New on Shame File Music mailorder + associated gigs/events

New items on Shame File Mailorder

Order online at http://ShameFileMusic.com

Surface Noise is a new series of limited edition (50 copies), hand-numbered CDRs documenting live performances of experimental and noise artists. Each volume features live performances from two different artists; the first initially invited by the curators, and the second then chosen by the first artist. Co-released by Melbourne labels Iceage Productions and Shame File Music, the series will consist of ten volumes.

cleaninglady/Klunk - Surface Noise vol. 1 CDR The Surface Noise series kicks off with a Melbourne double, featuring the modular synthesis noise of cleaninglady and a subterranean performance of unique handmade instruments and electronics from Rod Cooper’s Klunk.

Kate Carr "Overhead in Doi Saket" SD Card Hand-numbered SDHC card contains audio in wave, printed mini booklet in PDF and many more extra photos from Thailand. "For a collection of field recordings to be effective in its aims, we need a sense of casually listening in on a sonic landscape, rather than a feeling of naked voyeurism. Belfast-via-Australia sound artist Kate Carr has earned a reputation in recent years for opening doors into said realms, offering glimpses of rough-hewn terrain and glacial paradise alike. With this latest set of pieces, Carr has given us perhaps her most colorful, vivid and strikingly melodic work yet, a bursting world of sound stitched together in a fine-knit tapestry, woven out of recordings made on a trip to Thailand. Free of any trace of exotic fetishizing, this is true audio tourism raised to an immersive art form, moving from the hum of night creatures to the far-off whir of broadcasted music to birdsong to natural swells with the seams not hard to glimpse but absolutely invisible. There's an aura of a homecoming here — Carr does not sound like an outsider in this environment. Rather, it feels like she's always been here at the margins, haunting the corners, microphone aimed into space and water alike, capturing impressions of a shifting, ghostly panorama." - Zachary Corsa

 

Eugene Chadbourne "Viajando Hacia Adelante Y Hacia Atras En El Tiempo Con El Loco Doctor Chad: 30 Years Of Rarities" 2CD Loosely translated: 'Travelling forward and backward in time with the crazy Doctor Chad'. This incredible collection of Eugene Chadbourne rarities compiles 35 tracks over 30 years time and was put together by Andres Argil, an experimental guitarist from Mexico. What amazes me about this is that listening to this sprawling collection, I can see that Dr. Chad has had a vision, a crazed spirit of creativity which both embraces and pokes fun at any and all traditions in music from jazz to free to rock to country to psych to folk & blues & noise. The booklet includes liner notes by Dr. Chadbourne in English & Spanish explaining where & when each piece was recorded. Guest include John Zorn, Shockabilly, Violent femmes, red Clay Ramblers, Camper van Beethoven, Sun City Girls, ZU, Paul Lovens, Han Bennink, NoahJohn, Leonid Soybelman, Pat Thomas, Alex Ward, Jimmy Carl Black, David Moss, Jon Rose, Andrea Centazzo plus numerous solo guitar rarities unearthed for the first time. From the brilliant to the bizarre, this is indeed an overwhelming compilation of eccentricities from one of the distinctive guitarists to emerge from the early Downtown scene. - Bruce Lee Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

 

 

Cat Hope "The End of Abe Sada"(paperback book) - This book traces composer and noise artist, Cat Hope's 'Abe Sada' project from its inception in 2006 until the PICA What I see when I Look at Sound exhibition and the premiere of the Australian Bass Orchestra. 48pp pocket-size book with colour fold-out of the graphic score for The End of Abe Sada, with an introduction by Jack Sargeant.

 

 

Martin Kay - All Things Metal CD "All Things Metal is a collection of recordings I have taken over the last 5 years of various environments and sound events captured closeup to and through an array of functioning and discarded metal infrastructure and objects. My intention for this album is to highlight the unique ability that metal possesses in abstracting, transforming and reconfiguring a given landscape — propelling the listener to reconsider their emotional and psychological connections to familiar urban environments." - Martin Kay 

 

 

Ron Nagorcka "Atom Bomb Becomes Folk Art" 2CD An overview of the pioneering Australian (now resident of Tasmania) composer's career, with compositions from 1974-2006 covering tape music, electro-acoustic works, field recording and just intonation. The highlight of this set is the full recording of Australian ensemble, Golden Fur, interpreting Nagorcka's seminal tape recorder opera "Atom Bomb", performed for the first time in over 30 years ('one of the most twistedly beautiful things I have ever heard', says Al Margolis of Pogus Records). With liner notes by Larry Polansky

