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RM 4267CD
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$17.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 3/6/2026
A note from Carlos Giffoni: "I initially recorded all tracks in California between 2024 and 2025. The tracks were then sent to various locations around the world to each collaborator for completion, before returning to me in California for final touches. They were subsequently sent to Japan for mixing. Then, back to California, and then to Australia, where the final designs for the artwork were created. The final version was then multiplied and spread all over the world until it reached your ears, their intended target. The Pendulum swings. And the world keeps rotating endlessly." Mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke. Featuring Greg Kelley, Mabe Fratti, Zola Jesus, Ben Chasny, Lea Bertucci, and Iggor Cavalera.
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RM 4262CD
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$17.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/20/2026
A note from Stuart Argabright: "Degraded, faded cities now empty of people. You can hear household appliances in the kitchens still talking, but only to each other. The phrases are distorted, unclear; broken English, Japanese and a few Korean and Chinese automated voices, syllables, shopping lists, play lists for dinner and recipes. Somewhere one of the machines is dialled in on an isolated pre-Buddhist monk chant, distant like from a high cliff meditation cell. The flow of the wide, long Black Mother River Kali Gandaki below them. Here is Obliteration Bliss A world in a flash of light. The world running faster and faster. Another biomorph escapes the facility...she disappears into a backwater jungle town. A witness to smoking remains and death after generation wars, ash snow dusted, scorched lands. Look into a huge room filled with ancient machines and stumble among the fossils by the old silver river. Before the wind reverses and chokes us with sand, grit and who knows what else direct from the Subcontinent. The evening fog closes around impossibly high tower buildings. A pack of racing bikes approaching, lights flaring. Still we linger in-between the shadows and the light. There's another voice calling, but its form is hazed in fading neon. It's raining again."
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RM 4251CD
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$17.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/20/2026
A note from Brad Rose: "The Sound Leaves began as an interactive sound performance and installation based around humans' impact on the environment and how that impact is altering the sonic landscape of our world. As ecosystems change due to climate collapse, the sound of those ecosystems changes too. The Sound Leaves used an amplified collection of autumn leaves to encourage participants to listen closely to how their actions alter the sounds of the fallen leaves by walking on and through them for a period of time. By amplifying these sounds, processing and mixing them live, and playing them back via a set of speakers directed at the installation, the performance heightened the sonic changes participants' actions create. From that performance, a sound piece by the same name was composed using the recorded sounds with additional instrumentation. It was installed as a temporary exhibition on site at Philbrook Musuem of Art during the winter of 2023, emanating from a grove of oak and elm trees. A year later, as the climate crisis worsened, those same sounds were reprocessed and reconsidered, creating a more ghost-like approach, 'In Collapse.'"
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RM 4254CD
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$17.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/20/2026
A note from David Shea: "Meditations is a set of eight works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha's death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health. The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians , languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension. The musicians on these pieces also are recorded live in a group setting listening to each other with a shared space and character I create and through this listening the connections that form the final piece are made. The Heart Sutra which I read in the last piece of the eight is a translation which has been collaged by many schools and cultures that adapted the teachings to their indigenous religions. The bonus track is a live mix (called a Metta Mix) of a performance and collage of all this material and other new pieces, performed in a virtual avatar world called 'Second Life' for a live audience who listens and attends in their own avatars. All pieces on this set of recordings are a version of this in some ways, with the mix being something both from me and for those that listen. Meditations is both a document of practice, past and present and an experience of listening, both personal and the connective mix of us and all the things that are not us."
