their travels, outward from their homeland into scenes and communities that stretched from the Middle East, through North America and into Asia. Nya Sverige - Nothing But The Truth is a recording made in the United States whilst the pair were undertaking an exhaustive tour in 1991 alongside Hafler Trio and Zbigniew Karkowski. This, now legendary, tour was both arduous and rewarding. Living in a van for many weeks at a time, travelling between cities with the most modest of means meant Phauss came to know a very particular vision of the United States, one that existed below plain view. Their's was an experience had at the rawest edges of cities. Equally the performances they gave, from which this edition is assembled, were raw and quite frankly dangerous. Fire on stage, sparks flying from short circuiting electronics and intense physical rituals guided so much of their work during this tour and looking back at bootleg videos from the time it's difficult to imagine the work being able to be presented in the modern world. One of the flyers from their tour reads "Extreme Swedish Industrial", and as familiar as those words might appear now, in 1991 they held a very different resonance. They were unfamiliar terms of reference and the intensity of Phauss's music maintains that unknowability to this day. This is a profoundly individual work and sets the stage for a generation of musicians who followed them. The edition includes a book featuring a long-form in conversation between Carl Michael Von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser with Lawrence English. It also includes never before seen photos and documents from their North American tour and collects together an essential and largely underdocumented history of this period of the group's work.

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Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths & Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.

From Aviva Endean: "Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being confined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy -- so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth's wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other. Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In 'Nightwork' I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on 'Mirror Signals' or the binaural microphone feedback on 'Moths & Stars' would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story."

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With Annular Silhouettes, Brad E. Rose traces an undulating pathway through ideas of place, memory, and intergenerational exchange. The edition is a mediation on how perspective is shaped, and reshaped, in time. More so it explores how change is simultaneously incremental and accumulative. This is reflected in the compositional strategies he deploys. Elements arrive and pass with an almost subconscious logic. Their pace is measured, but entirely fluid, creating a sense of breathing or perhaps even daydreaming. This is a work of constant evolution, but couched within a singular perspective of subjective experience.

From Brad E. Rose: "There are many times when I'm working on a music project that, in the moment, I'm not sure what I'm really doing. I don't believe there's some otherworldly power guiding my hands or thought processes unless our own subconscious could be classified as such a thing. It's mostly about trying to be present at that moment and letting the ideas and sounds unfold in a way that isn't forced. Oftentimes, after the fact, it will become clearer to me that certain feelings or thoughts were trying to find their way out, but my brain, as is often the case, wasn't sure how to process them and let them go. Sound has often acted as that medium for me over the last three decades; a way to channel difficult thoughts into a language I can understand. One evening as I watched the snowfall in mid-January, after thinking about what Annular Silhouettes was, it finally hit me. Recorded during the depths of 2020, during a time spent within the vicinity of where I live, it's a bit of a love letter to the place I grew up. I live in the house that my grandparents lived in for over 20 years, that my grandfather gutted and rebuilt with his own hands. It's the last place he ever called home and his spirit remains firmly etched into its walls. I live less than ten minutes from my childhood home, where both my parents still live. I moved away and eventually came back. I am lucky to gain a different understanding of this place than I had growing up. Place is a strange thing in the way it can influence and shape us, for better or worse. Nearly 20 years ago, when I moved back here with my partner, she would tell me how she couldn't get over how big the sky felt in Oklahoma. I still think about that often. For a place that is stuck moving backward in so many ways, the possibilities above us can be endless beyond the forces dragging us back into the soil..."

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For more than three decades now Sydney pianist and composer Chris Abrahams has developed a singularly iconic body of work. Known widely for his work with trio The Necks, Abrahams solo works have carved out an entirely otherworldly realm in sound. His explorations of organ, electronics, and piano capture a restless curiosity and timbral interrogation that only deepens with each of his releases. With Follower, his compositional language further expands. Melodies cascade with a cinematic pacing, spilling out over the top of harmonic electronics and unsteady percussive elements. He creates a sense of opening and space, a field within which we become lost and utterly consumed by the evolving states he casts into focus. On the opening track, "Costume", bass piano meanders through a wilderness of de-tuned bells and organ swells; a strange sort of festival. Low frequency sighs evenly punctuate, like a pump or a heartbeat. It's a procession that takes it time as it wanders the terrain, brought to a close with transcendent distortion. On the second piece, "New Kind of Border", muscular modal piano surfs among waves of percussion and analog synthesizers. A buffeting travel. Follower is Abrahams's sixth album for Room40 and it showcases his continuing interest in the ambiguous spaces between music and noise; tonality and atonality; rhythm and texture. All four tracks have piano as a key factor: in one instance, high-pitched and atonal; in another, emotive yet distant as if projected on to a screen. Follower presents the listener with a sound world of colorful juxtapositions, rich orchestration and organically open forms.

