Room 40 Vinyl, CD & Tape 23 Items

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.

From Lawrence English
I’m not really sure when I first heard Beatriz Ferreyra’s music. My best guess would be in the early to mid
2000s when I was working alongside the curatorial team at Liquid Architecture. Given the focus of the
festival at that time, GRM and musique concrète more generally was very much a point of focus.
That said, it wasn’t until this decade that her work was sharply in focus for me (and I am guessing a great
many others). In 2017, I had the great pleasure to meet Beatriz in Braga, where we both were performing as
part of the excellent Semibreve Festival. Subsequent to that I invited her to perform in Australia and we also
had the pleasure to send time together in Rio during the Novas Frequencies Festival. Across these meetings, I
have come to realise the incredible focus, generosity and vision that Beatriz has maintained across her life in
sound.
Beatriz Ferreyra is one of only a handful of female concrète composers who were active across the second
half of the 20th century through to today. Her work, which is still very much an active investigation, is
simultaneously complex and elegantly simple. Often drawing upon singular object of focus, Ferreyra’s use
of tape and other forms of manipulation radically reconfigure her chosen sound materials, opening them
outward.
UFO Forest + collects together works from both her practices in tape based music and also computer based
works. The pieces featured here epitomise her prowess in create dynamically rich sound works that are
effortless in their sense of otherworldliness. Beatriz Ferreyra has created a sonic terrain all her own, and here
is lies the proof.

French electroacoustic veteran Lionel Marchetti returns to Room 40 with a special release composed in Australia and recorded telematically between three separate locations..

For his second Room 40 release following 2018's "The Last Days of Reality", Marchetti again collaborates with Aussie chamber ensemble Decibel. He worked out what he wanted to do in 2019 while visiting Australia, and devised a way of composing the piece that avoided a traditional score, instead working with conversation, listening and experimentation. After rehearsing with different instrumentation and imaginatively placed speakers, he adapted what he calls the 'partition concrète’ using his various studio techniques. But when he was due to record the final version of the piece, he was hit with a problem - Australia was in pandemic lockdown, and Marchetti was in France. So a special recording method was developed; some musicians were based in Melbourne, some in Perth, and Marchetti joined from Europe, everyone was connected via conferencing software that was adjusted to improve sound quality and latency.

Marchetti worked into the final recordings in his studio, adding the finishing touches and making sure it sounded as close to his original vision as possible. The final version clocks in at almost 37 minutes in length, and is as impressive as you'd hope from the story of its construction. Decibel's work from two different sides of Australia is at the center of the recording, but it's Marchetti's smart, restrained processes that have us coming back for more. If you're not completely concentrating you might miss it, but the small glitches and spacial effects that Marchetti provides gives the orchestral elements a distant charm. It's not completely acoustic music, and it's bending the possibilities of the sonic presentation just as Marchetti did with the recording process itself. He finishes off the album with a shorter two-minute composition recorded for Decibel's "2 Minutes from Home" project, a hand-scored piece that he wrote on crumpled paper using ink and white-out. Each member of the orchestra recorded their part separately in their own home, and the result is beguiling - otherworldly and tonally exhilarating without being overwhelming or overstaying its welcome.

Absorbingly paced and inventive electro-acoustic/concrète chicanery by Melbourne’s clarinet improvisor Aviva Endean, giving the ear something to chase with her micro-to-macroscopic proprioceptions.

Dynamically recorded across multiple spaces and hugely variegated in texture and tone, ‘Moths & Stars’ is titled for the artist’s attempt to zoom the ear’s eye between natural intimacy and the sidereal. Fucking with fundamentals of time and space she uses canny microphone placement and feedback systems to poetically mess with the listener’s sense of place and atmospheric pressure in a way crossing lines with the sound arts of Leila Bordreuil and Teresa Winter. In the process Aviva evinces a an underlying narrative by meshing and wrapping perceptions of the abstract with more palpably human vocal tones in a very instinctive and sensually haptic manner where it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the surprising folds and discreet dimensions she delves into.