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RM 4263CD
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$17.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/20/2026
"This is music inspired by the water and the wind. By the tattoo of the insects' beating wings and the soughing of the wattle in the sea breeze. By the dull roll of the surf and the rhythm of my breath against the pad of my feet as I walk along the sandy, leaf-littered path through the scrub to the beach. The fingers of the fire-blackened dead banksias clawing the vicious blue. Somewhere, a peal of laughter is torn from its source and flies for a moment on the thermals rising from the baking sand. It is the summer of 2024/25 in Australia as the ideas for this album coalesce from a dozen different threads. I'm camping with my family on Krowathunkooloong land in the south-east corner of the country. The place where I grew up. The same beach where I spent every summer through my childhood. We swim every day in the ocean and in the late afternoons in the calm of the Yeerung River. The water, stained red brown by Melaleuca, turns my hand into a bloody ghost as I watch it sink. This place asks questions of me about belonging, about the relationship of the body to the wind. Of memory, of history, and of forgetting. Sound braces us in the now but simultaneously connects us to the past - a porous membrane between inner and outer worlds. I am walking up the hill behind the Yeerung with my trumpet in my backpack. Stopping to play momentarily. Trying to find a space in which I can resonate the sounds I make with those around me. The river is full from earlier rain and is threatening to break through the thin sandbank that separates its deep red pool from the gunmetal blue ocean. The heat gathers and the pulsing of the crickets intensifies." --Peter Knight
Peter Knight is a composer, trumpeter, and curator whose practice thrives in the spaces between genres, categories, and cultures. His recent solo work extends the possibilities of his instrument with innovative approaches that interweave acoustic preparations, extended techniques with electroacoustic processing via laptop, vintage delays, and tape machines. Peter is interested in the use of repetition, rhythmic overlapping, slow harmonic evolution, and subtle timbral evolutions to shift our perceptions of linear time.
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RM 4100CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "Even without visiting a place, we often think we know it. It's a syndrome of the modern age. The world is right before us, on screen, summarized and sensorially curated into a particular vision that casts light across 'just so much' of an impression of a place and a time. In some ways, I realized this phenomenon most strongly when I visited Antarctica in the summer of 2010. In my mind's ear (and eye) certain features of that place were front and center -- imagined, as to be real. The stark color schematic, the full spectrum dynamics of life (and death), the distance from wider humanity and the uniqueness of climate formed a collaged pre-conception of the ice continent... The recordings here speak to the everyday of our incursions into Antarctica. They are not exceptional, or unique, in that they unfold across much of the continent's camps and bases moment to moment, depending on the season and location of course. What they do highlight is the confluence of environments, materials, climate, and life that all clamber together in these shifting plains of ice, rock, and water. While not exactly intentional, the way this work played out is largely in three chapters, the human, the land and the water. Each of these intersect and fall into one another of course, but they also exist with a sense of being discrete. Whilst the characters might be shared across these zones of entanglement, the stories they tell into are often unfolding in parallel, rather than in sequence... To me these recordings capture the duality of a place like Antarctica. They are a seasonal glimpse into the lived experience of the wildlife and humans that persist in this environment. They also reflect upon the objects and things that comprise this place. The recordings catch the uneasy murmurs of eroding ice plates, the trickling conversations of high summer streams, the clicking echolocations of Orcas, the barked disputes of territorial Antarctic Fur Seals, and the chirping of penguin chicks racing to shed their downy coats and find their way to the relative security of the ocean before the winter sets in. They also capture the feverish rush of researchers, military personal, and station workers as they prepare for the long, frigid months ahead during which time they are effectively disconnected from the remainder of the planet. These moments exist in urgency, the summer's sweet caress is fleeting and the winter knows no forgiveness."
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RM 4241CD
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Rie Nakajima and David Toop recorded at Dave Hunt's studio, 6 May 2022. Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space. A note from David Toop: "These are two conversations we had by emails when we all had to stay inside quietly five years ago. We have always enjoyed chatting on art, music, food and shared what we observed in life since we met but this period of lockdown, we couldn't see each other so somehow we found a way to continue this habit. Also, this extreme situation persuaded us to be 'thoughtful' and 'creative' not in a normal or natural way. Though the way we try to be thoughtful and creative is always with humor and laughter. This part is so important in what we share through art and music. Like sculpture, like music. Some thoughts in spring. Emerging in spring we made a studio recording. Many things had floated away in the time of lockdowns and isolation. Other things became fixed in unfamiliar ways. It's a long time since Lucy Lippard wrote about the dematerialization of the art object but it seems that the word 'sculpture' still has connotations of a solid thing, with weight and mass. Early on in our conversations, maybe 12 years ago, we thought about this word and its weight. What if sculpture was just a duration, an empty cup held in the hand until it disappears, leaves that fell from a tree in autumn, a collection of sounds that one person heard but the other person ignored, a closed suitcase full of objects and then later on the suitcase has been opened and the objects have been stuck to a window, or a season and its transitions, its colors and scents, its feeling of vigor and renewal. The thoughts were sculptures, you could say, but you couldn't touch them. They looked after themselves."