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Australian composer and director of the Australia Art Orchestra, Peter Knight, resolves his extensive work as an improvisor and band leader into his first solo recording in a decade, Shadow Phase. This is a recording which charts out a sense of perpetual opening, in a time of restrictive movement. It is a music of verticality, spiraling simultaneously up and down, effortlessly generating a depth and openness that is reflected both compositionally and texturally. Shadow Phase is also a music of light and dark, of elements being revealed and concealed with unerring patience. Even at its most dynamic this is a music that carries itself with a quality of a reductive, yet effervescent landscape. It is a masterful exploration of sound, anchored by Knight's evocative approach to trumpet.

From Peter Knight: "Most of this record was created in the shadow of COVID and deep in the maw of Melbourne's 2020 long winter lockdown. It is a meditation on the nature of connection. Restricted to a 5km zone, one of the only people I saw outside my family during this time was my old friend and teacher, Ania Walwicz. We met in the overlap between our zones on the waterfront near Docklands to walk and talk on bright, cool winter afternoons. Those conversations became large in my thoughts when Ania suddenly passed away in September. Her voice was in my head as I worked on this music, trawling through threads of ideas, recordings made on my phone, and thoughts jotted down in notebooks. Ania's practice as a writer relied on 'automatic' processes. Her work was informed by everything she had read (a lot) but it was created in the manner of dreams . . . I recorded everyday using the trumpet, my old Revox reel-to-reel, a couple of synths, a harmonium I lent from a friend, and whatever else was around. I worked mostly on just diving a little deeper each time I sat down to it. Through the simple process of exhalation, I explored my relationship with the trumpet, which has been through so many twists and turns. I let the tones produced by my breath unfurl on long tape loops and degrade beyond recognition through pedal and plugin chains, until the only imprint of the initial gesture remained. My process also involved long bike rides during which I'd listen to the work of previous days on ear buds, gliding through familiar streets made slightly strange by the absence of people and movement..."

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From Lawrence English: "The first time I witnessed Senyawa was in the early 2010s. We shared a bill at the MonaFoma festival in Hobart. Some memories hold strongly in your mind and Senyawa's performance that day did just that . . . This project, The Prey and the Ruler, finds its root in the unsteady months of mid-2021. As the pandemic plodded onward, and lockdowns were a thing of the everyday here in Australia, Peter Knight and I were talking about the situations unfolding in our respective states. We also got to talking about friends in the region and found ourselves pondering the situation just north of us, in Indonesia. It was around this time we thought to reach out to Rully and Wukir from Senyawa and to hear how things were first hand for them, and their communities. Following that initial conversation, we collectively decided that it was a good moment to commence a project that could cut through the geographic isolation of those long months, and also seek to create some opportunities for a community of instrument builders, friends of Senyawa, who had been significantly hit by the force of the pandemic. A few weeks after this exchange, Wukir sent a series of videos; grabs from his cellphone. The videos were of plastic molds, smoke, spray paint, and sound. In each short clip, instruments were being conceived, tested and forged. These were new instruments coming to life before our eyes, and ears. It was these instruments, and the audio possibilities they suggested, that are at the very heart of this edition. Following several more exchanges we started passing recordings to one another. The process of sharing materials back and forth quickly took on the shape of the works you hear on this album. Once all the contributions were in place, I set about forging them. On the first listen there was a deep sense of intensity to all the performances, like an outpouring or eruption. This was no doubt the result of people being largely locked away, a chance to break the looping around of their own daily routines. These sonic offerings from Senyawa, these instruments with their sounds so unfamiliar and at times unexpected, seemingly unlocked approaches from everyone in surprising ways. It was as if everyone was leaning into the sounds, applying themselves to the particular qualities of these new instruments. What you hear on this edition then is a collective effort at expanded listening..."

