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viewing 1 To 11 of 11 items
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RMSG 027CD
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With Tropical Church, Hong Kong based composer and musician Olivier Cong transposes the humid nights of the rainy season into a fluid audio postcard that speaks to contemporary life in his home city-state. His pieces dwell with a sense of intent, shifting between the sprawling cascades of human traffic, to the moments experienced alone in environments that maintain a strange familiar. Known for his work on film and theatre, Cong's approach is one of generous texture and minimalist forms, each of these contoured by a strong and deeply personal sense of harmony. Tropical Church is a recording that speaks to the emergent generation of new Hong Kong composers and sound artists. It is a gateway to a new audio vision of Hong Kong.
A note from Olivier: "In Tropical Church, you will experience music composed of piano, ambient electronics, shakuhachi, Chinese yuan, guzheng and spoken words, which I think represent my feelings for home -- Hong Kong. And to me, home is an old church that harbors a myriad of unspoken emotions, flowing from the West to East. Complex history hidden within the dampen pillars, the sounds of the city and the foot-steps of the everyday people that liven up the streets. Most notably in the first track, 'I am afraid of', voice recordings of anonymous strangers were collected describing their deepest fears. I'm most touched by the answers as they've shown me the same fears of death, love and being alone we all share."
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RMSG 026CD
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On Nova Naturo, Japan's Haco expands her already divergent song craft into a zone that meshes field recording, electronics and layers of floating voice into an imagined sound environment that encourages a sense of a deepened interior terrain. Haco's work in groups including the now legendary After Dinner and Hoahio have earned her a unique and respected position in the Japanese music communities, but it is with her solo work that she has unlocked an utterly unique and deeply personal approach to sound. Drawing inspiration from mythologies surrounding ideas of rebirth, Nova Naturo propagates a sense of ambience, but arrives at this sensation without dwelling in the aesthetics of ambient music. Rather, Haco combines unexpected elements, and uses these combinations to refocus your ears and invites you to listen closely, but with a sense of relaxation. This record is not a labor and instead suggests a kind of release from labor, an opening out into place, into the human experience of exploration and the rewards that come to those present in the moment. Haco works alongside the French improvised guitarist Manuel Adnot, the drummer and pianist Tetsuji Matsuo, and the double bassist Makoto Inada, who are based in Kobe. Also on this record is Stabilo (Speaker Gain Teardrop) from the Hiroshima ambient scene, and Tarnovski (Gurun Gurun), a key figure in Czech experimental-electro music, who were previously involved in her album, Qoosui (RMSG 016CD, 2017). There is also a collaborative track with the electronic music maestro Keiichi Sugimoto (Vegpher). These partnerships resolve wholly into this recording, bringing new timbres and threads to an edition that is entirely of Haco's making. This is a music of immense beauty, but it is a beauty that is complex and at times unfamiliar. It's in these uncertain moments that Nova Naturo finds its most compelling and fulfilling resolutions.
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RMSG 021CD
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Kansai based artist Ytamo returns to Someone Good with a record of deep introspection. Recorded across 2019, whilst she was pregnant with her first child, she produced this edition in soft focus. This is an album that resonates with an in-built nostalgia of recollection that is simultaneously actual and imagined. The songs reflect on her own experiences as a child, each piece building a bridge between the promise of parenthood and the hazy memories of her youngest years. Pairing back her instrumentation at times to the instrument she started her musical life with, the piano, this album showcases her capacity for cycling minimal movements, dynamic tonal ruptures and hypnotic interweaving harmony. Features Takako Minekawa.
From Lawrence English: "... Sometime in the early to mid-00s, I was on tour in Japan. I was playing at the now closed venue Bridge in Tennoji. It was one of my favorite venues in Japan, mostly as Tennoji still holds those secrets of Japan's 20th century history; the nocturnal, dreamlike sensibilities that reach out to us from beyond; much like, Chris Marker's San Soleil observes. During this concert, I was joined by an artist whose work I wasn't familiar with at that time, Ytamo. By the end of her set however I was completely spellbound by her unusual sense of harmony, minimal repetitious piano patterning and her ability to move between seemingly unrelated musical structures in ways that acoustically melted from one movement to another . . . A few years ago we released MI WO on Someone Good (2016), a milestone recording for her and one I did not think she could easily eclipse. With Vacant, however, she does just that. Vacant is a completely personal music. It contains the kinds of songs that tell of one person's experiences in a way that opens out towards all who encounter the work. Vacant plants seeds deep within the listener and these germinate at unexpected moments and with unpredictable results. Having lived with the record for the past half year, I can speak to this experience. 'Far Away From Here', one of the long-form pieces on the record has found its way bubbling up in my subconscious. The same can be said of 'Mantis', another piece with melodies that just fold into you, burying themselves with a gentle presence that radiates in time. I can't recommend Ytamo's music to you enough."