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RM 403-20CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "If I'm not mistaken, Ben Frost and I first talked about the ideas of what would become Steel Wound sometime in mid-2002. In the early '00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realized in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at another sound world which would become his focused in the summer of 2002 and into 2003. Locking himself away at Johanna's Beach, a remote southern vantage along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, he was able to record for the first time without a sense of constraint. This opening up of the sound palette brought with it an entirely new harmonic language that had been hinted at, but not realized, on previous recordings. With a simple restriction of instrumentation, the guitar as the palette, Frost unlocked a certain verticality to his working methods that holds light to this day. Steel Wound is, by design, a singular record in Ben Frost's discography. It's a recording born of particular conditions, but also of particular interests. It was the first time Ben had set himself up with a situation where saturation, volume and density were all something that could be realized in a space and a time, not as a process of post-production. To have sound operating in space is a thing of true beauty and moreover it allows for a certain unpredictability that is central to new discoveries. Working with a Fender Twin, often with the reverb dialed in at maximum, he found a language of shimmer and saturation, of compression and collision, that set the stage for a prolonged interest in how sound performs and is perceived at volume. It also is the first time that many of the tonal and melodic inflections that have come to be recognized as his compositional language are on display. Steel Wound, in my opinion, is a map to the future for Ben. It is a portal, a chance for new understandings to emerge and also to take hold and it's these learnings that have guided Ben's work in the subsequent years. Steel Wound remains a pulsing beacon in an ocean of noise that has been flickering for two decades now."
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RM 4255CD
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"The field recordings on this album contain the common theme of water in different states: snow, ice, hail, streams, creeks, in the Puget Sound passing under a ferry boat, pouring from a leaking sea wall, in frozen ponds, as it turns a water wheel, rain in thunder storms, in a pool during winter swimming. These were recorded between 2017-2024. They were usually made quickly while out with my son, and later edited to preserve the sounds of our voices while obscuring the specific content of what was said. In contrast, when Daniel records, he has a predetermined place in mind, and sets off on whole day adventures to document through both photography and audio. Working together melds his high fidelity, pre-meditated recordings with my spur-of-the-moment low-fi recordings... When we decided to work together on Smelter, I gave him five recordings of my piano compositions which he treated and added his own elements to -- turning them into long drone formations. These were then combined with the various water-based field recordings we'd made individually. Making records this way creates an aural archive of place/time and environment -- in the same way a film photograph holds onto a vision in time: the single moment when light is suspended in microscopic halide crystals which can then be recreated and reinterpreted: a form of time travel, where the past is both fixed and also accessible in the present. With Smelter perhaps we have created a time capsule, an index in which to place our combined story telling for listeners to share." --Faith Coloccia
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RM 403-20LP
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A note from Lawrence English: "If I'm not mistaken, Ben Frost and I first talked about the ideas of what would become Steel Wound sometime in mid-2002. In the early '00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realized in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at another sound world which would become his focused in the summer of 2002 and into 2003. Locking himself away at Johanna's Beach, a remote southern vantage along the Great Ocean Road in Victoria, he was able to record for the first time without a sense of constraint. This opening up of the sound palette brought with it an entirely new harmonic language that had been hinted at, but not realized, on previous recordings. With a simple restriction of instrumentation, the guitar as the palette, Frost unlocked a certain verticality to his working methods that holds light to this day. Steel Wound is, by design, a singular record in Ben Frost's discography. It's a recording born of particular conditions, but also of particular interests. It was the first time Ben had set himself up with a situation where saturation, volume and density were all something that could be realized in a space and a time, not as a process of post-production. To have sound operating in space is a thing of true beauty and moreover it allows for a certain unpredictability that is central to new discoveries. Working with a Fender Twin, often with the reverb dialed in at maximum, he found a language of shimmer and saturation, of compression and collision, that set the stage for a prolonged interest in how sound performs and is perceived at volume. It also is the first time that many of the tonal and melodic inflections that have come to be recognized as his compositional language are on display. Steel Wound, in my opinion, is a map to the future for Ben. It is a portal, a chance for new understandings to emerge and also to take hold and it's these learnings that have guided Ben's work in the subsequent years. Steel Wound remains a pulsing beacon in an ocean of noise that has been flickering for two decades now."