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In 1985, Mangaka Yoshihisa Tagami penned Grey. Now, seemingly all but forgotten, it remains historic as it led the vanguard of manga translated and serialized in the west. Approach is Lawrence English's homage to the lasting impression the manga left on him as a 13-year-old. After rediscovering it in 2021, he was struck by how internalized some of the manga's themes had become and was compelled to create a soundtrack as a form of distorted mirror to its pages. What results is an intensely episodic study of Tagami's renderings of the humans, landscapes, and technologies that haunt the speculative world he depicts. Approach is a potent and affective work which acts a distant sonic pyre of a smoldering future that feels acutely more tangible than it did when Tagami first imaged it.

From Lawrence English: "... This album, Approach, is an echo that has travelled with me for 33 years, even if I wasn't fully aware of it. It's a record about memory, about how seemingly cursory encounters shape us and how experiences accumulate in time . . . The record draws its root from Yoshihisa Tagami's seminal manga Grey. In many respects this album is a soundtrack to that manga. What makes Grey unique, in the west at least, is that it was amongst one of the first manga to be translated and distributed outside of Japan (yes, even before the touchstone that is Akira). It was one of the first droplets that has since become a torrent pouring outward from Japan. It was also the first manga I bought for myself, when I was 13, and read as a serial. I tend not to think or speak very much about my teenage years. I had some profound experiences that have carried forward, I forged deep emotional partnerships that carry to this day. The majority of that time however was something of a slog, a day-by-day performance of self-preservation . . . All boys' schools, one of which I attended, are a maleficent prison if you are not participating in, or as was my case you are maintaining an antithetical position to, hegemonic masculinity . . . It's difficult for me to quantify how much cultural consumption happened during my teen years, but I recognize now how formative so many of those exposures have become. An example of this came into sharp focus last year when I happened to remember, and then reread Tagami's Grey. As laconic and occasionally unlikable as the main character, Grey, might have been I associated deeply with their sense of determination. Grey's rejection of societal expectation, and his refusal to accept the immobility of systems, and social codes, clearly resonated with me . . . This record then is also a kind of sonic postcard retrospectively drafted for that very unsteady and volatile version of myself..."

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From David Grubbs: "This recording documents Manuel Mota's and my first public performance as a duo. We had played together previously for a recording session -- a relaxed afternoon at Lisbon's ZDB, where I recall zoning out, guitar in my hands, watching the endless throng of people Sunday-strolling past the plate glass window next to the stage. That deeply pleasurable afternoon session felt like a live accompaniment to a film. This recording also documents, for the both of us, a first indoor collaborative performance since the beginning of the pandemic. It felt familiar -- I do remember how to do these things -- and yet upped in its intensity of focus, and afterward that much more imprinted in memory, even prior to sitting down with this recording. It seemed I could have narrated it after the fact, its various twists and turns, which is not often the case for me with improvised concerts, details of which often vanish -- to return who knows when -- or transform into a series of disconnected impressions. One of the things that I love about Manuel's playing is that as a listener I quickly abandon my search for the logics of continuity that apply to most performers. With Manuel I rarely feel that I anticipate the shape of a given phrase in the time of its unfolding -- as a duo we're definitely not finishing one another's sentences -- nor do I sense that I'm tracking larger structures in the making to serve as signposts for the performance as a whole. The two of us first met more than a decade ago, but throughout many conversations we haven't spent much time speaking analytically about playing, never really compared notes from inside. It's not that we've chosen not to talk about music, or that there's a barrier or unspoken ideology to doing so. There's always something else to talk about. This concert took place in the Biblioteca Municipal of Barreiro, a smaller city to the southeast of Lisbon across the Tejo River estuary. 'Na margem sul' means 'on the south bank,' and is commonly used to refer to the area south of the Tejo. For a first time returning in many months to playing in an indoor setting, the library seemed an especially welcoming location." Personnel: Manuel Mota - electric guitar; David Grubbs - electric guitar. Recorded July 16, 2021 by Leonardo Bindilatti at the Auditório da Biblioteca Municipal, Barreiro, Portugal.

