News & Events
Room40 is proud to continue the publication of a series of editions from American guitarist and composer Norman Westberg.
Best known for his work with the seminal outfit SWANS, Westberg’s output beyond that group is sprawling and restless. His name recurs and ripples through many interconnected micro-histories surrounding New York City’s music and art scenes. From appearances in film works associated with the Cinema Of Transgression, through to his participation in bands such as The Heroine Sheiks and Five Dollar Priest, Westberg’s name is woven deeply into the fabric of New York over the past three decades.
MRI is the result of Westberg’s encounters with the heavy medical scanning technology following his recognising diminished hearing. ”I started to notice a loss of hearing in my right ear,” Westberg explains, “and decided that it was high time that I had it checked out by a professional. The audiologist confirmed the uneven hearing loss and recommended an MRI. The purpose of the MRI was to make sure that there was not something other than my own aural misadventures causing the uneven loss.” This record is a coda to this experience. Recorded in 2012, it is a collection of reductive rolling guitar pieces that are embedded strongly in the American Minimalism tradition.
The newly mastered and post-produced edition also features a brand new piece, "Lost Mine," recorded in 2015 as an echo of the processes that led to the original recordings. It follows the reissue of 13 in late 2015.
From Lawrence English:
“Norman Westberg’s guitar playing with SWANS has influenced a generation of musicians across genres. I can personally attest to how his particular approaches to that instrument, in creating both harmony and brute force, have challenged and ultimately influenced my own sonic preoccupations.
What Norman has created with his solo works is an echoing universe of deep texture and harmonic intensity. His solo compositions generate an affecting quality that drives the listener towards reductive transcendence.”
More information can be found here.
The Legendary Pink Dots are delighted to announce the forthcoming release
of their new album Pages Of Aquarius on Metropolis Records.
They promised us so much…
Naked hippies and soma fountains and patchouli rain from candy floss clouds and flowers and the summer that would never end. The Age of Aquarius.
The Age of Harmony and understanding and tolerance. Say it softly, like an Aquarian, The Age of ….Love. The Age of Love and HAIR.
Page One Aquarius. How does it look out there?
Bad hair, no hair. Covered up. Walls. And God is everywhere, splashed in red across those walls, And the fountains are dry, the ocean is full and they're dragging the lost from the depths of the sea and tying them up with wire.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
Are we in for 2,160 years of this?
I’m an Aquarian. I believe in this crazy stuff and I visualise big old Pisces lying there, dying there. Huge, wounded, angry because no-one helps and every hot feverish cry brings a new storm, and every kick shakes the planet to it’s core. Big old Pisces. Huge but invisible so no-one sees him except the irritating baby that tickles his nose with an oily feather.
Page 2,000 Pisces, the end of the cycle and it hurts.
It can’t last.
Page One Aquarius.
The World is Beautiful. Blessed be. EK
Out April 22nd.
A teaser is available here.
In 2014 Lattimore received a prestigious fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage — a rare honor given to 12 people every year — and used the funds to take a road trip across America with a friend, writing and recording songs at each stop along the way. With her harp and laptop, Lattimore drew inspiration from each location, letting the environments in which she recorded color her work. The result is evocative, delicate and haunting music, Lattimore’s harp at times bright and skipping, other times distant and hazy, swathed in gauzy delay.
She recorded much of At the Dam in the beautiful setting of Joshua Tree. “I would wheel the harp out on to the porch of my friend Chiara’s little house and I had the whole desert around me. It felt like a residency on another planet.” Lattimore also recorded in Marfa, Texas at a friends home, as well as in the mountains of Altadena, east of LA.
Recording far away from her Philadelphia home gave Lattimore space to navigate her thoughts. The stirring, slightly ominous opener "Otis Walks Into the Woods" attempts to encapsulate her reaction to the news that her family’s blind dog had walked into the forest on the outskirts of their farm to pass away – a gently hypnotic ode to a noble companion. "Jimmy V" recalls another fallen hero, basketball coach Jimmy Valvano. "Before taking the road trip, I’d seen a great documentary on him, a really interesting and complex, inspiring character, and thought I’d write a song with him in mind," Mary says, "Maybe it’s the first harp song written about a basketball coach?" On “Jaxine Drive,” a guitar sighs, low and sorrowful beneath Lattimore's hopeful-sounding harp, while "Ferris Wheel, January" imagines one looking at the Pacific Ocean from high elevation and the patterns of the waves creating an illusion resembling the bright lights of the Santa Monica Pier in winter. "It's a travel diary," explains Lattimore, "A chunk of my life that I attempted to wrangle into a recorded language that feels familiar but not too precious."
At The Dam is named for a Joan Didion essay about the Hoover Dam: "its enchanting, grandiose practicality, how it will keep operating in its own solitude, even when humans aren’t around." Drawing inspiration from these ideas and treating each memory thoughtfully and sensitively, Lattimore captures transient moments as time moves inexorably forward.