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RM 4247CD
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Elemental View is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her "Long String Instrument" and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman's singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere. Elemental View invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. Fullman bows the instrument lengthwise with her fingertips while walking, playing multiple strings at once. As she walks, upper partial tones unfold at different rates, in proportion to differences in string length, imparting an undulating wave of continually shifting overtones. The notation for the "Long String Instrument" contains both temporal indications and spatial choreography, as specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length. Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman's work. To produce percussive sounds on the otherwise drone-based instrument, Fullman designed and fabricated the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which play three, six, or nine strings at once. Varying techniques with these tools produce either open ringing tones or closed dampened ones. With their laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman's composition. In the movements "Environmental Memory" and "Concentrated Merry-Go-Round," Fullman incorporates Travis Andrew's primary instrument, the guitar. Andy Meyerson and Fullman accompany the guitar in duo playing box bow and shoveler. For "Surface Narrative in Four Parts," Meyerson also applies his percussion mastery to the santur, a Persian hammered dulcimer. The santur's unique tuning is derived from the extended microtonal partials of the sequence played by Fullman on The Long String Instrument.
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RM 4207LP
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A Note from Aki Onda: "This album was recorded as a soundtrack for Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern at Spiral Hall, organized by Sound Live Tokyo, on November 3, 2015. It was probably one of our best performances. Before the performance, Ken explained to me the selected slides he uses and the ordering he employs, so that I would better understand the flow. Some slides are black-and-white and some color. For a given performance, Ken selects ten slides or so. However, he might play with just one slide for the entire show or change the order -- there was plenty of room to improvise. On my side, I also had a structure and the order of tapes, quite independent from Ken's visual. But I made the system easy to extend or shorten, duration-wise, in order to respond to Ken's ordering and mood. I dedicate this album to Flo Jacobs who passed away just recently. Flo was deeply involved in Ken's creative process; as he says: 'This is a mom-and-pop business.' From the first day of working together, she was always there with us and took care of all practical matters. Ken is a dreamer and thinks and works intuitively. But Flo -- an exceptionally beautiful woman in and out -- is rooted in the real world. Not just a pragmatist, however, Flo advises Ken on artistic decisions. Ken always asks to hear her thoughts, as I did as well. As film critic and their decades-long friend Amy Taubin once described it, 'Florence Jacobs is nothing less than a producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema.' What a perfect couple, and it was an extremely joyous journey with them!"
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RM 4261CD
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A note from Peter Knight: "Ŋurru Wäŋa traces notions of home, belonging, and displacement. In the two parts of the title track, Sunny Kim intones the words of Korean poet Yoon Dong Ju's poem, Another Home, in counterpoint to Daniel Wilfred's song, sung in the Wáglilak language. Ŋurru Wäŋa (pronounced Wooroo Wanga), translates as 'the scent of home', and as we travel we long for that fragrance, passing the bee, guku, making the bush honey while the crow circles calling overhead. This theme -- this search for a sense of belonging -- is at the heart of what drives Hand to Earth, a group of five people, who come together from different backgrounds, different birthplaces, and different musical approaches to share our songs, and by doing that to create something new. The six tracks on this album map our respective journeys into the now and express the connections that have developed within Hand to Earth over the years we have travelled and played together. We each have our own relationship to this place, its difficult history, its contended present, its clouded future. This music is perhaps a way of thinking through this, written in the scribble of electronics, in the sighs of the clarinet and trumpet, in the broad-brush strokes of the yidaki, and the snap of the bilma. The songs that sit at the heart of Ŋurru Wäŋa were recorded mid-tour on a day off in Melbourne. Daniel had a spontaneous urge to record songs from the song line of Djuwaḻpada who is an important figure in Wägilak dreaming. Djuwaḻpada walked through the land starting in Daniel's country, Nyilipidgi, in central Arnhem Land and ending at the coast at Lutenbuy singing the place and everything that lives there into existence. Daniel's song cycle traces the flight of the birds, the Mäḏawk and Wäk Wäk. It describes the seasons, and the Stringybark tree, Gaḏayka, that supplies the bark for painting, and the wood for the bilma (clapping sticks). With the exception of 'The Crow,' which was recorded in New York, these songs landed in single takes in one session recording just the voice, bilma, and yidaki with some synth drones and other materials. The rest of the sounds came later in separate iterative recording sessions, in which the settings for the songs were developed through spontaneous layering and rubbing back. This process reflected the approach we take to live performance but stretched across time, our voices calling to one another. Creating connections -- resonating, blurring, vibrating."