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Finland's Sasu Ripatti aka Vladislav Delay has been responsible for some of the most radically positioned rhythmic electronic music of the past few decades. His willingness to abandon measured and progression senses of repetition in favor of multi-layered unfolding pulses has become a touchstone for a new sensing of time. In a similar way, Norwegian guitarist Eivind Aarset has reappraised the harmonic and timbral capacities of his chosen instrument, the guitar, and unlocked new perspectives on this seemingly familiar instrument. His experiments have unsurprisingly caught the ear of similarly restless artists such as Jon Hassell or David Sylvian, with whom Aarset has collaborated. It's little wonder then that these two musicians have gravitated towards one another on Singles. Gravity seems a fitting metaphor too, in that this record is a series of orbits, elemental materials catching onto one another and hurtling the music in directions not really expected, nor traceable. Singles is a record of dimension too, opening outward and collating, sometimes simultaneously, texture and pulse into ultraviolet sonic nebula, as ecstatic as they are enveloping. From moments of fluid improvisation, emerge deeply morphic compositions that fold into and on top of themselves, forging an ever-deepening sense of pressure and energy. At times open, reductive and spatial, this record also has moments of explosive force, an excessive spilling over that speaks to the fearlessness of these two artists. These are unbounded works, pulling ever closer towards the very edges of what is knowable, in sound.

Eivind Aarset is a guitarist with a unique musical vision that absorbs and reflects all manner of music while retaining an enviable individualism and high-quality craftsmanship that can span from quiet intimacy to searing intensity. His debut as a bandleader on Jazzland Recordings was described by the New York Times as "One of the best post-Miles electric jazz albums," setting a high benchmark that Aarset has consistently met and exceeded, both in the studio and in live performance".

Sasu Ripatti's work as Vladislav Delay has charted out a dimension in sound that is wholly cohesive in its divergence from the familiar. Through working with rhythm as an agent of change, rather than repetition, he has been able to devise new methodologies for composition that dissolve expected relationships and in their place he champions sound materials that course outward in unexpected orbits and trajectories.

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Pierce Warnecke's work springs forth from the nexus of sound and vision. With Deafened By The Noise Of Time, he undertakes a deep interrogation of sound, which mirrors many of his approaches to visual materials. Seeking to test how elements of music are altered through interference and deterioration, he uses a range of methods to reveal new densities, timbres, and melodies from within his original source materials. Rather than becoming fragmented or overtly degraded though, Warknecke's work on Deafened By The Noise Of Time suggests new textures and harmonic relationships. As one musical gesture is transformed a new set of possibilities opens outward, creating a sense of perpetual unfolding.

From Pierce Warnecke: "Deafened By The Noise Of Time is a speculative take on how sound might decay and disappear; a reflection on the unavoidable entropy and dislocation of all things over time through four compositions, one with video . . . I first started working on the material for this album for a performance at Eglise Saint-Merry in Paris in 2017. Following the concert, I sat down to edit the music but struggled with the pieces, every time finding new flaws, unable to follow through with the original compositional ideas. Somewhat frustrated, I decided to strip down the musical content to form more bare-bone structures and look for a different principle or process to tie everything together. For this, I shifted focus to a long running part of my video practice: the deterioration of things over time, where I use my camera with simple lighting and slow movements to focus on rusty, dirty, burned or broken found objects. I like the idea of these things being both recent and ancient, contemporary artefacts of a world in constant decay. I like the idea of being able to still sense memory on objects even when they've become almost entirely unrecognizable. I like how this pushes back against the inevitability of impermanence. I like the act of scavenging and reusing discarded objects to put them in new but uncertain light. I like to think of it as a kind of ritualistic transformation of 'trash-to-treasure', a conjuring of a thing's entire past through imperceptible clues left on it's surface. For Deafened By The Noise Of Time I wanted to apply these ideas to sound, and consider how a musical idea might disappear under an accumulation of interferences, as a kind of sonic sedimentation and erosion..."

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Of Which One Knows is a collection of works by Natalie Beridze that sit outside the easy categorization of "album". They are of course, an album, but they are more than that, in that they represent a kind of multiplicity in sound, an accumulation of experience, of emotion, of life, transposed into sound. It is only together that the stories that sit between them might start to be assembled. Spanning a decade and a half, these works chart a trajectory of investigation and curiosity that charts the very edges of Beridze's intensely personal compositions.