 

 

Tarab - Shards of Splinters CD Sprod collected all of the sounds for Shards Of Splinters while on a month-long residency at MoKS in Estonia. He purposefully chose to go to Estonia in the middle of a very cold, very bleak Baltic winter, in stark contrast to the fire-season and sweltering temperatures he would have found at the same time in his native Australia. As with his small back catalogue, Shards Of Splinters navigates along the boundary between the natural and the industrial - where factories had been left to collapse and to be consumed by vegetation, where tin sheds were torn asunder by hurricane force winds, where rusted pipes eerily resonate chorale drones from unseen cisterns deep under the surface of the earth. Many a field recordist and sound ecologist uses this boundary space to collect a beguiling array of recordings, but Sprod focuses almost entirely on mapping an apocalyptic poetry through his profoundly broken sounds. The unforgiving cold of the Estonian winter threads his recordings of slushing ice, crumbled concrete, and scraped metal that he deftly arranges into ruptures and disturbances that churn through tactile squeaks and metallic vibrations. There is a violence front and center in Sprod's work as if he's forecast the globe itself waking from hibernation to exterminate humanity once and for all. Aesthetically, Shards Of Splinters finds common ground with Eric La Casa or the more narrative work of Chris Watson; but conceptually, Sprod takes a much darker approach akin to Small Cruel Party or G*Park, that gives his recordings a magnificent depth. Brilliant. - Jim Haynes.

 

 

Tarab - Strata CD Strata has been constructed from recording made in a series of vacant lots and their immediate surrounds in the north-west of Melbourne. These vacant lots are backed onto by various factories and warehouses on one side and a train line and Moonee Ponds creek (perhaps more aptly described as a concrete storm water drain) on the other. Running some 20 meters above all this is a large multi-lane highway overpass...Rather than attempting to document this location I set out to construct a sound piece from the place itself through my direct interaction with it. Somehow collecting together all the existent traces I could unearth to form the work. Not only through walking, observing and recording the various areas and sounds but also by crawling and scratching around in the dirt; sifting through the piles of discarded objects; listening to the solid vibrations of the concrete pylons and traffic noise from inside the creek; by burying microphones and dragging them through the dirt and rubble. Strata attempts to respond to ideas of urban density and emptiness, and to show how these states blur and overlap each other. I have tried to highlight the small hidden details and with them create a condensed hyper-real version of my many wanderings through this area. But perhaps more simply put, Strata is the result of a process of attempting to, if only fleetingly, inhabit somewhere. To see, hear, smell and touch it. - Eamon Sprod (Tarab)
Limited edition of 200 handnumbered copies.

 

 

Tarab - I'm Lost CD A schizoid-concrete opus of environmental sounds heightened, stimulated, decontextualized, and teased into a psychic puzzle of industrialized and post-industrialized detritus, I'm Lost marks another milestone in the ever impressive catalogue from Australian sound-artist Eamon Sprod, who adopts the moniker Tarab for his endeavors. The title is one that explodes with a multitude of meaning. There's the geographical frustration in losing one's way as the surrounding landmarks fail to match with whatever technology may be in use (e.g. a sextant, a compass, an iPhone, a torn map, one's poor memory of a childhood neighborhood, etc.). There's the psychological implications of being lost from the existential narratives that we have scripted for ourselves due to broken relationships, failed jobs, dead relatives, natural disasters, the hand of God, etc. In addition to these possibilities, Sprod proposes that the notion of "lost" could also be an inversion of the idea of the "found object" or the "found sound," instead becoming the "lost object" or the "lost sound." Sprod's semantic wordplay is hardly a conceptual gimmick, as he fully immerses himself in the confusional framework while maintaining a consummate technical prowess over his field recordings. The compositional approach is rhizomatic, with dead-ends, wrong turns, and reprisals of these same dead-ends and wrong turns, offering a blackhumor sneer at the stubbornness of humanity's inability to learn from our mistakes (e.g. pollution, blight, poverty, disease, etc). Within the album's harsh edits and disjointed collages, Sprod renders sound with dysphoric associations through his vacant drift, crumbled gravel, scalding plasma-tube frequencies, and putrid factory noise. I'm Lost achieves the same psychological gravity as heard in the works of Sudden Infant, P16.D4, and John Duncan with an even greater sense of dislocation from those pioneers of radical tape splicing.