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RM 4240CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "Time is a strange and elusive companion. Listening to Alan Lamb's Primal Image/Beauty, the traces of time are deep, and forever deepening. Recorded in 1981 and 1983 respectively, and then revised and refined across the coming half decade, each of these pieces traces Lamb's personal history through materiality and harmony. 'Primal Image' was the first composition Alan Lamb completed. Recorded on the Faraway Wind Organ, a long stretch of abandoned telephone line located on his family's farm close by the Fitzgerald National Park in Western Australia, this piece resolved an interest in the sonification of wires which had started many decades before. Lamb recounts pressing his ears to a telephone pole as a child, encouraged by his nanny to 'hear the sound the world made.' 'Primal Image' is a work of intense dynamism, a climatic sonic environment within which a complexity of harmony, timbre and texture intermingle, inviting us to lean in. Similarly, 'Beauty' maintains this offer of harmonic complexity. Recorded across some 20 hours, the piece is a condensation of vibration, a folding of time and listenership that speaks both to Lamb's passion for his instrument and the instrument itself as a source of unbounded, and evolving sonics. Lamb's music is one of both attentiveness and patience. It is a music that comes forth from the world, but is simultaneously hidden from most of us. It is a music of the moment, but also one of recurrence as vibrations travel along the material that is the metal wires. It is also a music which, by its very nature, is eternally in the present. Alan Lamb, as a conduit to this material music invites us to share his listening in these moments. He asks us to cast our ears outward into the world and in doing so unlock an interiority of the mind which remains forever compelling and more so fascinating."
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RM 4257CD
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A note from Andy and Klaus: "After playing together for years, our tide was turning. What began as a happy rhythm of show dates in Berlin, from cozy trios in Klaus' home studio to ten-piece ensembles at Ausland, was now ebbing away thanks to Andy's move to the US. Whenever an accustomed pattern shifts it can take time to readjust, to find the gravity that will pull to shape an orbit again. What had been working well between us remained on both our minds for a few years after: the tension between complimentary forms and reflexes -- from deep bass to airy hiss, from swift improvised gesture to slowly developing layer -- these still animated our imaginations. But they had been honed in live playing, a situation now vanishingly rare. Then Klaus simply suggested we work toward a record, in gradual steps, no pressure, by trading recordings and responding to them in turn. This would be a conversation in concrete sound objects as opposed to the intuitive communication and reciprocal flow of on-stage collaboration. A different listening, becoming a different sounding. Again we found seemingly opposing tendencies resonating to surprising effect in the long-distance, long-term recording and exchange process. A new productive tension was added to our process: between the excitatory becoming of live playing and the carving directly in fixed blocks of sound that felt more like writing than performing. We took our time, savored the eddies and deluges, gaps and jumps of building a work together asynchronously. Around the time we were working on the last track of this collection, Andy pored over Stefan Helreich's A Book of Waves, a brilliant exploration of the ocean wave in its many forms and meanings across science and cultures, from histories to technologies to ecologies. In both the title's turn of phrase and the depths it plumbed, we felt we had found an echo of our cyclical endeavor, circumnavigating an idea, a shadow of which we can finally share in the shape of this record."