From Natalie Beridze: "Of Which One Knows, was written and produced between 2007-2021. Such unreleased material is a quintessential backdrop to an artist's processes, as it has obviously never landed in any full bodies of work. It does however gain humble significance, which feels approachable, which is about absence and hence always fresh, drifting somewhere between remembrance and obliviousness. I see sound in smells, maps and mischievously put random words in poems, as they provoke pivotal subconscious algorithms in me. These tracks are the portrayal of those feelings. Anterior memories; Layer upon layer; Petrichor -- a smell of first rain; In spring; Jupiter Florida; I'm in beauty Kentucky; In paradise Miami; I'm in cut off Louisiana; In why Arizona; Sea of moisture moon; I am the memory of. Every blissful moment of the divine process of music-making, that goes back to a sacred process of a child at play -- a burning response to the intensity of the neigh to invisible blueness of half-formed ice. The span of time for this music reminds me of my dad's studio. Infinite thick wooden drawers that crackle clack, bounce clatter, peal, rattle the same way as before. There is no decay crumbling, perishing or rot in the objects inside. Clippers, liner pens, tracing paper, cutters for grown-ups, unused razors and their tiny spare blade packs, tapes, compasses, leather and metal roll meters, are all intact. Random snapshots, outdated student ids and driving licenses in leather sliders, letters, postmarks, piled up separately in intense small section drawers. All's in perfect order. All intact. Layouts, house models with tiny tables and chairs and swimming pools with people inside, others by the fireplace, some holding cocktails, others reading books- are very dusty, smelling of glue and cardboard, all intact. Some stacked one on top of another, others unfinished on the modelling table under the stained swinging arm desk lamp."

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Rafael Anton Irisarri's works from Room40 have always dwelled in a place of pressure. His low frequency excursions have charted out a unique voyage into a territory in which texture and density are equally matched to create a visceral, but ultimately comforting zone of entanglement. At the same time as completing his Solastalgia edition (RM 4105LP), Irisarri recorded Agitas Al Sol. Like its sibling work, this album is an enveloping sonic drift that traces across the unsteady topographies of the Anthropocene. It moves in deep exhales, drawing from within and pressing outward into a sound vista that is effortlessly deep.

From Rafael Anton Irisarri: "It's sometimes hard to go back and speak to work that was made in the past. Things change, but they also stay the same in some ways. I feel this strongly coming back to these pieces. Agitas Al So was a companion suite of materials that was composed alongside my album Solastalgia. For those with a keen eye for wordplay, they might notice each title is an anagram of the other. In some respects, this is actually a very fitting sonic analogy too for the pieces from the two records. They mirror each other in various ways, harmonically in the very least, but they also share the same deep sense of pressure that forged them so acutely. To come back to these pieces, I was struck by how much they expand on the ideas contained in Solastalgia. Where as Solastalgia might have been me breathing in, this set of pieces is a deep, deep exhale. Remember to breath."

Rafael Anton Irisarri is a composer, record producer, and mastering engineer living in New York. Irisarri's compositions field an array of modern ambient overtones threaded through oceanic symphonies with tape loops, bowed electric guitar and vast washes of overdriven sound. His most recent album for dais records, peripeteia, portray these common themes giving way to metal and classical influences that emphasizes Irisarri's melancholic tendencies. These unique overtures, coupled with his signature layering of distortion and bleached-out textures, fabricate an audible environment that would seemingly be at odds with, yet gracefully complement each other.

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Finnish artist Antti Tolvi operates at the nexus of performance and installation. His work, which is concerned with how sound operates in the spaces that contain it, is a meditation on how sound reveals itself, in time and in space to the listener. Each of the works captured on this edition dwell in the reductive, the subtle and the sustained. The pieces seek to draw attention to microtonal variation and flutter. They arc in a slow reveal that highlights Tolvi's patience and his unwavering desire to create work that invites us to become settled within it.

From Antti Tolvi: "'Spectral Organ' was played and recorded with no over dubs in Kemiö Island, in a 14th century church on 22/9/2019. We have these acoustically amazing spaces even in the smallest villages and towns in Finland. In every space there are these unique and solid, super complex analog wave generators ready to play. You just need to get in and turn the wave generator on. Even this particular, very basic church organ has around 2200 tuned pipes . . . Because of high amount of pipes and the fact they are often not so well tuned, all kind of interesting microtonal intervals are easily found. The idea in this piece is to create static spectral sound sculpture. An invisible, in situ, air sculpture. A sculpture where you can enter, stay and leave. It is a kind of floating architecture inside the visible architecture. This sculpture will always be different in each different church. In this recording I play almost whole piece just by slowly opening and closing the stops. This organ luckily has mechanical stops. In some organs stops work with electricity. Usually this means that stops are either completely open or close, not anywhere between. This limits notably the amount of colors you can get out of organ. You will lose the possibility to slide from tone to tone. The second piece, 'Feedback Gong' is a recording made as part of a sound/light installation I completed in early 2020. The installation was premiered at B Gallery Turku in midsummer 2019. The installation has on-going feedback though a 20" gong cymbal. The cymbal hangs between two microphones and a 15" speaker without any physical contact. 'Feedback Gong' has a pretty similar invisible sculpture idea as the first piece does. Here we give the most delicate decision to the feedback circuit. These small differences and variations make alter the sound and create the nature of the piece..."

