TUJIKO NORIKO AND U

Hi Folks

awesome news, the new Tujiko Noriko album is all wrapped up and off at the factory! It sounds quite simple 'magic' (as noriko described it!) - a curious mix of floating songform, melodic tremors and sweeping tidal waves of altered reality.

here's a little blurb from the press release!

Tujiko Noriko join with collaborators Lawrence English and John Chantler for 'U', a record of orbiting themes, esoteric lyrical wordplays and warm analog-infused song-forms. Following on from the acclaimed 'Blurred In My Mirror (ROOM40), 'U' is a record of phases and exchanges between Paris and Brisbane over a three year period. A record of extended technique and unconventional process, U is most of all a swelling passage through the rare and exotic reality Tujiko Noriko evokes through her curiously dream-like songs. U is by far one of Noriko's most affecting records. It's also one of her most eclectic, littered with songs that tell of moments of absolute loss and unrelenting ecstasy.

We'll be popping up a new track from it on the myspace later this week! So be sure to check in.

she's here next week! We're excited....

cheers

+l

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LAWRENCE ENGLISH LAUNCHES NEW LP - KIRI NO OTO
Category: Music

Today Lawrence English launches his new LP, Kiri No Oto, out through the prestigious UK label, Touch. He's joined by Brisbane deathwave band, No Anchor, and the immaculately psychedelic collective, Secret Birds, at Red Hill's Lofly Hangar.

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LIQUID ARCHITECTURE, NEW SOUNDS AND MISTS!
Category: Music

Hi Folks

hope this message lands finding you all in top form! A couple of quick things I thought I'd mention....

...
First off Australia's national festival of sound arts, Liquid Architecture kicks off next week here in Brisbane. It's a killer line-up over two nights at Brisbane Powerhouse.

Here's a quick overview

FRIDAY JULY 5 from 8pm
Rafael Toral (Portugal)
Marcus Schmickler (Germany)
Nat (Melbourne)
Ian Wadley (Just about everywhere)

SATURDAY JULY 5 from 8pm
Andrew Pekler (Germany)
Toy.Bizarre (France)
Alex White (Sydney)
Richard Nunns + Clocked Out Duo (NZ/AUS)

you can nab tickets at
http://www.brisbanepowerhouse.org/events/view/liquid-architecture-9/

...
There's a swag of new and exciting room40 editions just out. These include new releases from Leighton Craig (an incredible Casio led sound journey), Ueno (the guitarist from the exceptional Tenniscoats paying equal homage to Derek Bailey and Mouse On Mars!), Audible Geography (an incredibly limited edition featuring Francisco Lopez, Jeph Jerman and more) and a new digital edition for the legendary Luc Ferrari.

Info at WWW.ROOM40.ORG

...
Finally, on a personal note, I have a new record titled Kiri No Oto out on UK based label Touch this coming month. I'm very excited about this edition and it is the start of a new series of work for me that's informed by a range of new ideas involving Harmonic Distortion and exploratory mixing techniques. To celebrate its release I'm going on a tour of Australia - playing solos for the first time in many years in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Bendigo and Brisbane.

The dates are
* Sydney July 11, Liquid Architecture, The Factory Marrickville
* Perth July 12, Perth International Film Festival
* Freemantle July 13, Mojos Bar
* Bendigo July 15, The Old Fire Station
* Melbourne July 18, North Melbourne Town Hall
* Brisbane August 8, The Hanger (Red Hill)

Hope to see some of you out at the shows.

cheers

+l

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ROOM40 RELEASES UNDER REVIEW

Here's a bunch of reviews we've had for some of our recent releases:

Tomasz Bednarczyk - Summer Feelings Forest Gospel
Verdict = Beautiful Tones and TV Static

If this is the way summer feels to Tomasz Bednarczyk then Mr. Bednarczyk must make his summer home in a fuzz addled TV buzzing in some abandoned field in the middle of nowhere. Really, Bednarczyk lives in Poland where wintery summers are the norm. This fact brings some understanding to summer feelings built out of sparse, fragile pianos delicately played under a dusty layer of electronic tape hiss. Similar in feel to (though not quite as mammoth in spectrum as) Gavin Bryars' The Sinking of the Titanic or William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, Bednarczyk's Summer Feelings plods slowly and introspectively as if it were trudging through a snow storm of static. The crackle is subtle and everything seems slightly blurry as if viewed through coke bottle lenses. Despite the frostiness of the work there is a definite heart buried underneath the layers of sound. An under current of warm synths and the occasional use of field recordings underscore a humanity caught in the midst of the scrambled white out, steering it to constantly redeeming territory. This really is an amazing accomplishment for Bednarczyk, who maintains a confident restraint well beyond his years (he's 22 years old if my math is right). I mean this stuff could easily be attributed to the aforementioned artists who are both decades older the Tomasz. Summer Feelings is a beautifully quaint, cordial exercise in gorgeous melancholy and a stunning debut for Room40 by an exciting new (to me), young artist.