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RM 4189CD
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A note from Lawrence English: "In 2016, I invited Norman Westberg to Australia for his first solo tour. He'd been in Australia a few years before that, touring The Seer with Swans, and it was during this tour that I'd had the fortune to meet him. Since that time Norman and I have worked on a number of projects together. He very kindly played some of the central themes on my Cruel Optimism album and I had the pleasure to produced his After Vacation album (RM 481LP). [In 2024] Norman shared a multichannel live recording with me from a tour where he was supporting Swans. The recording instantly transported me back to the first time I heard Norman perform. Whilst many people know his more dynamic and tectonic playing associated with his band practice, Norman's solo work is far more fluid. Often, when I hear him live, I imagine a vast ocean moving with a shimmer, as wind and light play across its surface. Norman's concerts are expeditions into just such a place. They are porous, but connected, a kind of living organism that is him, his instrument and his effects. He finds ways to create moments of connection which are at times surprising, and at others slippery, but always rewarding. There's a deeply performative way to his approach of live performance. There's a core of the song that guides the way, a map of sound, but there's also an extended sense of curiosity that allows unexpected discoveries to emerge. Milan, which I had the pleasure to work on for Norman, captures this sense perfectly. It is a record that exists in its own right, but is of course tethered to his other works. It's an expansive lens which reveals new perspectives on familiar vistas."
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RM 4249CD
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From Siavash: "What remains after mutilating and reassembling an essential historical recording? How is it connected to a particular event in a grotesque and cyclical novella riddled with medical procedures of an aesthetic and deforming nature? Malakoot -- this spiral, centers on a decision made one afternoon by a character. On a similar afternoon, full of anxiety, pressed by an unknowable presence in this city, I decided that the soundscape for such an inspiring work of fiction was a mutilated one; things collapsing in on themselves, self-decapitating, full of cuts and sutures. The material for all the surgeries was two of the earliest solo piano recordings in Iran's history, played by an incredibly ordinary but, at the same time, fascinatingly suspicious character. The procedures were performed both on the snippets and cuts of the recordings themselves and with the help of various digital methods, on synthesized resurrections made from their transcriptions."
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RM 4195CD
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"Recorded in 1996, Merzbow's The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is one of a series of unique editions from his vast catalogue that reveals a side of his practice often under represented. During the late 1980s and into the 1990s, Masami Akita was sometimes working on film and theatre music. In this space he created a series of recordings that capture the full scope of his sound worlds. Given the nature of these settings, his compositional approaches were varied, seeking to create both intensely crushing walls of sound and more spatial, and at times rhythmic, pieces that plot out an approach to sound making which atomizes his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole. The Prosperity Of Vice, The Misfortune Of Virtue is the soundtrack to the theatre piece "Akutoku no Sakae/Bitoku no Fuko" by Romantica. Based on Marquis de Sades's Historie de Juliette ou les Prosperités du vice and Les Infortunes de la vertu, this recording was originally released with limited distribution and remains one of the lesser available Merzbow recordings. This edition is completely remastered and contains an additional cut from those original sessions. Cheers." --Lawrence English
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RM 4245LP
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From Lawrence English: "I like to think that sound haunts architecture. It's one of the truly magical interactions afforded by sound's immateriality. It's also something that has captivated us from the earliest times. It's not difficult to imagine the exhilaration of our early ancestors calling to one another in the dark cathedral like caves which held wonder, and security, for them. Today the ways in which sound occupies space, the so-called liquid architecture, holds just as much wonder, albeit one that is often dominated by functionality and form. Beyond those constraints however, how sound operates in the material world is something that exists at the fundament of our understanding of music, and moreover within the broad church we know as the canon of sound arts. Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds is a record born out of these relations. In a direct sense, the record is the product of an invitation by curator Jonathan Wilson to create a sound environment, reflecting on the Naala Badu building at the Art Gallery Of NSW. The building's name, which translates from the Gadigal language to 'seeing water', was opened in 2022 and this piece was offered as an atmospheric tint to visitors walking through the building throughout the year following its opening. It's also a record born out of a recognition for the porousness sound affords, especially as a device for collaborative endeavor. This composition is one born out of generosity and acoustic solidarity. Even The Horizon Knows Its Bounds is comprised not just of my sounds, but also that of an incredible array of artists who have also operated in the orbit of the Art Gallery Of NSW. The players include Amby Downs, Chris Abrahams, Chuck Johnson, Claire Rousay, Dean Hurley, Jim O'Rourke, JW Paton, Madeleine Cocolas, Norman Westberg, Stephen Vitiello, and Vanessa Tomlinson. The piece was constructed around two long form sound prompts that each musician responded and con-tributed to. These materials there when digested into the final piece you hear. The work could not exist without the substantial offerings these artists made, and I am immensely grateful to each of them."
