New releases from
Shame File Music
Arthur Cantrill -
Hootonics LP The soundtrack to Arthur and Corinne Cantrill's 1970
feature-length film Harry Hooton features
the groundbreaking music/sound created using a variety of musique concrete/tape techniques, collage, and treated recordings
of early CSIRO mainframe computers. Hooton was a poet, futurist and thinker
associated with the Sydney Push, and a formative influence on the Cantrill's
artistic view, as detailed in Arthur's liner notes. This extraordinary
soundtrack is a fitting tribute to Hooton, and stands as unique
proto-electronic noise music decades ahead of its time. Limited edition of 300
copies, includes download card with bonus non-LP track.
Special offer – get Arthur
Cantrill’s ‘Chromatic Mysteries: soundtracks 1963-2009’ CD with ‘Hootonics’ for
a discounted price
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.
New titles on Shame
File Music mailorder:
Teletopa "Tokyo
1972" 2CD/3LP In 1968 the young Sydney composer David Ahern studied in
Germany with Stockhausen where he met Cornelius Cardew. The next year he
travelled onto London attending Cardew’s classes in ‘Experimental Music’ at
Morley College and - in a mammoth seven-hour concert at the Roundhouse on 4 May
- participated (with Cardew) in performances of La Monte Young’s String Trio
and also took part in the realisation of Paragraph 2 of Cardew’s The Great
Learning which proved to be the catalyst for the formation of the Scratch
Orchestra. These were revolutionary and defining moments in 20th century music.
Returning to Sydney in 1970, one of Ahern's aims was to set
up an electro-acoustic improvisation group - Teletopa was founded in Sydney in
late 1970 by Ahern, Peter Evans and Roger Frampton. Tokyo 1972 features two 50 minute improvisations from a radio
session at NHK studios Tokyo. The group was Ahern, Frampton, Evans and Geoffrey
Collins and they were completing a 1972 world tour. The group broke up on their
return to Sydney. Only a small example of their work has ever been released
before.
Packaged as a multi-panel digipak (the double CD version)
and screen printed (triple LP) cover,the Liner notes include an Ahern manifesto
from a 1971 pamphlet, and a newly penned "Potted History of Teletopa"
by former member Geoffrey Barnard. The tapes have sat in boxes for 42 years.
With this release we can hear that Sydney in the early 1970's had a group at
the forefront of musical experimentation with a unique take on free
improvisation.
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 hand numbered 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.
Solvent Cage
"Ceremony" CDR - Dense, precise and foreboding instances of sonic
darkness. Limited first edition of 25 hand-numbered copies on elegant
transparent paper covers.
Shame File Music: Australian experimental and beyond...
http://ShameFileMusic.com
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