“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.”

Subtly hallucinatory, Burroughsian field recording collage by CM Von Hauswolff and Eric Pauser’s Phauss, stitching abstract meta-narratives from the ether of mid ‘80s Switzerland, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, India, Thailand, The Philippines and USA, Morocco, Algeria, Niger, Benin and Nigeria, with assistance of engineer Zbigniew Karkowski. Reissued for first time in 35 years.

“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. It is an unsteadying journey where even the sounds of the everyday feel alien and repositioned. The sounds call to us prompting a sensing that is at its heart utterly fascinated, and fascinating.

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.”

Formed in the early 1980s,​ Phauss is Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Erik Pauser.

"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.

Like their travels, their ways of approaching the work they made was similarly wide-reaching and innately curious. They worked with often quite strict conceptual structures within which they were able to unlock entirely new ways of considering composition and also the material production of sound, through performance, through iteration and through considered experimentation which allowed for failure, just as much as success.

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."

Digitalis's Brad E. Rose (aka The North Sea, Charlatan etc) debuts on Room40 with his most rapturous collection yet - six tracks of bewitching, blissed-out synth drones that bear up to comparison with AFX's "Selected Ambient Works II", Steve Roach's "Structures From Silence" or Brian Eno's "Apollo".

Tulsa, Oklahoma-based Brad E. Rose has been quietly churning out music for decades at this point, working under so many different monikers and in so many different outfits it's been hard to keep track. Apart from heading up the beloved but now defunct Digitalis imprint, Rose also runs The Jewel Garden, where they've been releasing mostly their own private press-style material since 2020. "Annular Silhouettes" is Rose's first non-Jewel Garden solo drop in ages, and sounds like a subtle summation of their recent loose musical threads. Written in "the depths of 2020", the material is Rose's attempt at creating a love-letter to the place where they grew up, created in the house where their grandparents lived for over two decades, only a few minutes walk from their childhood home.

Tulsa is a complicated city with often uneasy politics, but Rose's view is holistic, empathic and sensitive - their memorial is melancholy and sometimes even cold, but never lacking hope. The album is split into six separate pieces that play together as a whole, all made in the same style with the same instrumentation. It's more of a continuing thought than an assembly of different tracks; Rose acknowledges that they enjoy the feeling of not completely knowing what they're doing, and letting their subconscious thoughts guide the creative process. Certainly that gives the music a level of spiritual kinship with Aphex's seminal "Selected Ambient Works II", which was allegedly partly written in lucid dream states. Rose's compositions are nowhere near as dark, but strike a similarly ambivalent mood that feels nostalgic, but not completely rooted in the past.

"Annular Silhouettes" sounds like an elongated take on Brian Eno's "Apollo" classic 'An Ending (Ascent)', and Rose uses the soft-focus synth tones to represent the sun rising and setting across Tulsa's wide, flat plains. It's hard not to be moved.

Aussie trumpet player, composer and sound artist Peter Knight dissolves jazz and classical elements into a low-light requiem on "Shadow Phase", harmonizing well with music from Arve Henriksen, Leila Abdul-Rauf and Angelo Badalamenti.

Described by Knight as a "meditation on the nature of connection", "Shadow Phase" was created during Australia's strict 2020 lockdown, when residents of Melbourne/Narrm were restricted to a small 5km zone. During this period, Knight connected with his friend and teacher Ania Walwicz, who passed away later that year. This provoked the composer to consider Walwicz's process, which was created in dream states, attempting to find resonant words from the subconscious. It's interesting then that "Shadow Phase" is an instrumental album, relying on trumpet, synthesizer, harmonium and Revox reel-to-reel sounds to convey the mood.

Knight's trumpet parts are most impressive, and his loops - distorted with pedals and plugin chains, and saturated by 1/4" tape - form illusory clouds of lilting melancholy. Its an album that fits neatly on Room40, alongside evocative cinematic music from Rafael Anton Irisarri and dreamworld experimentation from Madeleine Cocolas.