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Madeleine Cocolas's Spectral is a reimagining of the familiar. It is an attentiveness to the incidental, and a reaching out towards the unheard. Taking these acoustic microcosms as a source of focus, she unpacks these transient flickers and memories, and repositions them; exploding them outward and shifting perspective. Spectral, celebrates the shadows of melody and the afterthoughts of rhythm. It breaths with a sense of calculated intensity that reflects on Cocolas's focus throughout the process of realizing the work. It is a dynamic set of transient states which bring to mind a world reimagined through new senses and new ways of being.

From Madeleine Cocolas: "Spectral is built on a foundation of sounds I collected from my immediate surroundings in recent times. It's a familiar story, casting your ears close to home. I captured these sounds as a type of aural diary to mark days and weeks as they passed. As our physical worlds seemed to become smaller, my senses of observation and perception of my immediate surroundings sharpened. Inside these small spaces I found a wellspring of materials that seemed to offer themselves up. At the time I didn't know why I was collecting sounds or what I would do with them, it just felt like something I needed to do and it helped me stay connected and feel tethered to my surroundings. With my phone on hand, ready to record on walks around the block, past whirring industrial machines, deafening crickets and crashing storms, I found so much beauty and meaning in the sounds and the recordings I collected. As the collection grew, I could sense these links between them, some sounds seemed to gravitate towards one another, they self-arranged almost. It felt very natural to then build layers over the top of them, to be able to express some of the emotions that the sounds triggered, of memories from the moments from when they were captured. At its core, Spectral is about deep stillness, observation and perception underpinned by emotional expression. It is a subtle shift in memory, a recoloring of the world we think we know and a willingness to lean into that possibility."

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Yui Onodera's work is patient. He invites a sense of dwelling with his pieces, an encouragement to pause and to allow sound to swell up around you. On Too Ne, he charts out a very specific sonic exploration. Across these five works he creates a lilting passage of sound, a liquidous flow that confirms the adage of ambient music existing as constant, but never solid. Too Ne also invites a sensing of the self, in that the works ask you to examine our own memories as a way to unlocking a deeper resonance within the work. Onodera has created an incredibly generous and open sound field here, one in which you might find yourself dwelling, deeply.

From Yui Onodera: "These pieces are what can be described as almost static ambient tracks. They are about a recognition of perceived stillness, even when there is change in the sounds' relationships with each other, and with the listener. 'Too Ne' is an old Japanese word that refers to a sound that is sounding from far away. It is about distance, and also perhaps about reaching out to those sounds that seem to exist far away from us. 'Too Ne' is a word that is not often used in modern Japan, but it has a long history, and can be found in the oldest extant collections of Japanese waka (poetry in Classical Japanese), such as 'Manyoshu'. It is sometimes understood that there are many sounds that appear in people's minds here, when they think of an imagined landscape. Sounds as memory markers, but also as devices to help us imagine more deeply the places we visit and recollect with our minds. Here, I recall in my mind the distance of static sounds like vague clouds, delicate sounds like a state where cherry blossoms whirl in the wind and resemble snow falling."

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Richard Chartier's Pinkcourtesyphone operates at nexus of recollecting 20th century anxiety and opulence. Over the course of this project, he has created a lush and overtly queer sound world of drifting rouge atmospheres, smudged lipstick electronics, and cavernous architectures that dwarf the sense of human interaction in favor of omnipotent acoustic voyeurism. All Intensive Purposes aches with a deep sense of longing, held aloft with tangible suspension. Voices and sounds float, haunting a murky, aged and diminished mansion. The music hums a tune of a song forgotten, amidst the satin-like sheen of perfume that has sat too long, thick in the air.