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RM 4248CD
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From Theresa Wong: "The inspiration for these pieces comes from the Chinese folklore of Guanyin, a deity whose name translates to 'the one who perceives all the sounds, or cries, of the world.' Also known as Guanshiyin 觀世音, she is the embodiment of infinite compassion. I grew up knowing of Guanyin as a female deity, but recently discovered that she had transformed through the centuries from the male Hindu bodhisattva, Avalokiteśvara. I instantly found an affinity for this gender-fluid figure, who was said to have attained enlightenment through meditation on sound. These pieces offer an imaginary story of a humble seafarer (Guanyin is a popular matron saint of fisherfolk), who returns from the tumult of the sea one evening at dusk. They journey into a seaside cave in a cliff nearby to find solace in prayer to Guanyin. Deep within the chambers of this glistening cave, an encounter with the mystical deity brings comfort and healing while the churning of life outside persists. Perhaps it was out of a premonition that I created these pieces, which became one of the few things I could listen to during an intensely challenging year of my life. All the music is played on solo and multi-tracked acoustic cello. Many pieces are created around the repetition of simple phrases, like a sonic mantra repeated to focus and ease the mind. The cello is tuned down to a fundamental of A=216 Hertz, and the harmonies are composed in just intonation, a tuning system based on the natural overtones of resonating frequencies. In tracks 5 and 7, the lower strings are detuned extremely to a precise tension, creating a drone that contains both noise and specific overtones. In this manner of playing, I often have the feeling of 'splitting the sound open' into a composite of rhythm, harmony, melody and noise through playing beating frequencies, fingered overtones, implicit melodies emerging out of undulating harmonics, and the pure growl of the slackened string. I hope the listener will find rest and repose -- in this music, amidst the ever-compounding churning of our present world. My deepest thanks to Lawrence English, Janet Oh, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and the Emily Harvey Foundation for supporting this work."
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RM 4238CD
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I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea is the first collaboration of Lea Bertucci and Olivia Block. This collaboration was set into slow motion some years ago, in 2017, when Lea and Olivia connected through an interview facilitated by writer Steve Smith. In 2022, the artists finally had a chance to collaborate, performing an improvised set at Pioneer Works in New York City. Since then, the New York based Bertucci and Chicago based Block remotely built out ideas stemming from their live performance, passing sounds back and forth, until I Know the Number of the Sand and the Measure of the Sea was forged into existence. The title is a famous utterance of the Oracle of Delphi, a cult of female priestesses who would inhale the poisonous vapors of nearby volcanic vents to induce mystical visions for their seekers, often changing the course of civilization. Getting high from the earth. That is what this album hopes to achieve for our listeners. This collaboration sees Block playing synthesizer and tape, and Bertucci using her own voice processed through reel-to-reel tape, as well as microcassette collage of field recordings. Recorded and mixed by Olivia Block and Lea Bertucci. Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space Special.
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RM 4206CD
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A note from Alvin: "It has taken me over 50 years to write these words. Since my initial successes in the 1970s, many have urged me to 'release' unpublished works from the same period, pieces that featured the VCS3 synths or the amazing Serge (which I regret not having used enough) or pieces featuring soundscapes from my classic environmental composition style. For reasons of persistence and empathy, Lawrence English at Room 40 was the most persuasive; now, nearly three years after our agreement, a new publication composed with materials from that inceptive period has come to fruition. While I'm condemned to live evermore in the past, it is the future where I continue to put my remaining creative energies. Nonetheless, in the creation of these two 'new' works I did all I could to avoid sentimentalism or get buried by my own history and the musical riches of the late 20th Century. Relistening to these forgotten fragments of old tapes included inspiring and useful surprises."