»Follower« is Abrahams’ 6th album for Room 40 and 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 colourful juxtapositions, rich orchestration and organically open forms.

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 favour 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.

A gossamer collection of tranquillized and dissociated material from Georgian artist Natalie Beridze (fka Tba), curling her distinctive FX-fukt vocals like incense smoke around faded pads and processed field recordings. Riyl Tujiko Noriko, Hiroshi Yoshimura. Sometimes it’s the tracks that don’t end up on “major” releases that end up floating to the surface. That’s definitely the case with “Of Which One Knows”, a set of demos recorded by Beridze between 2007 and 2021. She’s put out plenty of music in that time period, including three startling fulllengths on Monika Enterprise, but these pieces here occupy a different creative space, forgoing the itchy industrial atmospheres of last year’s “Mapping Debris” and the galvanized dream pop of its predecessor in favor of dialed-down soundscapes and loose-limbed vocal experiments. Heady and deeply personal, these tracks poke into Beridze’s gooey core, inspired by memories of rummaging thru her dad’s studio: the smell of books and glue, the feeling of an old armchair, the outline of a flickering desk lamp. Percussion is minimal throughout - a beat helps introduce opening track ‘Ash Wednesday’, but it’s simply a muffled thump that helps accent Beridze’s harmonically complex vocal. Words can just about be extracted from the verses, but syllables are extended and elongated, melodies are bent into disquieting shapes, and echoes are molded into reverberating, neuron-teasing loops. None of this material is experimental for the sake of being weird, Beridze manages to shape a mood that’s coherent and challenging, but never walled off. On ‘Drift’, cinematic synths and strings heave beneath swirling vocal chops that never descend into darkness or cliche. Beridze instead uses her processing skills and compositional expertise to inspire mystery and wonder. The most obvious comparison - on tracks like ‘Door Part II’ or muted piano-led closer ‘Sadness’ - might actually be to Scandinavian jazz-electronic sounds, the sort of crossover experiments that have emerged from labels like Smalltown Supersound and Rune Grammofon over the years. Beridze treats her instruments and compositions with care, but her music’s never precious, it’s rigorous and poetic, and endearingly reflective.

Lawrence English teams up with Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart once again for another voyage into ambient music’s punishing underworld. It’s their gloomiest slab to date - unfurling nightmarish Lynchian drones and seismic, overdriven rumbles that sound like a Thomas Köner and Wolf Eyes soundtrack to Dante’s Inferno. If the gaseous, clouded noise of ‘Material Interstices’ sounds as if it could be snatched from one of David Lynch’s most unsettling dream sequences, we have to assume that’s completely intentional. The inspiration for the album came from two of English’s recurring dreams, one of which had recently re-emerged. When English chatted to Stewart about it - a labyrinthine subterranean horrorscape of concrete and iron underneath his house - Stewart related to having unusual sleep patterns. So the music emerged from this midnight realm, and illustrates English’s Tetsuo-inspired industrial fantasy in grim detail. Those expecting the beauty and charm of English’s lighter material might be in for a shock. This is vantablack level darkness, inspired by 1980s industrial tape music, blurry noise and the darkest of dark ambient records. Think the bleakest end of Dean Hurley, Maurizio Bianchi, Lustmord or The Haxan Cloak, but assembled to trigger near hypnagogic states. There’s an intentionality about “Material Interstices” that feels knotted to its nocturnal inspiration - English and Stewart simultaneously invoke nostalgia, dread and wonder, recalling industrial music’s rich legacy but suggesting its future might not be entirely written just yet.