More information can be found here.
"Zinging, absolutely deadly 7-track EP from Micachu on her return to DDS, featuring three tracks with Tirzah (including the much sought-after Go), plus a Demdike Stare Edit.
DDS render a precious haul of new Micachu zingers on her return to the label, ramped up by Demdike Stare's dextrous edit of "I Dare You" to chase up 2014’s acclaimed Feeling Romantic Feeling Tropical Feeling Ill LP for mutant dancefloors and sun-kissed headphone journeys.
Smitten by the hugely addictive, brilliantly slippery 2-step twister on Go, Demdike suggested the cut for release on DDS, and were subsequently privileged to peruse the unique space-time folds and dance/pop sampledelia of Mica’s archive.
As they also found out whilst compiling her last solo LP; it is a deeply rewarding experience to explore the Mica’s output: immersing themselves in her peerless world of refractive colours, sawn-off textures and teasing arrangements.
They’ve emerged with a joyously unhinged party-ready EP, traversing the mercurial 2-step viscosity of Mica & Tirzah’s "Go," to their addictively sticky ohrwurm, "Dare You," and the free cosmic pop whorl of "Trip6love," before taking in the clanking ragga jag of "More Red" with Brother May, a.k.a. the London-based MC who voiced Mica’s Fact Mix 444 in 2014.
The cherry on top is a crucial Demdike edit of "I Dare You," featuring Miles and Sean extending and swerving the original just like they would with two copies of the 12"."
-via Boomkat
Blackest Ever Black presents a new vinyl edition of Af Ursin’s 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato, and its first outings on CD and digital formats.
Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. He began his musical activities in the mid-1980s, co-founding the Noise-Maker’s Fifes collective with Geert Feytons in ’89. During the ’90s he developed his solo work under the name Af Ursin, before establishing his private press, La Scie Dorée, in 2001. It continues to act as the main platform for his own music, including regular collaborations with Christoph Heeman (as In Camera) and Andrew Chalk (as Elodie), while his other label, Metaphon (run with Marc Wroblewski and Greg Jacobs), is focused on archival presentations from the likes of Michael Ranta, Joris de Laet, and IPEM.
Van Luijk’s work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Informed by years of intensive listening to various types of free music, exploratory drug use and especially the “irregular organic forms” of the Belgian countryside where he resides, van Luijk’s process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique. He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Over time he has evolved his own richly poetic musical language, full of allusions to drone, acid folk, classical, Musique concrète and jazz, but beholden to none.
Originally released on La Scie Dorée in 2005, in an edition of 350 copies, Aura Legato is one of van Luijk’s darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings. It’s a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence – dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den – and has earned telling, if inadequate, comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS. Fully remastered by Noel Summerville, the album has never sounded better, and our vinyl edition replicates the original’s ornate presentation: sleeve die-cut in the style of a 78rpm record, with gold detailing and individually hand-glued labels. Due to be released in May 2016, we urge you to acquaint yourself with what is, unmistakably, a modern classic.
More information can be found here.
Front 242, Tuxedomoon, Eric Random and more not-disco classics for the dancefloor.
JD Twitch has done more than most to improve our record collections this year, introducing us to some incredible post-punk rarities on his Optimo Music compilation [Cease & Desist] and releasing an inspired intercontinental collaboration featuring young musicians from Glasgow, Ghana and Belize on his Autonomous Africa imprint.
For his next trick, Keith McIvor is going back to his roots with a compilation of club favourites from his earliest days behind the mixer. "So Low is an occasional night at The Poetry Club in Glasgow where I play some of the music I played when I first started DJing back in 1987," McIvor explains.
"At that time the audience I played to mostly loathed what I was playing and rarely danced, but then shortly after, when house music arrived, I found a different audience who actually liked to dance."
At the request of his wife, and some friends who were too young to hear these songs in the club at the time, he now runs the So Low night as an excuse to give records by the likes of Front 242 and Chris & Cosey another airing. "It has an extremely enthusiastic audience, a joyous atmosphere and is the antithesis of what a club in Scotland playing this music nearly 30 years ago would have been like," he explains.
The So Low compilation focuses on some lesser known stars of cold wave, from UK and European minimalists like P1/E, Colin Potter and Gerry & The Holograms, to US industrial band Hunting Lodge and avant-garde San Francisco collective Tuxedomoon, as well as a number of French and Belgian acts such as Siglo XX, Front 242, Marc Verhaeghen’s The Klinik and Clair Obscur.
Teaming up with The Vinyl Factory for the releases, McIvor has also enlisted contemporary cold-wave fans Powell and Helena Hauff to provide remixes for their favourite tracks on the compilation, which seems like a very good idea to us.
Check out the tracklist below, and look out for the compilation on February 19 on 2xLP, CD and digital, with the remixes following soon after.