 

 

Various artists "Ladyz in Noyz: Australia volume II" 2CDR - A double disc set featuring an array of Australian women working in noise and experimental-related music. But beyond gender, this is a fantastic survey of contemporary Australian noise and cutting edge musics, ranging from extended vocalists (Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Amanda Stewart, Kusam Normoyle) to electronic manipulations (Eves, Fur Chick, Gail Priest, Gurner), through to extended instruments (Rosalind Hall, Laura Altman) and glorious noise (Cat Hope).

 

 

BACK IN STOCK - Various Artists "Source Records 1-6: Music of the Avant Garde 1968-1971" 3CD Originally released on a series of 10" LPs from 1968 to 1971 by the new music journal Source, this series documents some of the most significant experimental music from largely US composers (plus New Zealand's Annea Lockwood) of the time. This series has been remastered and issued as a 3 CD set with booklet; a veritable time capsule from a time and place that was hotbed in the developing story of experimental music. Other composers include Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Larry Austin and more.

Shame File Music: Australian experimental and beyond...

http://ShameFileMusic.com

Upcoming Gigs/Events:

 

More Talk, Less Action 2014 #2 ‘Promoting Unpopular Music: How and Why.

We all know it’s a long way to the top if you wanna rock’n’roll, and if you’re true to your art, forget about it. Many creatives face the problem of whether and how to promote unpopular culture. But is there more to promo than getting bums onto seats? Can the marketing extend the message? Our panelists are all experienced in the subtle art of leading people to music’s fringes; from running record shops specialising in musical oddities, to curating sound art festivals, and straddling the barbed-wire fence between comedy and indie pop. They offer wisdom about the dos and don’ts of selling the unsellable.

PROMOTING UNPOPULAR MUSIC: HOW AND WHY
Panelists:
Philip Samartzis (lecturer in sound culture at RMIT, organizer of festivals)
Pat O’Brien (3RRR, Sunshine and Grease label/shop)
Justin Heazlewood (The Bedroom Philosopher, author of Funemployed)
moderated by Greg Wadley (Hi God People, New Waver, Spill label, University of Melbourne)

Thursday 2nd October from 7:30pm sharpish
West Space gallery, Level 1, 225 Bourke st, Melbourne
join the Facebook event

More Talk, Less Action is a series of events featuring short performances with panel+audience discussion relating to topics of interest to music makers and afficionados. See http://MoreTalk.org for details, archive of previous events, etc.

** THIS Ensemble will play for a very long time on:
Friday 10 October, 2014 - 8:30pm
Cross Street (Moreland City Band Hall), East Brunswick.
Facebook event

** General Assemble of Interested Parties at Testing Grounds #2
I will be taking part in this 8 hour multi-media social event.
Sunday 12 October, 2014. 11am-7pm
Testing Grounds, 1-23 City Rd. Southbank
Facebook event

** I will be playing an outdoor acoustic duo with Ernie Althoff at this house gig. Also playing are Bound For Glory, Bonnie Mercer and Rod Cooper.
Inside/Outside
Saturday 26 October, 2014 - 2pm
Mitcham
Facebook event

** Good Improv/Bad Improv - two upcoming performances of my game piece/structured improvisation.

"Good Improv/Bad Improv" explores both negative and positive behaviours in group improvisation. Performers are arranged into trios, then each musician draws an instruction from a hat, which they then follow in the subsequent improvisation, without revealing the instruction to their fellow performers or audience until afterwards. Instructions include:

- Play softer than everyone else
- Completely disregard what the others play
- Be the star of the trio

Can you pick which are the good or bad behaviours?

Here is the score for the piece, including full details of how it works and all the instructions available to performers.

Thursday 20 November, 2014 - 7:30pm
More Talk, Less Action (2014) #3 - Improvisation: How To Win
West Space, Level 1, 225 Bourke Street, Melbourne
Performers: Lloyd Honeybrook, Adam Simmons, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang. Also in discussion with Clinton Green.

Saturday 29 November, 2014 - 2:30pm
Musikunst
Edinburgh Castle Hotel, 681 Brunswick Road, Brunswick
Performers TBA