Wickedly crude but skilful no-input mixing board business from a boss of that discipline, Toshimaru Nakamura

‘Culvert - No Input Mixing Board 10’ is the umpteenth exposition of Nakamura’s improvised and eternally inventive practice since he switched to this style from guitar noise with 2000’s self-explanatory ‘No-Input Mixing Board’ CD. Its 8 parts see him reflect on the hidden waterways that underline his home region around west Tokyo, generating discrete burbling streams of mulched feedback that metaphorically resemble the culverted streams that nobody sees underfoot, yet necessarily course with energy, as in many built environments. In his home region these hidden streams are often topped with artificial brooks that overlay their route like a “double decker river.”

While sitting on a bench beside one of the artificial brooks, Nakamura was prompted to make music that reflects these secret veins. Each of the eight parts gushes with an allegorical brownian motion apt for the concept, and also recalling K2’s torrential forms of junk metal cut-up, but also perhaps implicitly speaking to the threat of rising sea levels which would surely seep up from the Pacific thru these coastal waterways with a destructive attrition akin to this music.

Array expresses the experience of a remote Antarctic research station through the convergence of sound, site and performance. The result is an immersive and affective experience of the spaces, protocols and conditions comprising the bracing polar environment. Array is a companion piece to Polar Force, a performance-installation work by Philip Samartzis and Eugene Ughetti, presented by Speak Percussion.

Array features recordings of radar and scientific instrumentation used for upper atmospheric research and terrestrial communication. These sounds reveal the sophisticated technology and architecture used and heard within the Australian Antarctic Territory. Many of the recordings focus on the way the built environment is transformed through stress and fatigue caused by extreme climate and weather events including freezing temperatures and high velocity winds.

Together with the field recordings are layers of live performance using custom built instrumentation to produce a unique series of textures, rhythmic cycles, resonances and timbral phenomena. The application of tension and pressure upon the assorted instruments recalls the distressed state of highly specialised infrastructure found within the perimeters of a research station.

A polar research station comprises many types and volumes of prefabricated space. In dialogue with this are the unique spaces used to record the instrumental performance. By merging different spaces Array brings into focus various industrial resonances, spatial characteristics, timbres of metal and concrete, and sonic artefacts produced by hard and permeable materials and surfaces.

In three parts, Array presents Antarctica as a liminal space oscillating between representation and abstraction to challenge often repeated tropes. The intent is to blur the relationship between the recorded and performed to produce a hyper-realistic encounter of the powerful forces that operate at the margins of our planet. One hears the precariousness of a remote research station contorted by unrelenting stress, compressed air forced through waterborne fipples and the volatility of weather events.

Life on remote research stations is progressively resembling the broader contemporary experience, in which strict protocols are used to govern and preserve life. The resilient communities who live and work in these places have learnt how to co-exist with an increasingly hostile environment, along with its unknowns and necessity for hyper-vigilance. Rather than consider it as a place on the edge of elsewhere, Antarctica and its assemblage of durable, super modern colonies provides an archetype for an uncertain future in anticipation of the volatility that awaits.

Iranian composer Siavash Amini creates an ode to night; literal and metaphorical. Using textural electronics and post classical arrangements, he asks us to dwell in the ‘dark’ of sound and forgo the sensory certainty of light.

"When I was 22 I managed to acquire Techno Animal's Demonoid 12" at a local record store, Rocking Horse Records. I can still recall the intensities of sound that marked the first moments of listening to it. The sense of bass as a tactile surface, that rolling groove and the howling sine waves and dub sirens that scorched with a type of sonic burning sensation that to this day makes my hairs stand on end. A year later I heard Ice's Bad Blood, from there I discovered The Bug through a release on Wordsound, a band called God, a sound movement called isolationism and much more; all of these projects had one nexus point - Kevin Richard Martin.

A companion album to 2022's restrained 'Spectral', 'Bodies' blurs the boundaries between bodies of water and human bodies, provoking presence by emulating wave cycles and heartbeats with deft electronic rhythms and obscuring vocals and field recordings with tense synths.

Cocolas headed to the Australian coast and explored the creeks and waterfalls of Far North Queensland to source environmental sounds for 'Bodies'. And although these recordings are mostly hidden, they provide the album with its backbone, over which Cocolas lavishes concealed chorals and orchestral waves of powerful, distorted electronics. There's a palpable tension to the material; we can hear Cocolas' cries on opening track 'Bodies I', but it's buried beneath saturated, cinematic washes that might be strings, and might be synths.

