Lawrence English’s Room40 label has confirmed details of its next two releases, with both of which exploring minimalism.
The first, from Erkki Veltheim, is titled Ganzfeld Experiment and due out on August 16. It’s an audiovisual work for electric violin, video and signal processing, and sees Veltheim draw inspiration from esoteric and occult numerology, Tony Conrad and Brion Gysin’s experiments with flicker and the Dreamachine, and Terry Riley’s piece ‘Persian Surgery Dervishes’. You can hear it just below.
"In ‘Ganzfeld experiment’, as in many other of my works, I’m particularly searching for an ecstatic experience, one that transports the audience outside of their rational, everyday selves," says Veltheim. "The constantly panning white noise and visual flicker are intended to induce a hallucinatory state where one’s sense of time and perception are disoriented, becoming prone to suggestibility by the repetitive but subtly morphing sounds and images."
The second of the label’s new releases, from Todd Anderson-Kunert, is titled Conjectures and due out a week later on August 23. It sees the Australian composer has devised an electronic drone piece built for the Moog System 55.
To create the album, he used one of the few existing Moog System 55 machines in the world, devising the piece entirely with it. It’s Anderson-Kunert’s first release for Room40. You can hear it below
"Sonically it uses only electronic sounds in order to interrogate frequency, dynamics, and
timbre, being influenced by genres of noise, modern classical, ambient and varieties of electronic experimentation," he says. "Recordings that were close to me during this period include works by Eliane Radigue, Sarah Davachi, Pan Sonic, Stephen O’Malley, Okkyung Lee and The Haters."
Check out Room40 on Bandcamp here.
