Bands are like the people in them; they tend to get set in their ways. But not Cleared. The sole fixed part of their method is that guitarist/electronic musician Michael Vallera (Luggage, Maar, numerous solo recordings and a swell duo with Lee Ranaldo) and drummer/electronic musician Steven Hess (RLYR, Haptic, Locrian, Slow Bell Trio) are both involved. They have the potential to like an instrumental rock combo and have often done so on previous recordings. But Lustres, their first for the Australian Room40 label, continues a process of ping-ponging material into diffusion.
One of the musicians collects, plays or synthesizes some audio, then sends it to the other. He works on it, adding and subtracting and atomizing the sound, then sends it back. The work gets…
Tag Archive: Room40
…remastered edition with bonus tracks.
As the title suggests, Akira Kosemura‘s entrancing Polaroid Piano is a wistful meditation for minimal piano and field recordings, bleached out with old light. The glitchy electronics of Kosemura’s prior work are gone. The music is so hushed you can hear the action of the pedals, the keyboard shifting in the body of the piano. This quiet rumpus serves as a relaxed rhythm track — one suspects Kosemura mic’d the piano to capture these extraneous sounds, drawing them purposefully into the music. The gesture is Cagean, but the questioning, wonder-filled style is pure Satie. The cover art captures the mood perfectly, although a blue sky filled with kites and balloons would have been just as apt.
And the Clocks All Ran Dry is the result of a single night suspended outside of time. Recorded in one continuous session, the collaboration between Andreas Voelk (das ende der liebe) and Scott Monteith (Deadbeat) captures the rare intensity of two artists fully surrendering to sound — unrehearsed, unhurried, and unbound.
The album unfolds as a meditation on transience and stillness, a dialogue between dub’s deep spatial pulse and krautrock’s hypnotic motion. Across its duration, drumless anti-rhythms dissolve into organic textures, and moments of silence take on equal weight. What begins as improvisation gradually becomes architecture — music that builds itself in real time and then vanishes into the night from which it came.
With For a Moment the Sky Knew My Name, Peter Knight extends his fascination with the porous relationship between body, instrument, and environment into one of his most personal and immersive solo works. The album takes its cue from extended fieldwork and improvisations undertaken near Yeerung River on Krowathunkooloong land, where Knight spent much of his early life. Each of the album’s pieces grew organically from direct encounters with that setting — the pulse of wind against brass, the crackle of heat, the buzz of insects — forming a meditation on sound as both a reflection of and response to place. It is a work of quiet fluidity, at once structured and spontaneous, where texture and tone gradually shape entire topographies of listening.
Sculptor, installation artist and seasoned improvisor Rie Nakajima has been friends with David Toop for many years, and the two became accustomed to their regular chats – on art, music and food – to the point that when face-to-face meetings were prohibited for a spell, the two transferred their musings to email. They noticed that the style of their back and forth had changed, forcing a level of creative thought that, in Toop’s own words, wasn’t “normal or natural”, and when they reconvened in the Spring of 2022, they realized their reality had shifted. Of course, if you’ve been following either artist you may have already stumbled across last year’s excellent ‘Music for Voilà’, and this set examines their interaction with mic-ed sculptures and small instruments…
An expanded CD reissue of Black Rain’s Obliteration Bliss, originally released on cassette via Downwards in 2023.
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.
…Siavash Amini is a self-taught musician in rock and metal music, who later studied music for his university degree in Tehran. He belongs to a generation of young Iranian music enthusiasts who possibly had nothing except a personal computer and a dreadful dial-up internet connection. Electronic musicians like him were lucky enough to witness the unexpected rise of a genre in its pure artistic form. Electronic music in Iran was essentially introduced as an elite genre, and it took quite a while for it to be incorporated into popular styles. Raised and shined in this scene, where there were a handful of serious annual electronic music festivals in the 2000s and 2010s, Amini followed his path to become an internationally recognized musician.
Alan Lamb, who passed away earlier this year, was a giant in the field of environmental sound.
His landmark work was based on a literal landmark: the Faraway Wind Organ, a half-mile stretch of abandoned telephone poles that he purchased from the Australian government for $10.
Throughout the 1980s, Lamb recorded the wind activating the six wires strung across this length.
The results are shockingly dramatic. Waves of sound build and crash as the wind rises, sci-fi laser sounds ping and zip as insects collide with the wires, and in the background, distant calls of Australian wildlife evoke the vastness of the landscape.
Room40 has recently begun reissuing Lamb’s work and Archival Recordings is a welcome…
This off-label release by Dragon’s Eye Recordings label head Yann Novak explores various notions of misinformation in the form of three tracks of experimental ambient music, each about 10 minutes long.
The source material consists of slightly more than two dozen field recording and synthesizer loops that Novak arranges and manipulates into something other than their original forms.
The pieces blend into one another in content and tone. Heavy bass elements combine with ominously lilting chords. There are slow progressions across windswept soundscapes, as well as subtly vibrating bass drones and sparse percussion. But these offerings are far from minimal and instead provide layers of detail like stratified…
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 atomises his universe of sound, and uncovered the singular detail that is often consumed in the whole.