She wanted her collages to evoke memories and emotions rather than represent something more tangible, and handles this by drifting from digital to analog, electronic to acoustic, concealing everything almost beyond recognition. On 'A Current Runs Through', Cocolas turns her instrumentation into crashing, cinematic drones that emerge like bubbling waters, and on 'Exhale' it sounds as if she's sunk beneath the surface, her ensemble drowned by filtered bubbles and ominous groans.

Recorded back when Celer was a duo of Will Long and Danielle Baquet, 'Cursory Asperses' is made from cassette snapshots of water sounds, that Celer manipulate into haunting, slow-moving pads.

'Cursory Asperses' was originally released on limited-edition CDR back in 2008, but listening back now it's hard to place. Long and Baquet used freeware audio processing apps to process their sounds, transforming a series of tape recordings of streams, lakes and pools into achingly beautiful drones that change almost imperceptible, mimicking the source material but not drawing from it aesthetically.

This isn't an album of waterlogged soundscapes, it's a suite of electronic compositions that have been channeled by the movement of water itself. And while it'll sound familiar to any Celer or Will Long devotees, it's feathery, opiating material that'll lull you into a hypnagogic state quicker than you can say Irv Teibel.

Prolific Georgian sound artist and composer Natalie Beridze (fka TBA) returns to Room40 with an elegant set
of uncanny vocal treatments, smudging artificial cries into endless, frozen echoes.
When we last spotted her on Room40, Beridze collected up 14 years of unreleased tracks on the brilliant
‘Of Which One Knows’, showing her understanding of ambient chamber music. ‘If We Could Hear’ is a more
recent suite that centers its energy around vocals, but those voices are probably not real. And for an artist
so notorious for her command of song forms, it’s a bold move to take such a different approach. Honestly, it’s
hard to tell that the vocals are synthesized, even; the first time we played ‘If We Could Hear’, we would have
sworn it was Beridze singing. But focus a little closer and the cracks appear. On the extended ‘Who hears it
all’, the sound artist rubberizes a virtual choir, prodding it and pulling it to accentuate the uncanny qualities.
Freezing phrases in time and granulating them so they become gusty pads, Beridze provides an unstable,
anxious ambience, and when she disrupts the relative calm with tape-saturated screams, it’s genuinely
unnerving.
‘Who wakes the dawn’ is a little less bone-rattling, but no less enigmatic. This time an operatic solo voice
leads, sometimes sounding painfully human, before Beridze uses discreet tells to remind us we’re listening
to a synthesizer. Each track uses a similar sonic palette but appears to approach a different musical form:
‘Who whispers to hysteria’ sounds like AI church music, and ‘Who dwells in possibility’ is a Michael Nyman
opera conducted by robots. It’s disquieting material that provides us with plenty of food for thought. Certainly
worth a look if you’ve exhausted Lee Gamble’s ‘Models’ already.

A note from Lawrence English:

Occasionally ideas present themselves in ways that no one can expect. This recording from Australia’s Eugene Carchesio and the UK’s Adam Betts is one such unexpected presentation.

A couple of years ago, Eugene passed me a collection of recordings that he explained were in the orbit of his now legendary Circle Music series. The recordings, in Eugene’s particular manner, maintained an intensely rhythmic quality rooted in a deep and unwavering sense of minimalism. Eugene has a way of making a tiny cosmos from just the barest of materials. He wondered though, about mixing it up and adding something unexpected to the pieces, and asked about some drums being added.

At almost exactly the same moment, I had been reminded of the amazing work of Adam Betts, who I have been fortunate to be in the orbit of for more than a decade now. We’d first met at Bad Bonne, sharing a bill, and then crossed paths most recently in Tbilisi where he was performing with Squarepusher.