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RMSG 022CD
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Andrew Tuttle grew up in Alexandra Hills, a quiet slice of rural life in Redlands, a city which lies 20km or so from Brisbane, on the East Coast of Australia. Or at least that was the plan. The reality proved to be somewhat different, the area changing quickly after his family's relocation there, resulting in his home being quickly absorbed by rapid urban sprawl, leaving him in a limbo between nature and suburbia. Alexandra, Tuttle's fourth studio album, reflects the growth apparent in his three previous Room40 releases and commitment to developing a reputation in his home country of Australia in the time since his 2015 debut. Leaning upon the inspiration pulled from recent tour supports with contemporaries such as Steve Gunn, Ryley Walker, and Calexico; Alexandra presents a true sonic landscape; a musical reflection of a rediscovered homeland. A magician of banjo and resonator guitar, Tuttle named the album after that Queensland street and suburb where he first created and fell in love with music. Alexandra is the sound of rediscovering one's environment, almost twenty years on, tracing it with an organic, expanding flow of energy. The songs on Alexandra weave their way serenely and purposefully, tracing a gossamer path resembling the distinctive, scribble-like burrowing patterns left by moths on the scribbly gum trees which dot Tuttle's ambles through the Australian bushland backgrounding the suburban environment. Splashes of color flutter through like rosellas in flight, with pedal steel, piano, strings and horns contributed by collaborators such as Chuck Johnson, Tony Dupe, Sarah Spencer, Gwenifer Raymond, Joel Saunders, and Joe Saxby. Painting broad strokes of local color amongst a deeply rooted spirit of place, Alexandra is a journey that tranquilizes the restless mind. This expansive album cycles through a rediscovered environment, illuminating forgotten or overlooked landmarks, evoking the dreamy ritual of the "flaneur" (a romantic figure imagined by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin) who wanders the streets, with the sole purpose to wander. Mixed by Chuck Johnson and mastered by Lawrence English, Alexandra was tracked externally at Brisbane's The Plutonium by engineer Aidan Hogg, then edited and processed at Tuttle's studio in Brisbane and at his childhood home on Alexandra Circuit in Alexandra Hills.
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RMSG 020LP
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Tralala Blip are an Australian unit of differently-abled musicians hailing from the Northern Rivers of New South Wales. Over the past decade they have carved out a unique position in the Australian electronic music community. Working to overcome a range of challenges imposed by their disabilities, Tralala Blip have created a range of approaches to instruments, performance, and composition that allows them to seamlessly create music together. Eat My Codes If Your Light Falls is their first full-length album in over five years. It charts out an entirely new sonic universe that is the resolution of several years of intense live performance and expanded studio experiments. Produced by Lawrence English, the record explodes their working methodologies and reveals a collective sacred heart that is fueled by their intoxicating post-electro pop melodies and diarized lyrical poems. Eat My Codes If Your Light Falls is in many ways the first work in a new chapter of what Tralala Blip are becoming. It resolves their experimental practices and focuses that energy within a tight framework of explicit song form and entirely personal production aesthetics. This is their voice, articulating their stories. It's for you to listen and begin to understand that which lies in parallel with our everyday. Beyond their extensive performance commitments, they have presented their work as special guests of TEDx, have had a stage production created about them and have instigated many workshops for other differently-abled musicians and artists. Their goal is to reconsider the nature of creativity, especially music making and to push these processes beyond any sense of the normative or commonplace. Celebrated internationally for their relentless pursuit of a level playing field in music creation, they have been fortunate to be supported by festivals such as Unsound, Liquid Architecture, and arts facilities such as ZKM Kahlsruhe. The future is expansive and multi-abled, Tralala Blip invite you to get amongst it. Tralala Blip are Mathew Daymond, Lydian Dunbar, Zac Mifsud, Randy Reimann, and Phoebe Rose.