From Pinkcourtesyphone: "A decade has passed since Pinkcourtesyphone's unexpected debut album Foley Folly Folio (LINE)... time does fly in face of expectations, since expectations are just future resentments. All Intensive Purposes is a lush compliment to Pinkcourtesyphone's previous outing for Room40 Leaving Everything To Be Desired. Immured within the deep deep pink velvet lining of their sonic smudge satchel ooze forth the obsessions and peculiar delicacies that have captivated both Pinkcourtesyphone and audiences alike. Moody glowering, ghostly utterances re-situated, hissy, distant and sad, all the while light and tender. It is that sound that is at the fluffy heart of a long string of successful though surprisingly varied albums. A new sparkling jewel that already gathers cloudiness in its facets. This album can be best characterized by one word -- charm, well, maybe two words -- questionable charm. 'I could listen to it for hours' -- a possible proclamation for these inconsistent consistencies. Theoretical A and B sides makes one long for the warmth of antiquated plastic possibilities, if only for a moment to distill the gnawing hungry need for consumption within. Seven 'songs' lilt and wallow, indefinable, intangible, yet always... there. This is 'catastrophe muzak', the sound of sympathy, romanticized and ruined. Here is a collection of moods which we anticipate and enjoy with no misgivings. A long trail of evening debris awaits your ears' pleasure. Let it procure that pleasure for you, let it devour you. I can't imagine... you will."

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Lawrence English on Phill Niblock's Ghosts And Others: "Ghosts And Others is a singular work in the Phill Niblock canon. It's singular not just in its material content, but also in its methodology and approach. It represents a highly focused exercise in editing, location recording and acoustic observation. In many ways, this work reflects a kind of acoustic mirroring of his practices as a film maker. It makes itself available to the world and in doing so reveals a particular perspective that says as much about its creator as it does about its subjects. Like all of Niblock's works this is a piece of patience. It is a work that dwells in the places it finds itself in, allowing certain moments to dominate in some sections, and seemingly vanish away in others. It suggests a movement within boundaries, in that it bounces from one locale to another counterpointing their gradual evolutions across time. There's a sense of collision throughout Ghost And Others. Explosions of Chinese percussion punctuate the piece, dynamic strikes to ward off ghosts during a funeral procession in Aberdeen, Hong Kong. They clang between bursts of car horn, the bellows of cows from collective Soviet-era farm in Hungary and various other sonic ephemera. Elsewhere a reeded instrument tries to carve a space for itself, but the world does not allow it to hold. It is a work that celebrates proximity as much as an aural vista. Transit is also a theme here. What is a fascinating about Ghost And Others is the sense of movement in the work. Trains divide up this piece, marking points of transition, of distraction and of discovery. They act as gate-keepers almost, allowing us through into new spaces and suggesting new relations between the sounds as they combine or detach. As a work of field recording, Ghosts And Others is generous, invitational and most of all effortlessly deep. It is a resonant sensing of place, people and things."

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Swiss artist Zimoun is known for creating effortlessly deep and fluid sound works and sculptures. On Guitar Studies I-III he limits his acoustic focus to just one instrument, arguably the most iconic of the modern age. In doing so, he begins a vertical study of the guitar, seeking deeper and deeper into its tonal and timbral qualities, pushing to reveal the dynamic possibilities of the instrument. Using a wide variety of techniques and settings, he unlocks an entirely personal and profound reading of the guitar. It is one that is equal parts static and dynamic, visceral and delicate. Guitar Studies I-III is a masterwork of iteration, patience and harmony. The edition is published in tandem with a book featuring a long form in conversation between Zimoun and Lawrence English, and also includes archival photos, installation views, and other materials.

From Zimoun: "With the Guitar Studies series I've dealt solely with noises and sounds produced by guitars. Partly I played the guitars by hand in a more conventional way, but more often I prepared them, or activated them by using small DC motors. I used various microphones for the recordings, as well as the loose contact of a pickup and many different amps; from a small toy amp that was partially defective to a beautiful Magnatone amp with analog tremolo from the sixties and an old Fender Amp I bought together with my first guitar when I was ten years old. I also played recorded sounds back in different environments, for example inside a cardboard tube or in different rooms with various sizes, and then recorded them again. This way I added natural resonate and spatiality to the sounds. I also created a distorted sounds by sending the signal of the guitar to a naked speaker membrane lying on the table, and then put some sand on the membrane itself . . . I did not work with loops in any of the compositions. For each layer in each piece, I recorded whatever I was exploring over the whole period of about an hour. In this way, I put together countless hours of sounds. Through the almost endless overlaying and long recording takes, I have tried to achieve a kind of liveliness, even if at the same time no major changes happen in the composition. It's never exactly the same, but never going somewhere else either. In that sense these compositions also have a strong sculptural component. After this process, I started working on the microstructures of the recordings. For example, I recorded slow equalizer shifts in some of these tracks over the whole period of time. I also played these live via various controllers and analogue equalizers. This approach allowed the individual frequencies to become more present over long periods of time or mix with others..."