More information can be found here.
Tracklist:
- John Bender – ‘Victims of a Victimless Crime’
- Hunting Lodge – ‘Tribal Warning Shot’
- Throbbing Gristle – ‘Discipline (Berlin)’
- Front 242 – ‘Kampfbereit’
- The Klinik – ‘Moving Hands’
- P1/E – ’49 Second Romance’
- Colin Potter – ‘Power’
- Eric Random – ‘Fade In’
- Conrad Schnitzler & Wolfgang Seidel Meissner – ‘Fabrik’
- Gerry & The Holograms – ‘Gerry & The Holograms’
- Chris & Cosey – ‘Passion’
- Hard Corps – ‘Porte Bonheur (Remix)’
- Holger Hiller – ‘Das Feuer’
- Siglo XX – ‘Dreams of Pleasure’
- Clair Obscur – ‘Toundra’
- Tuxedomoon – ‘No Tears’
Tim Hecker has revealed details of his latest album, and first record for 4AD. The Canadian composer will release Love Streams, on 8th April 2016.
Love Streams takes its cues from the avant-classical orchestration and extreme electronic processing of his previous full-length, 2013’s Virgins, but shaped into more melancholic, ultraviolet hues. Inspired by notions of 15th century choral scores (particularly those by Josquin des Prez), transposed to an artificial intelligence-era language of digital resonance and bright synths, the album was assembled gradually, with layers of studio-tracked keyboards, choir and woodwinds being woven into the mix, then molded and disfigured through complex programming. Like hearing some ancient strain of sacred music corrupted by encryption, Hecker admits to thinking about ideas like "liturgical aesthestics after Yeezus" and the "transcendental voice in the age of auto-tune," during its creation.
The Love Streams sessions took place throughout 2014 and 2015 at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavik, Iceland – where parts of both Virgins and Ravedeath, 1972 were tracked – with Hecker reuniting with the same crew of collaborators from Virgins (Kara-Lis Coverdale, Grímur Helgason) and bolstered by the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, whose vocal arrangements were scored by Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson.
The title of Hecker's new work can be interpreted any number of ways – erotic, technological, spiritual – although his own conception is appropriately vast, calling it "a riff on the ubiquity and nihilism of streaming of all forms of life." Now we stream more than we love. Nowadays music too frequently resembles a product, or white noise. With a career spanning fifteen years, Tim Hecker belongs to a select camp actively resisting this undertow, this reduction in significance.
This is the seventh Surgeon album.
"While exploring new production techniques using old and unlikely hardware, the results were so unusual that I really had the sense that these pieces of equipment didn't actually create these sounds, rather they were in fact some kind of elaborate reception device that allowed me to tune into transmissions from distant galaxies. The music I could hear was actually the received transmissions of Pop Hits from those Distant Galaxies that were being played on their radio stations. I quickly recorded all that I could before losing the transmission. I consulted with Dr. Andrew Read, the astrophysicist with whom I recorded Guitar Treatments in 1999. He has worked on the discovery of the most distant galaxies and astronomical objects in the Universe. Together we came up with a possible list of where these musical transmissions may have come from."
-via Forced Exposure
"The legendary JK Broderick reprises his lushly romantic Final alias for Downwards with an expanded reissue of 2010's My Body is a Dying Machine offered to those who missed it first time around.
Now featuring eight tracks instead of the original five, Black Dollars hits a rich vein of ambient dream-pop that has always been an integral, if quieter part of Broderick's oeuvre since even before Godflesh was born.
Foggy highlights of the original EP such as the looping, blooming noise ecstasy of Gravity and the mind-sweeping guitar strokes of A Slight Return are now supplemented with the blown-out glory of The Eternal Dreamer and the majestic MBV-style swell of Flow River Flow and the vaulted electro-acoustics of The World is Not Waiting For You to make up an epic trip for the road or bedroom."
-via Boomkat
"Roly Porter zooms out to super macro levels of sidereal physics in Third Law, his debut for Tri Angle and most impressive solo album to date in the wake of Life Cycle of a Massive Star and his formative work with Vex’d.
Eight tracks describes a cataclysmic chain of cosmic events with fathomless attention to detail and a dizzying sense of meter appropriate to the breadth of his compositional and conceptual scope.
Leaving the dancefloor/earth as a speck of dust floating in his rear-view, he evacuates mind/body into a noumenal dimension of near-symphonic energy transfers between interrelated elements of rhythm, bass, and sound design shaped according to his own laws of physics.
In effect it recalls the flaring cinematic scope of Vangelis as much as Iancu Dumitrescu’s pursuit of a spectral music, and likewise the shuddering electro-acoustic masses of his Subtext label-mates, Emptyset and Paul Jebanasam, whilst also paralleling the dark matter investigations of The Haxan Cloak and Fis’s polymetric, psycho-acoustic ecosystems for Tri Angle."
-via Boomkat