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RM 4186CD
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From Lawrence English: "There's two things I can tell you about Ueno Takashi, without reservation. The first is he knows the best coffee spots in Tokyo. I am the happy recipient of this knowledge. The second thing I can tell you is that he is someone for whom the guitar is a platform of exquisite promise. Ueno Takashi, who many of you would recognize as one half of the legendary unit Tenniscoats, is also responsible for an impressive series of solo guitar recordings which stake out a claim that tests the fringes of extended technique, harmonic relation and post-blues modes. His approach is simple; the guitar must lead and through allowing this he has unlocked a potential in the instrument that is entirely personal and profound. Arms, which collects together a series of recordings made during the past few years, is by far one of his most melodic and structured recordings. Here, using only the simplest of tools and techniques he crafts a suite of pieces that orbit one another with a gentle gravity. His playing is, at times, intensely delicate and at other moments more free and playful, but never careless. Ueno's way with the guitar is one attuned to 'what is needed,' and he seemingly shuns excess. While some might call this approach minimalist, his unique sense of time opens another reading which extends beyond those traditions. Arms is a complete universe within which we are invited to be. Ueno is your host, and guide here. Enjoy."
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RM 4237LP
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From Lawrence English: "It's hard to imagine that this year [2024] William Gibson's Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural specters he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was an era of promise, and imagination, of speculative hope and down-right uneasiness in equal parts. In 1994, as the books 10th anniversary was on hand, New York duo Black Rain were commissioned to make a soundtrack to the audio book version of Neuromancer. Read by the author himself, this document, originally publish on a series of cassettes, would go on to be recognized as a unique glimpse into Gibson's sensing of the characters and places that make up the Neuromancer zone. Following a period of work as an expanded collective, Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa, the two core members of Black Rain, decided to strip back their unit largely to a duet format. Their focus became more engaged around studio practice, and it was this refocusing that was ultimately serendipitous. As they started work on Neuromancer a number of new approaches and techniques emerged and with them came a new sonic language the pair had only imagined previously. The audio book was a huge success and the soundtrack too was recognized for its brooding and post-industrial electronic grind. Since that time however, the recordings have largely remained in obscurity. While a couple of the pieces have surfaced in various editions including an excellent compilation by Blackest Ever Black, the entire suite of pieces has remained unpublished until this moment. Working off the original master tapes, this edition (like the book), folds and morphs over itself in an episodic stratification. Pieces emerge, like strange architecture, from one another forming a sonic environment that feels almost tangible. I spent many weeks working on these tapes and also on the connections between the pieces. In collaboration with Stuart, our joint aim was to create a version of the soundtrack that speaks to the very atmosphere of the text itself. It's a delight to share this collection of work for the first time."
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RM 4239CD
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Originally recorded and edited between 1983-1997. From Lawrence English: "I'll take a guess and say I first heard Alan Lamb's Night Passage in 1999. Released by Darrin Verhagen's seminal Dorobo label, the record birthed an approach that wove together themes of materialism, field recording and a reimagining of the abandoned utilities of human habitation. Night Passage is one of those recordings I feel has always been with me, it's that foundational. It completely re-shaped the way a generation of audio explorers thought about how sound and music might exist in the orbit of each other. On my first listen I'm confident I was unable to place exactly how these sounds were created, even knowing the source materials, but one thing I can say without reservation is their resonance has lingered with me these past couple of decades. The sound world Lamb captured, waves rippling along wires, was exquisitely simple, and effortlessly deep. Here, right before us, was a sound world locked within materials we pass by everyday. In tapping into these materials, Alan Lamb unlocked a parallel dimension of sense, one guided by interactions of objects and the environments surrounding them. An inorganic, living music the likes of which had not been readily available until the publication of his recordings. Alan Lamb's work with long wires, undertaken in situ across Western Australia, are quite frankly the stuff of legend. To revisit them in such a focused way almost four decades on from their initial recording I'm struck by how other worldly and evocative they continue to be. It's with great pleasure we share Night Passage, completely remastered under the guidance of Alan himself."
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