The reason Adam was on my radar though was entirely unrelated to music and it was down to the fact that he had just participated in a welsh toss competition and done quite brilliantly. Somehow, watching Adam lug those weights made me think he’d be the perfect candidate to work with Eugene on this project. To my delight, he agreed.

What results here is a melding of two incredible musical spirits, each of whom have an unerring sense of restrained energy and rhythmic ferocity. It is a parallel reading of how minimal motion can create giant affective waves of energy. It’s also a record of careful listening and generous exploration.

It’s not everyday music can emerge from such curious orbits of thought, but when it does it is a cause for celebration. With that in heart I am so pleased to share this incredible edition with you.

Siavash Amini’s new album is an attempt to wrestle with Safi-al-din Urmavi’s theory of tuning, rhythm and
maqam, using a 17-tone scale as the basis for three long-form experiments.
There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled on intonation and temperament lately, but it’s a subject that’s often
revisionist, and can willfully ignore the musical development of countries and cultures who have long
embraced tonality outside equal temperament. Amini has been fascinated with Urmavi’s 17-tone scale since
he was at high school but has only tentatively approached it before in his compositions. While writing his
last album ‘A Trail of Laughters’, this scaling was at the front of his mind, but he felt limited by conventional
instruments and compositional techniques. ‘Eidolon’ then is his attempt to wrestle with the concept outside
of its history, using Urmavi’s scale as a starting point rather than an end point.
‘Ortus’ is initially hard to place, erupting in hissing noise before it reveals its hand. Shimmering, metallic
drones eventually make themselves known, but they sound like traces, hidden beneath frothy waterfall sounds
and static. But when the noise subsides, Amini builds a delicate lace of drones, using Urmavi’s technique to
guide him to the sublime. ‘Instantia’ is even more forthright, a dense mesh of notes that revels in its powerful
thrum, occasionally pricked by field recordings and subsonic rumbles.
The 15-minute final track has us most enthralled; ‘Relictio’ is the most unassuming track of the three, and its
tonality isn’t even completely obvious at first. The squealing horn sounds might be a malfunctioning machine,
and the vibrating, resonant tones might be feedback or rugged ambience, it’s hard to tell at first. In the final
third, Amini strips away the gristle, leaving glistening waves that serenade us into silence.
Essential listening if you’re into anything from Kali Malone and Ellen Arkbro to Duane Pitre, or Mattias
Petersson’s excellent ‘Triangular Progressions’

More recently best regarded as soundtrack composer, Ben Frost here follows work with
interdisciplinary sound artist Francesco Fabris on the ‘Dark’ OST with a plunge into purest rock
music, as in the actual sound of molten material rising to the surface and solidifying. With an
impressionistic-artistic license also found in work by Chris Watson, Jana Winderen or Giuseppe
Ielasi, the duo uncompromisingly revel in the sounds of nature’s biting point, using various
production methods to make audible the sound of the earth beneath our feet in the process of
creation, on location at Fagradalsfjall, Reykjanes Peninsula Iceland.
Here’s label boss Lawrence English on the subject
“As stable as we might choose to think it is, this planet is anything but that. A paper thin crust,
the zone in which we find ourselves, and mostly concern ourselves with, exists as a modest veil
cloaking a dynamic seismic turbulence that is as powerful as it is unknowable. There are moments
though where ruptures occur. The pressure from within carves its way to, and through, the
surface of the planet simultaneously delivering destruction and virgin landscapes, as primordial
as any we might care to imagine. It is here, in these places, where we can literally see the living
planet, that geologic time is condensed and world building is made visible, and audible to us, in an
unrestrained and provocative detail.
These volcanic ruptures, such as those captured on Vakning by Francesco Fabris and Ben Frost,
speak to the very living geology of Earth. These recordings, captured at close range, exist at a
nexus where liquid rock becomes solid. They capture moments of transformation, of obliteration
and of creation, often all at once. These are recordings of a living, material planet, dynamic and
unrestrained.”