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RMSG 017CD
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Andrew Tuttle is a best-kept secret of the Australian underground. A composer, improviser, and collaborator who has shared stages with Matmos, Julia Holter, Forest Swords, Steve Gunn, OM, Deradoorian, and many others, a world traveler and artist in residence, his third, self-titled album, is an expression of his life in music and a reflection of life in his home city of Brisbane. Primarily developed in a Brisbane bedroom, home to a banjo, acoustic guitar, and synthesizer; the album is lilting, elegant and delicate -- the sound of joy and imagination. There's a wide-eyed sense of positivity and discovery throughout. Tuttle's music meanders, swings, and sometimes soars like birds across a radiant sunset. Each note feels alive, with harmonics stretching out to meet the neighboring notes, much as the Brisbane River winds and the eucalypts and palm trees of Tuttle's home suburb of New Farm intersect with a constant vibrant hum of humanity. Andrew Tuttle's body of work maintains both a sharp creative focus and a wide-eyed spirit of exploration. Like time-lapse photography, it unfolds its colors and textures with an astonishing gracefulness and wonderment. Born of reflection rather than of nostalgia, Tuttle's third album and his performed works are the sound of re-discovering one's local natural and urban environments -- and the importance of embracing love, family, and friendship in a turbulent world. Tuttle's first two solo albums Slowcation (2015) and Fantasy League (RMSG 015CD, 2016) heavily played on an inherent tension between Tuttle's primary musical interests of acoustic instrumentation and digital synthesis. On his third, eponymous album, Tuttle has brought these worlds closer together -- sparse decayed banjo and fragile guitar motifs are at one with shimmering filtered delays and bubbling electronics. For this third album, a fortnight residency at Stockholm's EMS Elektronmusikstudion and collaborations with Charlie Parr (electric guitar), Dina Maccabee (viola), Chris Rainier (prepared guitar), and Joel Saunders (trumpet) were an initial creative impetus, however these seemingly disparate explorations have manifested themselves into Tuttle's most cohesive work to date. The final album, a result of several careful revisions, reflects Tuttle's belief in this work as a major personal and creative statement. In Andrew Tuttle's world, folk and bluegrass rituals, ragas, and drones cozy up to electronic technology like they've known each other their whole lives. Tuttle dwells in a between world of ambient and folk genre that feels like a community all of its own.
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RMSG 016CD
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David Toop on Haco's Qoosui: "Weightless, not so much a voice from heaven but a voice that swirls in liquidity, water spirit, a world and a time in which humans, plants, animals and weather could communicate in multiple tongues through the barriers that separate living entities, the world of Apitchatpong Weerasthakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), in which a catfish with erotic powers speaks to a princess, a world in which spirits could be heard whispering in forest glades, in spider's webs and waterfalls, from the hidden places of bright tiled rooms filled with emptiness and the yellow fizzing of neon strips. Henry J. Farny painted 'The Song of the Talking Wire' in 1904: a Lakota Sioux hunter stops in the snow, pressing his ear to a telegraph pole to listen to the humming of its wires. For his model, Farny sketched a religious man named Long Day or Long Dog, who spoke about hearing spirit voices over the wires, an experience he then used to bolster his claims to being a spiritual leader. One hundred years later, Haco listened through contact microphones to the spirit voices inaudibly (to unaided human perception) emanating from CD-R drives, mobile phones, wireless routers and similar sources of electromagnetic waves, enacting the cyborgian reworking of nature and culture of Donna J. Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1984). 'Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,' Haraway wrote. 'This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.' The siren song is weightless, blissful, but also flightless -- always connected to the body whose aurality must be blocked to survive its seduction..."