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A note from Lawrence English: "In the summer of 2010 I had the opportunity to visit Antarctica through an invitation extended by the Argentine Antarctic Division. It was nothing short of life-altering, as I am sure anyone would suspect. Upon departing from Buenos Aires for the iced continent the Hercules transport aircraft, under direction of the Argentine military, made a routine stop at an airbase outside Rio Gallegos. What was meant to be a few hours layover turned into several days as, on landing, a strong wind storm blew in unexpectedly. Conditions exceeded expectations, and before long it was clear the transport could not take off. The situation was only compounded by adverse weather along the Antarctic Peninsula. Whilst the scientists and military personnel we were travelling with bunkered down in their quarters, I found myself drawn outside into the howling air. The wind in Patagonia is, well, breathtaking. Literally, there were moments where it was so physical, that it was difficult to catch my breath. Across three days I recorded abandoned buildings, lone trees folded over in fields of tundra-like grasses, quivering road signs, wailing fences and other objects shaken into life by the wind. It wasn't a comfortable experience by any means, but the multiplicity of sounds I was able to capture, I hope, speak for themselves. The Antarctic recordings were made during two blizzards at Marambio and Esperanza bases. During the blizzard in Marambio, the temperature dropped to -40 degrees centigrade (with wind chill) which made recording particularly challenging. The wind battered the base's structures and telecommunications equipment, making a range of unsettling, phasing choral drones and deep low frequency vibrations that resonated inside the base itself. The blizzard at Esperanza was mild by comparison, but still strong enough to coat penguins in layer of snow as they huddled together during the worst of the storm. This year marks the tenth anniversary of completing these compositions and since that time, I have had the pleasure to diffuse them on numerous occasions. With those experiences in mind, as well as the format on which these works are now being made available, I have revisited them and completely remixed and remastered the pieces. Listening back to these recordings I am struck by the sheer physicality of the wind. It's rare that you feel physically reduced by the motion of air, but in both Patagonia and Antarctica that is just how I felt. A small speck of organic dust in a howling storm."

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A note from Jeph Jerman: "What I remember... a car on fire alongside the highway in the middle of the night. Waking in someone else's bed in London with an entire poem spilling into my head, and then recording it with Tim in the kitchen after breakfast . . . The screaming woman at the airport who pulled the fire alarm, evacuating the terminal. Some guy in Brooklyn talking through our entire set... smoking rope and playing chess with Jean-Herve Peron. Playing in that giant concrete bunker on Mare Island, our sounds smeared by endless reverberation. People smoking heroin in the bathroom in Oslo, setting off the fire alarm toward the end of our set, and the freezing room in Den Haag. Improvising in the back seat of Tim's car while he drove and recorded it, somewhere in Indiana. The guy shooting up in the stairwell of that dilapidated squat in Berlin, and the whirlwind tour of the city at 3AM. Chocolate you could snort in Antwerp. Crossing the English Channel through the Chunnel, and our entire train loaded onto a ferry to cross the Baltic Sea. Spending a lot of time together, without ever running out of things to talk about. It was Tim who said that our next record should be called hiss lift. We saw it on a sign pointing to an elevator in some hotel, the two words in different languages. For me, that phrase conjures up vague thoughts about tape manipulation, a finger on a switch so marked. We talked about the record a lot, mostly on trains, and came up with other titles launched from subtle in-jokes. What we didn't talk about in any detailed way, was what it would sound like. Lounging on-board and resting, not focusing on any one thing I could watch the landscape from two or three different directions at once, all rolling into and out of each other's reflection. Different surfaces displayed aspects on the inside of our compartment, highly distorted by their curvature. It struck me that it was very similar to the music that Tim and I had been making, and that spark set off the fire you now hold. Every tour that Tim and I did is represented here: Two runs through California and two up the east coast, a tight circle in the mid-west, and three weeks in Europe and Scandinavia. The spoken word bit is the recording we made in the apartment in London, and the rest is a mélange of places and times superimposed. Sounds reoccur, jutting up in varied combinations, ghosts peeled and pasted . . . Here then are our cut-ups, mnemonic prods diced and displaced. The residue of experience passed hand-to-hand."