-Mr. Thistle


Chris Abrahams & Mike Cooper - Oceanic Feeling-Like Tokafi
The sea as a metaphor: Concentrating on nothing but the evocative power of its musical structures.

Art is about the big mysteries of life and somehow, the ocean embodies all of them: Death, love, romance, destruction and creation – just to name a few. Maybe this is why maritime-motived music splits critics and audiences right in the middle: To some, a work like „Oceanic feeling-like" will seem formulaic and obliquely romantic, a mere mantra of human incomprehension in the face of forces which can not be controlled or understood. To others, it is yet another valuable piece of a puzzle which we need to work on to make sense of it all: How can there ever be enough music like this if it helps us find the answers we need?

The latter feeling prevails on „Oceanic feeling-like", because it cares nothing for cliches and can do without electronic trickery. A natural result of the creative combustion engine at its heart, combining two artists who have both, in their own right, defined unique spaces of electro-acoustic improvisation, this record eschews water-samples and flowing, floating, gurgling or sparkling sounds, concentrating on nothing but the evocative power of its musical structures.

It is therefore surprising that its tracks carry inviting titles like „Surfside No. 2", „Board/Wax" or „Waiting for Otis", because this is so obviously not an „Ocean Swell" album. It does not try to imitate the ocean, but to capture its moods of vastness, infinity, majesty and fear. It is not about recreating its movements and processes, but about facing them as a frail human being. And, finally, it regards the sea not just in its absolute dimensions, but mainly as a metaphor.

Anyone expecting a lush sonic tapestry will therefore be disappointed: Despite the depths of its textures, enriched by myriads of pearly glitches, crystalline crackles and rhythmic feedback, „Oceanic feeling-like" is confounding, disturbing, confrontational and often primordially direct in its arrangements, a bleeding soundscape whose openness leaves the interpretational process completely up to its audience. Listened to with headphones, it is pristinely clear and transparent – but in the confinements of a dark and lonely room, it conjures up haunting and threateningly opaque fogfigures and the creaking of blood-stained wooden planks nonetheless.

Everything here bases on the spartanic immediacy of Abrahams' Piano and Cooper's Guitar. Despite effect treatments and the weaving of soft loopnets, the raw timbres of their instruments remain intact on almost all tracks here as a sceletised image of a duo playing together in the same room. On the quarter of an hour-long „Memory of Water", Abrahams at first lights up the nightsky with nocturnal broken chord pulsations, shifting constantly, slowing down and evaporating into singular dissonant tones. In the ensuing middle sections, metallic strings are plucked, bowed and torn, creating ghoulish resonances and ghost harmonics. In the coda, the ambiance increasingly tightens, growing in claustrophobia, a wordless finale of choking intensity.

There are moments of more genteel harmony, but they are never without their emotionally confusing counterpoints. In the short sketch „Hechizo", Cooper's pastoral postrock plainsong is thwarted by Abrahams' tender freetonalities and upper-register dabbers and the dreamy ambience of aforementioned „Surfside No. 2" is slowly superseded by nervously overlapping whirrs and purrs, backwards loops and electronic splinters, before a consoling piano resolution heals the wounds.

All input flows into a controlled score, whose next direction can never fully predicted. As closely as the performers are listening and reacting to each other, they are also firing off rounds of electronic reprocessings and discreet rhythms, which force them to constantly adjust to new situations. Their exchange is a shining example of musical multitasking and a statement of idiosyncratic personality where others might have ended up with sonic fluff or free jazz banalities. Quite possibly, the exact details of how they managed to arrive there, will remain a big mystery. But that only reinforces the relevance of an album which proves that the ocean is far from becoming obsolete as a theme of an artistic quest for meaning.

-Tobias Fischer


V/A - Airport Symphony Earlabs
Rated 8.2/10

The distance to be traveled no longer reigns supreme in the airport. From its windows one sees the narrowness of a habitat accessible with little of any effort - hence the strange lack of direction and avidity that accompanies these (non)places of transportation. With no journey to speak of, the airport itself becomes a locus of events and exchanges, a veritable world onto itself.