Haco has received recognition internationally as the founder, singer, lyricist, and composer of the legendary avant-pop group, After Dinner, one of the first Japanese indie bands to tour abroad and to receive the unanimous praise in the 1980s. Hailed as one of the first female proponents of onkyo, Haco has made field recording environmental sounds from daily life and used them as materials in her composing, programming, and mixing. "A founding member of the legendary band After Dinner, Haco is one of the most versatile vocalists in the Japanese indie scene." --John Zorn
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RMSG 014CD
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the many lives that live
within the organic planet
by listening, I touch them
fluttering light of the day
--Takako Minekawa
"Sometime in the early to mid '00s, I was on tour in Japan. I was playing at the now closed venue Bridge in Tennoji. It was one of my favourite venues in Japan, mostly as Tennoji still holds those secrets of Japan's 20th century history; the nocturnal, dreamlike sensibilities that reach out to us from beyond, much like say Chris Marker's San Soleil does. The concert was most memorable though for one reason -- Ytamo. Before I performed, Ytamo (who at the time I had not heard of) commandeered a piano and created one of the most unusual and soothing pieces of music I had ever heard. These were songs that felt as if they were on the edge of consciousness, they flowed with grooves that seemed to suggest a deep hypnosis. It was quite honestly audio magic. Now the better part of a decade on, I have the pleasure to have a hand in making her latest recording available. MI WO orbits in a more aquatic space than her earlier works. Shimmering electronics abound, melodies like the tides and rhythms that vibrate with oceanic gravity. Originally created to accompany an exhibition by Argentine artist Natalí Katz, MI WO sees Ytamo expand her palette considerably. She melts together the core of her song explorations with a rich sonic texturing that is both compelling and evocative. It's my great privilege to share this with you." --Lawrence English
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RMSG 015CD
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What is Fantasy League? Taking his unique blend of acoustic and electronic elements as a starting point, Brisbane artist Andrew Tuttle has devised an approach to the notion of Fantasy League loosely based upon the idea of the creation of an album as a utopian fantasy environment. This environment sets social interaction against total isolation. It sets self-reflexivity against self-confidence; it promises to complete you, as you complete it. But at what point is the fantasy to be broken? At what point must the music fall away from the promise of becoming and into the concrete nature of being? In Fantasy League, your position is only ever as certain as your desires. Music and self are in unison, but never settled or steady. Written, recorded, edited, and mixed May-October 2015, James Street. Mastered by Lawrence English, November 2015. Andrew Tuttle: computer, banjo, synthesizer, acoustic guitar. Tuttle has released recordings on Room40's A Guide To Saints label and Heligator, in addition to several private mixtapes. Tuttle has collaborated live or on record with artists including Matmos, Lawrence English, Blank Realm, Mike Cooper, and Heinz Riegler, and shared concert lineups with Matmos, Julia Holter, Hauschka, The Soft Pink Truth, Forest Swords, Omar Souleyman, Om, Marihiko Hara, and countless others. Prior to 2013, Tuttle created music under the nom de musique of Anonymeye, releasing three albums and performing over 100 concerts in Australia, Europe, and New Zealand.
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RMSG 002R-CD
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In late 2006, Someone Good received a package from a young Tokyo musician called Akira Kosemura. On the CD-R was the initial rendering of It's On Everything. Instantly, label-heads Lawrence and Rebecca English were struck by Kosemura's amazing sense of melody, space and compositional restraint. Working at the edge of pop structures, avant-garde influences and a gentle yet focused textural aesthetic, Kosemura typified a new vision of melodic instrumentation shrouded in rich textural electronics. Within a couple of months, Someone Good was preparing to release the album that would go on to lay the groundwork for one of the most vital and considered independent artists currently working in Japan. Someone Good couldn't be more proud to re-release this edition -- five years on, it still feels as fresh and passionate as it did the first time they heard it.
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RMSG 013CD
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Japanese composer Keiichi Sugimoto aka FilFla's mini-LP, Fliptap, is the latest addition to Someone Good's ongoing "10 Songs in 20 Minutes" series. "10 Songs in 20 Minutes" is a collection of albums refining and capturing the essence of avant-pop songwriting. A euphoric collection of pop-infused electronic microcosms, Fliptap is a celebration of minimal composition. Keiichi Sugimoto is a master crafts-person when it comes to creating micro pop hooks and with Fliptap, he boils down an essential vision of what FilFla is about. Fliptap is littered with fractured vocal lines, ear-worm guitar melodies, subtle synth hooks and pulsing rhythmic energy -- the perfect combination for repeated listens.
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