Tag: Room40

Categories
Music

øjeRum – V​å​gnende Jeg Ser De D​ø​de

Danish composer øjeRum has recorded for and with some of the best ambient and electronic music labels active today, and this latest release is published by the estimable Room40 Records out of Australia.  From the release Bandcamp site:

“While recording, radio waves and static electricity interfered with the signal – sometimes subtly, sometimes more pronounced – supplying the recording with an accidental ghost accompaniment. This chance encounter let me to contact Scanner as I knew of his use of radio waves and police scanners. The result was the two remixes accompanying my piano recording.

“Vågnende Jeg Ser De Døde” is a line from a Danish Easter Psalm; “Awakening I See The Dead, in an Easter morning red”.”

A beautiful quote, so appropriate for the end of darkness that is Easter.  It seems a ghost accompanied the artist on this release.

Categories
Music

Geneva Skeen – Double Bind

Perhaps I’ll need to renew my subscription to The Wire or spend more time on other blogs, as I can’t believe I missed the work of Los Angelina Geneva Skeen.  My hometown is producing so many fine artists working within ambient and electroacoustic music that it has become (happily) difficult to keep up with this wellspring of talent.

Double Bind defies proper categorization, sitting somewhere between academic musique-concrète, noise-style improvisation and a touch of mysticism in Skeen’s work.  Though bleak, there is a feeling of being inside of a warm, pulsating, silvery ocean in these compositions.  The one which won me over was the second track,  Leveled Ground, Bottomless Pit.  These compositions are, in every sense of the word, alive.  The listener will feel the sounds go in and out of the ears and tingle the bones a bit.

She has made me a fan, and I look forward to hearing the rest of her catalog.  Touch Music and Room40, among other labels, have unleashed a treasure.

Categories
Music

Yann Novak – Bathed In Light And Rapture

We’re lucky to have so many talented musicians and composers in Los Angeles covering all genres.  One of the most intriguing I’ve come across lately is Yann Novak, who hails from Wisconsin originally, but who is, like myself, a Southern Californian.  Yann has recorded with labels such as 901 Editions, Dragon’s Eye Recordings (which I believe may be his own label), LINE, Room40, and Touch, among others. His credentials are impeccable.

This release on Room40 (all praise to Lawrence English for running a fine imprint) has as its cornerstone the composition The Ecstasy of Annihilation, which is 7:30 in length.  There is a sublime, rather gentle buildup the gradually makes one feel like they’re scaling the heavens ever upward.  It’s a fantastic piece, but the same track is modified quite nicely by several artists, including Siavash Amini, Bethan Kellough and Lawrence English himself.

I’m in the process of witnessing both birth and death in my life at the moment, so, as painful as it is to watch people enter the great beyond, and as joyous as it is to welcome new life into an ever-evolving world, this album provides quite a pleasant soundtrack to witnessing these happenings.

Bravo, Yann.  This is stunning.