Artists such as Tim Hecker, Stephan Mathieu, and Francisco Lopez push this concept well beyond the isolated process of worship into a fascinating aesthetic, historical, and social document&183; A deliberative approach is taken, with a particular sensitivity for pace and spacing. In the spaces relatively untrammeled by electronic interference, the sublime acid clarity of the microscopic amplifications stand on the side of the subject, diaphanous, atomic, they build organically and establish a wide dynamic and expressive range. These are followed by or sometimes interspersed with more processed elements that abide by the logic of the object, sly, evasive, and seductive, they thresh and slide like a blunt razor in the unwary listener's subconscious. The oppositions and relations between these poles - between vigilance and boredom, attachment and neutrality, commitment and indifference - charges the music with multiple meanings and tantalizes for its suggestion of liaison.

Camilla Hannan's contribution reaches a nearly punishing sonic density, canvassing industrial screeches and elongating and distorting gestures; Deupree, with his aesthetic of precision and subtlety, allows his sound sources to hypnotically shimmer like heat rising from a sun-baked asphalt road; while others benefit from having tiny, barely-there sound particles insinuate themselves on the earlobe and wafer-thin details recede into the mix, before the overall volume and clarity begins to increase and blur. Not every track succeeds in establishing a well-formed perspective on the matters at hand - pieces from Fennesz and some few others lack significant development or form and pass by like a gust of wind, fleeting and unmemorable. A good many fascinating perspectives are fashioned and positioned strategically around these issues of travel, giving Airport Symphony a deep consistency and intense focus in its ruminations on the decline of geography.

- Max Schaefer


Tim Hecker - Norberg Cyclic Defrost

The mineshafts and buildings that stood like tousled trees must have served as an ideal backdrop for Canadian-based sound artist Tim Hecker's delicate and highly personal digital meltdown. Originally a part of the Norberg Festival in Sweden, the work creates a dialectical spectrum between slowly evolving melody and crashing tone-clusters, all anchored by the resonating possibilities of the sub-bass.

Without falling into complete abstraction, the chiming xylophones that open the twenty-minute piece are swallowed by a gaping maw swarming with white noise and gnarly bass rumbles. At the nine-minute mark, after the piece has evolved into a large, vigorous composition with aggregates of pitches set adrift in a rippling pool of sound, an unexpected and positively delightful organ melody surfaces and dances amidst the decay like a light flickering out in the darkness.

It's a sad, fleeting moment and it serves as a keystone in the distinctive mood which the rest of the recording works to establish. The diamond clarity and bruising edge of Norberg thereby brings about another expansion of terms in the aesthetics of noise - indeed, it's an endearing and thoroughly rewarding piece in every regard.

- Max Schaefer

10:05 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

NEW YEAR AND NEW SOUNDS
Category: Art and Photography

HEY FOLKS

LOTS OF GOOD SOUNDS ON THE WAY THIS YEAR....

TO KICK THINGS OFF WE'VE GOT A WHOPPER OF A SHOW SET FOR THE IMA ON JAN 19 WITH MR BEN FROST FROM ICELAND, CHRIS CORSANO (ABOUT THE BEST DRUMMER I CAN THINK OF RIGHT NOW) AND MYSELF (IE LAWRENCE ENGLISH, LAUNCHING A NEW ALBUM ON SIRR)....

THERE'S A ALSO A SWAG OF NEW RELEASES ON THE WWW.ROOM40.ORG SITE, SO FEEL FREE TO CHECK THEM OUT!

HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL....

+L

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The Commodore 64 still runs the Brisbane City Council Bus service.

Click on the picture to see the link. More for old time's sake than anything else, the Commodore 64 screen is clearly displayed in the bus station of the Myer Centre.

8:05 PM - 3 Comments - 4 Kudos - Add Comment

hello from the 40

hey folks...

I thought I should at least add something here. room40 will actually be running a blog off the main site www.room40.org shortly, so here's perhaps a stop gap to start with.

thanks to all those who have dropped by, please be sure and visit the real room40 site for more uptodate and detailed info.

Looks like it'll be a busy month - our friends richard chartier and skist both touch down shortly...and we'll also have filistine here for a show on oct 6 in brisbane.

anyway, hope all is well in your respective parts of the world.

word up too for pure bunk's set last night at arena - a fitting close to one of australia's earlier electro-industrial icons....great to witness that duo one last time...

over and out

oh and some recommended listening, we'll focus on new stuff from japan perhaps...

fourcolour's letter of sounds on 12k
boris dronevil - final on inoxia
afrirampo 2004 african journey

6:07 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos