Posts Tagged ‘Room40’

Helen Svoboda – Headwater

Posted: 17 June 2026 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 26th June 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s rare that an album sits so far beyond the realms of any genre that it’s difficult to know where to start in discussing it. Helen Svoboda’s Headwater is one such rare album.

The pitch describes Headwater as ‘a stream of fragmentation, individuality and wholeness, shaped by disparate and complementary aspects of Helen Svoboda’s solo practice. Sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ run throughout the record to form an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved songform. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself’.

Lately I’ve been quite amazed by how little people I know can actually remember from times past. I don’t mean the fact that friends from school can’t remember people from our year we weren’t eve n friends with (although I do), but just events and things in general. I find myself haunted by memories stretching as far back to when I was just three, but most people I know can barely remember what they did last week, or what they had for dinner. Seeing my mother slide rapidly into a haze of dementia forgetfulness in recent months, I’ve spent a lot of time lately reflecting on memory on many levels. I’ve long considered it analogous to a vast ROM drive, but have wondered about the means of access to the stored files. And as much as these contemplations have led to some dark places, I’ve become more accepting of different capacities for recollection, while still feeling a degree of fear for the future.

The ensemble she’s has assembled certainly makes for an unusual combination, consisting as it does of Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). Double bass is rare. Two double basses – in a quartet – is unheard of, and makes for some incredibly unconventional instrumental interplay across the sixteen compositions.

Many of those compositions are brief – under two minutes in duration – but convey so much.

‘Veins’, released in advance of the album and featuring vocals from Selma Savolainen is sparse, ethereal, and is representative – to some extent, although the range of the compositions is such that no one piece could ever truly summarise its contents.

The album’s first song, ‘If’, is a deeply atmospheric amalgamation of stylistic elements. In many respects, it’s predominantly a folk song, and one built on foundations of curving drones and rousing vocals. It’s stirringly evocative, and calls to mind in some ways the earthy feel of Wardruna, only without the tribal percussion or sense of the cinematic. This feels more inwardly-focused and reflective, but is certainly no less powerful.

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‘Child’ begins almost acapella save for a sparse, low-key drone, but builds to a wailing crescendo, and Svoboda’s voice is nothing short of captivating, conveying so much more than the words alone. In contrast, the instrumental ‘Blur’ is a sawing strain of dissonance as a cacophony of strings scrape and scratch discordantly to create a nerve-jangling tension. It may only be two minutes in duration, but it’s ten minutes in intensity.

There’s spacey experimentalism and loose jazz leanings on ‘Void of Space’, and ‘Evening Hepuli’ brings high drama and breathy, operatic hysteria over stop/start strings which ring and reverberate. The final piece, ‘Hepuli Earworm’ is commanding, in places a wild jazz frenzy, occasionally inviting comparisons to The Necks, in others conjuring expansive soundscapes and moments with real emotional edge.

Headwater is not a straightforward album: it’s quirky and unconventional, and not always immediately accessible. But it’s inventive, imaginative, truly unique in composition and delivery, and, in parts, incredibly powerful.

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Photo: Celeste de Clario

Listen: ‘Veins’ by Helen Svoboda

Posted: 5 June 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Helen Svoboda now shares another glimpse of her forthcoming album, Headwater (out 26th June via Room40), with the mystical ‘Veins’. In collaboration with Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen, Helen Svoboda delves into her Nordic background in the vocal work on this track and throughout the album, carrying echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words with Savolainen as the second voice.

The distinctive sonic world of Headwater weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.

About the track, Helen says, “’Veins’ features the inimitable vocals of Finnish artist Selma Savolainen, as she explores the repeated phrase; ‘The veins I’ve grown from my mother/The tentacles beneath my skin’. This short pondering is injected with raw emotion and melancholic beauty, as if she is bursting out of her younger self.”

Listen to ‘Veins’ here:

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The instrumental pieces reveal an articulate language, with an expanded approach to the melodic and textural qualities of the double bass. Svoboda’s fascination with timbre is explored with collaborator Jacques Emery through the interplay of the two basses and Robinson’s electronics, extending traditional understandings of how the double bass might typically operate in a chamber context. The result is a different sound-realm entirely – traversing between spaces of lightness and weight, bound by a sense of youthful curiosity.

The ensemble features Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). 

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Photo credit: Celeste de Clario

Watch: ‘Void of Space’ by Helen Svoboda

Posted: 2 May 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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In a second glimpse of the forthcoming album Headwater (out 26th June), Room40’s Helen Svoboda now shares the sparse and mystical ‘Void of Space’. The song begins with a stark vocal, before close harmonies and pizzicato strings lurch the song into something more quizzical, full of wonder and uncertainty.

The distinctive sonic world of Headwater weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.

About the track, Helen says, “’Void of Space’ exists in the in-between, in a daydream, where thoughts evaporate into one another. The lyrics paint this picture, where a stream of thought "climbs up a cloud, but falls through", in a never-ending abstract void of space.”

Filmmaker Angus Kirby adds, “This video is a trip from the vaguely familiar to the unknown. Besides a literal interpretation of the title, ‘Void of Space’ has a celestial quality in its silences and sense of scale. To listen to it is it float through an eerie vacuum. I figured the video should reflect that with experiments with light and empty locations we’re used to seeing populated. Gradually we become untethered until we find ourselves in the titular void."”

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Photo credit: Celeste de Clario

Watch: ‘If’ by Helen Svoboda

Posted: 31 March 2026 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Room40 – 31st March 2026

Room40 announces a new album by the Finnish/Australian award-winning double bassist, vocalist and composer Helen Svoboda, arriving on the 26th June.

The distinctive sonic world of Headwater weaves sixteen threads or ‘earworms’ built around two double basses, two voices, and electronics; heard as singular and combinatory bodies of material. The album forms an abstracted picture of self, rooted in a devolved song form. It can be experienced as a tapestry that blurs the edges of identity; strange, beautiful, evaporative, and fluid, like memory itself.

On revealing the album opener, ‘If" today, Svoboda says “’If’ explores a dream shaped by constant interruptions. The sleeper is caught in a series of jolts, driven by the fear of losing precious hours of consciousness within a fleeting human life. Each disturbance prevents a descent into deeper sleep, yet the body never full awakes.

“The video, directed and filmed by Angus Kirby, captures this state between rest and recurring subconscious thoughts. We filmed this around the corner from my house in Melbourne during, and after, a stunning summer sunset.”

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Songs are glued together by extended instrumental practice, improvisation, and strands of Svoboda’s cultural heritage. As a Finnish-born artist who has lived in Australia since the age of five, Svoboda delves into her Nordic background largely through the album’s vocal work, which carries echoes of Finnish folk harmony and traces of invented “Finnish” words, explored in collaboration with Savolainen as the second-voice. Svoboda notes that she does not seek to emulate or replicate this style of music, but has taken and nurtured the seeds of its influence on her musical language into something deeply personal and intuitive.

The instrumental pieces reveal an articulate language, with an expanded approach to the melodic and textural qualities of the double bass. Svoboda’s fascination with timbre is explored with collaborator Jacques Emery through the interplay of the two basses and Robinson’s electronics, extending traditional understandings of how the double bass might typically operate in a chamber context. The result is a different sound-realm entirely – traversing between spaces of lightness and weight, bound by a sense of youthful curiosity.

The ensemble features Helen Svoboda (double bass, voice, composition) with close collaborators Jacques Emery (double bass), Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen (voice), and Tilman Robinson (electronics, production). 

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Photo credit: Celeste de Clario

Richard Francis – Combinations 4

Posted: 26 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th December 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

2025 has been something of a year of noise for me – on the reviewing front, for sure, but perhaps more so on the creative front. Noise doesn’t have to be confrontational or antagonistic. Moreover, it can most certainly be a release. Richard Francis’ latest offering, Combinations 4, is a work which offers up some substantial noise, with a broad exploration of frequencies which are immersive rather than attacking. Churning, droning, unsettling, it spans the range of what noise can do without venturing into the domains of the harsh. Nevertheless, this makes for a pretty challenging work.

Francis’ summary of his working practice and of this album is worth digesting, for context, as he writes clearly and factually:

‘Since 2010 all of the recordings I make and release are improvised live takes, recorded down to a stereo digital recorder with very little editing other than EQ, trimmed beginnings and ends, and the occasional layering of two tracks together… I arrived here through spending many years prior trying to build an electrical system (which I now call the ‘fugue system’) that would do what I did in composition/studio work but in a live setting: combining together dozens of sounds with open feedback and generative channels, and discrete control for each. Then when I finished building that system using digital and analogue tools, I preferred what I heard and recorded ‘on the fly’ more than what I was doing in composition, so that system is now my instrument in a way.’ Precisely what this system is and how it works is unexplained, and we probably don’t need to know: process and tech can very easily become tedious and adds little, when ultimately, it’s about output.

As the title suggests, this is the fourth in his Combinations series, and here, Francis suggests ‘there’s a bit more structure and layering to the works, if that makes sense’. It makes more sense in context, I assume, because on its own, Combinations 4 is a tour though difficult terrain, and any structures are at best vague.

‘Four A’ is a deluge of dirty noise, curtains of white noise rain cascade, and ‘Leave it all alone for months’ is a queasy mess of drones and groans, a morass of undulating dissonance. This piece is quiet but uncomfortable, the sound of strain, whining, churning unsettling. ‘Parehuia’ booms frequencies which simply hurt. In places, it gets grainy and granular, and the experience is simply uncomfortable. I feel my skin crawl. From here, we plunge into ‘My Fuel! I Love It!’ It’s six-and-a-half head-shredding minutes of sonic discomfort, dominated by rising howls and rings.

Assuming ‘Phase effect on wet road’ is a purely descriptive title based on the source material, it’s three minutes of the sound of heavy rain heavily treated while undulating phase hovers and hums, creating an oppressive atmosphere which bleeds into the slow ebb and flow of ‘The alphabet is a sampler’. The effect of Combinations 4 is cumulative, and while the final four of the album’s ten compositions tend to be comparatively shorter, they’re dense and difficult to process. By the arrival of the quivering, quavering oscillations of closer ‘Four J’, which become increasingly disjointed and discombobulating as the piece progresses, you’re feeling a shade disorientated, and more than vaguely overwhelmed.

For an album which appears, on the surface, to be a fairly innocuous work of experimentalism, with Combinations 4, Richard Francis has created something which delivers substantial psychological impact by stealth.

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David Shea – Meditatons

Posted: 21 December 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room 40 – 7th January 2026

Christopher Nosnibor

Today, December 21st, is the Winter solstice: in terms of daylight hours, the shortest day of the year, and the longest night. As I write, we’ve had cloud, fog, mist, and rain most days here in York for weeks, so it’s essentially felt like one perpetual night for nigh on an eternity. I’m certainly no summer sun lover (I have fair skin and suffer with hayfever), but do struggle with this time of year – always did, but personal circumstances have accentuated the struggle. Watching Shutter Island with my fourteen-year-old daughter earlier (it seemed like a good idea to avoid conventional ‘family’ ‘Christmas’ fare), she commented on how the ‘man with dead wife is troubled and has wild dreams’ trope is perhaps disproportionately common in movies. She’s absolutely right, of course, but the observation hit hard and brought me back to the reason we were avoiding the schmaltzy family Christmas shit – and reminded me that there’s simply no escape from my personal narrative, that my wife was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer just before Christmas in 2021, and died just after Christmas in 2023. These facts not only make it hard for Christmas to be happy, but dealing with all of the stuff like Christmas shopping, present-wrapping, arranging seeing relatives, etc. – stuff that was primarily her domain – on my own is a significant source of stress.

And this is why, on seeing this release had arrived for my attention, it made sense to do myself a favour, for a change. Music is, after all, one of the best therapies. While I’ve little to no interest in new age cack or pseudomystical bullshit, and have generally failed at any attempts to mediate with the limited assistance I’ve had, the idea of a method of achieving mental calm still holds significant appeal.

As David Shea explains in the album’s accompanying notes, ‘Meditations is a set of 8 works based on the experience of meditation practice. Music made for both meditation and reflecting the realities of a life of daily practice. The breath, the quietness, the listening, the distracted dissonant and consonant thoughts that pass through. The texts throughout the pieces are fragments of the Buddhist Heart Sutra, the shortest and created from a mixture of traditions and sources, produced long after Buddha’s death and meant to be chanted or sung as a ritual and personal meditation. The experience of meditation, so often covered in mythology and one dimensionally peaceful symbols, is in fact a complex set of traditions in all cultures and has roots in indigenous cultures world wide and involves the limitations of thought as well as the quietness of the mind as a source of understanding and health.

‘The Buddhist teachings that are in focus in this album are in a sense a sequel to the record Rituals of 2015 in that they are adapted as Meditations that cross and combine traditions with any attempt consciously to synthesize them into a new whole. A conversation between traders, in the form here of musicians, languages, sound sources and the peace and struggle of maintaining a real meditational practice and living in the chaos and violence of society as well as accepting the world as it is, with all of the internal conflicts and release and rise of tension.’

Each of the eight pieces is around eight minutes in duration, and are centred around Shea’s piano, with a host of musicians bringing a range of electronic and acoustic additions, ranging from singing bowls and vibraphone, to samples and midi guitar. The resultant work is gentle, subtle, and sedately-paced. There are tweeting birds flitting around notes which hang, suspended, resonating for substantial durations. Hums and drones. Hints of melodies. Any structures are not based around motifs or repetition, but a flow. That flow is not a linear trajectory, a passage from A to B, but a flow which weaves into the places where the calm is residing.

As much as I’ve always struggled to work with visualisation in guided meditation, Meditations somehow conjures mental images through its abstraction – perhaps because of its abstraction. Being told to visualise a stream, a woodland, a beach, is too much direction, too much ‘relaxation to order’, the meditative equivalent of mandatory of fun in a corporate environment. But with open-ended, non-specific assistance, the channels seem to open more freely. Just as I find ideas and words come to me more readily while out walking, when my blood is oxygenated and my lymphatic flowing comfortably, music which invited free interpretation and successfully evokes images without directed prompts unlocks doors and presents access to unknown passageways.

Piano and acoustic guitar ripple and trickle and ebb and eddy. On ‘Sitting in a Painted Cave’, which ventures more overtly into experimental and Eastern-influenced territory, picked acoustic guitar weaves a textured tapestry. The spoken word interjection is something I find proves to be a distraction in terms of the flow, but I feel this is more because my ideal tranquil space contains no evidence of human existence whatsoever. As a human being myself, I do accept this contradiction, just as I accept the irony of my rage at the presence of others when out for a walk seeking solitude. The track’s second half is rather more dissonant and difficult, with muffled voices adding an unsettling edge. It’s rather less relaxing.

The harmonics, drone, and piano-led ambience of ‘Stillness’ is rather more tolerable, but still wailing drones and tapers quaver before the rippling piano rises from the dissonance of amid-range feedback.

I might have expected ‘The Morning I Awoke’ to be more uplifting, and more… hippy, but it’s largely piano and calming acoustic strums and brooding strings. ‘Tye Heart Sutra’ more than compensate, and offers a spiritual trip and then some. But how to differentiate between business as a need to maintain production? It’s felt like It’s felt like the longest night of the year for about 2 months now.

‘The Heart Sutra’ arrives unexpectedly, before ‘Svaha’ arrives boldly but swiftly tapers into a droning serenity. The sound is dense, a resonant ‘om’, and it leads the listener – at last – to slow, deep breaths, as an undulating vocal –a folky, almost shanty-like lilting quaver- comes to the fore.

Despite its intentions – as specified by the title – Meditations is not quite the sonic still water is first implies. There are dark currents, difficult swells amidst the soothing flows. But for that, it feels more honest, more real.

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Ov Pain – Free Time

Posted: 22 November 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 / A Guide To Saints – 7th November 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Free time? What’s that? Who actually has free time anymore? Something seems to have gone awry. Every technological advance promises more leisure time: from the industrial revolution to the advent of AI, the promise has always been that increased productivity through automation would give us more free time. So where the fuck is it? I don’t know anyone who isn’t constantly chasing their tail, running just to stand still, who doesn’t feel like they’re losing the plot or on the brink of burnout simply because the demands of working and running a household is close to unmanageable, and making ends meet is a major challenge… and the stress suffered as a consequence. N

Ov Pain – the experimental duo consisting of Renee Barrance and Tim Player seemingly scraped and made time to record this album, a set of live improvisations (saving the time required to write and rehearse compositions), whereby, as Tim explains, ‘We recorded four different synthesizers – two apiece – straight into a computer pulled from a skip.’ This is how you do it when there’s no free time and no spare money. Although not explicitly detailed in Tim’s commentary, these factors are quite apparently central to the album’s creation, and by no means unique to Ov Pain. There’s a reason many acts peter out when the members reach a certain point in life: jobs and families mean that creative pursuits require some serious drive to maintain.

Tim adds, ‘One thing that is important to us is the immediacy and economy with which it was made and how that immediacy and economy becomes the thing itself.’

For all of its expansive soundscapes and layered, textural sensations, there is very much a sense of immediacy to Free Time. But, by the same token, for an album recorded quickly, it certain makes the most of time, in terms of space. There are long periods of time where little happens, where drones simply… drone on. The sounds slip and slide in and out, interweaving, meshing, separating, and transitioning organically, but not without phases of discord and dissonance.

The first track, ‘Fascia’ – with a monolithic running time of nearly eleven minutes – is a tormenting, tremoring, elongated organ drone, soon embellished with quavering layers of synth which warps and wavers, .it; s like watching a light which initially stands still but suddenly begins to zip around all over. It sits somewhere between ambient and extreme prog, with some intricate motifs cascading over that monotonous, eternal hum. Towards the end, the density and distortion begin to build, making for a climactic finale.

‘Slouching Toward Erewhon’ tosses in a neat literary allusion while bringing a sense of bewilderment and abstraction to proceedings, before ‘Comparative Advantage’ slowly pulses and trills, then crackles and buzzes, a thick surging swell of noise which is uneasy on the ear. And yet, the seconds of silence in the middle of the track are more uncomfortable… at least until the throbbing distortion bursts in atop stains of feedback and whirring static.

It may have been building for some time, but this is one of those evolving sets which after a time, you suddenly come to appreciate has expanded, and gone from a fairly easy drift to a heavy-duty drone assault.

Over the course of the album’s seven pieces, Ov Pain really do push the limits of their comparatively limited instrumentation. ‘Slander’ is a squalling, eardrum-damaging blast of gnarly treble that borders on extreme electronica, a straight-up assault on the ears and the mind. It hits all the harder because there is no let-up, and the frequencies are harsh and the sounds serrated. Around the mid-point, it goes darker, gritter, more abrasive, making for a punishing six minutes. Further layer of distortion and screaming noise enter the fray. It’s not quite Merzbow, but it’s by no means accessible. The final track, ‘Pusillanimous’ presents seven minutes of slow-pulsating ambience, and is altogether more tranquil to begin with, but before long, there are thick bursts of distortion and overdrive, and low rumbles heave and grind in ways which tug at the intestines. I feel my skin crawl at the tension.

Free Time is an album of surprises, and, more often than not of discomfort. It’s the sound of our times.

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Ben Frost – Steelwound

Posted: 18 September 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 19th September 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

There are many labels putting interesting and unusual, innovative releases into the world. The majority of them are small, and supremely niche, but survive by virtue of knowing their audience – and I say audience rather than market, because while they obviously need to balance financially, often on the minutest of margins, they exist for the purpose of disseminating art rather than the production of profit. The underground operates on a very, very different model, and with very different objectives, from the mainstream.

One label which is consistent in its output is Lawrence English’s Room40. The interview I conducted with Lawrence some years ago has vanished from the Internet now, as happens when websites cease to operate and their owners stop paying for their hosting, but it will always stand as one of my favourites. This is relevant, because we touched on the subjects of William Burroughs, cut-ups, and sonic collage, and lo, English, in his appraisal of Steelwound, recounts how ‘In the early 00s, Ben had been working on cut-up electronics, spilling over with floating rhythms, humming string samples and piano splices. It was a sound realised in part through the subversion of fruity loops and also owes a debt to Ableton Live which arrived in late 2001. His works to that point, gently saturated and bristling with a fizzy distortion at times, hinted at another sound world which would become his focused in the summer of 2002 and into 2003.’

A further note on Frost’s process is also informative by way of a preface, and comes again courtesy of Lawrence, who writes, ‘Working with a Fender Twin, often with the reverb dialled in at maximum, he found a language of shimmer and saturation, of compression and collision, that set the stage for a prolonged interest in how sound performs and is perceived at volume. It also is the first time that many of the tonal and melodic inflections that have come to be recognised as his compositional language are on display.’

This is the twentieth anniversary edition of an album that likely very few people have even heard of, let alone heard, and the chances are, it will remain that way despite this reissue. That isn’t because it’s not good, but because it’s ultra-niche and on a small label. But, in those certain small circles, it will likely receive attention, and deservedly so.

As is often the case, any technical and theoretical background is lost in the listening. The album’s first piece, ‘Swarm’, is an ambient work which may well weave a certain tension, but its trickling drone reveals nothing of the aforementioned context. The same is true of the epic ‘I Lay My Ear to Furious Latin’, which in itself is anything but furious, an floats, drifts and wisps abstractly over the duration of nine minutes, before the mellifluous ten-and-a-half-minute ‘You, Me and the End of Everything’ stretches out into post-rock territory, and in doing so extends its emotional pull, also. It’s slow and ponderous, spacious, and expansive, and strains of feedback scrape and push at the delicate, soft-focus edges, before the first vocals of the album arrive, haunted, detached, and deeply moving in unexpected ways. Sometimes, the human voice affects us more profoundly when any words aren’t discernible. We hear the emotion poured into them, and we feed on what we take implicitly. Sound and enunciation, delivery, can convey emotion and meaning which is beyond words, and that is very much the case here.

The title track, emerging from the rumble of thunder and heavy rain amidst a blustery backdrop scrapes and drones, trills and whines, a representation of an industrial soundscape that veers between the graceful and the brutal, the harsh, as feedback assails the ears frequently – but there are points at which it dissipates, and submits to drifting mellowness, even then the feedback continues. ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, taking its title from Hubert Selby Jr’s classic, if gritty, novel is soft but with harsher edges.

It’s hard to comment on the initial resonance or impact of Steelwound twenty years ago. There likely wasn’t much. But as the whistles and wails of the title track dissipate in a gentle breeze, it does grow dark. Not SO dark, but darker that it was. This is an album of texture and detail, moving, but also captivating, a spell of gripping stillness, a pause to reflect. As the scraping, sonorous trails of ‘And I watch You Breathe’, it’s worth stepping back, taking a moment, and breathing. Just… breathing.

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Erik Griswold – Next Level Avoidance

Posted: 19 August 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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ROOM40 – 9th August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s been some time since I’ve sat down to listen to a work created using prepared piano. It’s been even longer since I spent time with Erik Griswold’s work. Perhaps the two are related, as Griswold’s accompanying notes recount how it’s been a while for him, too:

Under the house again, just me and my very old piano. Have we got anything more to say to each other? Will some new toys spice things up a bit? The creative process seems to swing like a (Foucoult’s?) pendulum, always returning to the same spot again and again, eventually. When I last made short form prepared piano pieces in 2015 (Pain Avoidance Machine) I was “feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat.” If only I had known how far we had to go.

To the sounds of my 1885 Lipp and Sohn, prepared with brass bolts, strips of paper and rubber, I’ve added an analogue synthesizer, extending the exploration into the electronic. The tactile quality of both instruments is central to my approach, with small inconsistencies of sound, attack, decay, filtering all foregrounded. It’s a very intimate setting with just two C414 microphones at close distance to capture the granular details of sonic materials. The addition of “frames,” “windows,” and “sonic mirrors” produce a ritualistic aura hovering above and around the music.

I take a moment to reflect on reading this, before I can even bring myself to listen, reflecting on the title. Putting things off is… well, it’s a way of dealing, but it’s not really coping, is it? Not that Griswold hasn’t been making music: he’s maintained a steady flow of releases over the last few years, even during the COVID years – but to return to the piano is a significant step.

The title track raises the curtain here, and at times the tinkling tones are achingly beautiful, graceful, delicate, the most magnificent invocations of neoclassical perfection – albeit alternating with plinking, plonkling randomness which flips between low-end thunder and what, to the untrained ear or anyone unfamiliar with the instrumentation, sounds like clumsy stumbling.

‘Wild West’ isn’t a twanging country tune, and says nothing of the wiki-wiki-wah-wah we know, but a rolling piano piece with the prepared element adding a taut, almost electronic-sounding aspect – like the plucking of an egg-slicer – but also abstract, and strangely evocative. Meanwhile, the gentle, somewhat vague, and perhaps rather progressive-leaning ‘Ghost in the Middle’ radiates a hypnotic beauty.

The album’s mid-section takes on a dreamy, drifting, hazy quality, floating from here to there, with scratches and scrapes, forward and backward providing texture to these ponderous sonic expanses.

‘Uncertainty’ again balances neoclassical magnificence with angular irregularities and some jarring alternative tuning which continues into the trickling ‘Poly cascade’, a stack that’s subtle and in some way grounding.

‘Colours of Summer’ lands as a surprise and completely rips out those roots in an instant, being a throbbing techno track which completely goes against the grain of the album. In complete contrast, ‘Ghost of Ravel’ returns to classical territories, and is nothing short of beautiful, although as the album inches towards its close – the atmospheric bubbler that is ‘X-Mode’ which calls to mind the Krautrock bubbling of Tangerine Dream, and, more contemporaneously perhaps Pye Corner Audio’, find ourselves floating, drifting, unsure of where we are. Next Level Avoidance is full of surprises, and is in essence representative of the prepared piano, in that it’s unpredictable, unstable. Dim the lights, breathe and feel the flow.

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Hand To Earth – Ŋurru Wäŋa

Posted: 28 July 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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Room40 – 22nd August 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

Sometimes, I will encounter a release, and while knowing that I need to cover it, I find myself paralysed by the discovery that I am completely out of my depth. This is never more common when presented with works which represent cultures from beyond my – embarrassingly small – sphere of knowledge. And embarrassing is the word. Doubtless some would steam in and opinion with an overflowing confidence which presents itself in perfect disproportion to their knowledge, but bluffers inevitably come unstuck sooner or later, and are shown up as the arrogant cocks they are. I’ve always been of the opinion it’s better to be open about those gaps in knowledge, accept that no-one can know everything, and take the opportunities which present themselves to gain some education.

During my first or second year as an undergraduate studying for a degree in English, one tutor commented that I had squandered almost half of the first page on ‘rhetorical throat clearing’ – a magnificent and amusing turn of phrase, which summarises something I’m still guilty of some thirty years later.

Anyway: the point is, when presented with Ŋurru Wäŋa, the new album by Hand To Earth, I find myself swimming – or somewhat sinking – at first. The accompanying notes set out how ‘A search for a sense of belonging is at the heart of what drives Hand to Earth, a group of five people, who come together from different backgrounds, different birthplaces, and different musical approaches to share their songs, and by doing that to create something new.’

Peter Knight (trumpet, electronics, synthesisers, bass guitar) goes on to explain that ‘Ŋurru Wäŋa traces notions of home, belonging, and displacement. In the two parts of the title track, Sunny Kim intones the words of Korean poet Yoon Dong Ju’s poem, Another Home, in counterpoint to Daniel Wilfred’s song, sung in the Wáglilak language. Ŋurru Wäŋa (pronounced Wooroo Wanga), translates as ‘the scent of home’, and as we travel we long for that fragrance, passing the bee, guku, making the bush honey while the crow circles calling overhead.’

The notes add that ‘The music Hand To Earth creates collisions between the ancient and the contemporary; between the ambient and the visceral.’

And indeed it does. Listening to Ŋurru Wäŋa is a transportation, and transformative experience, not entirely similar from watching a documentary soundtracked by the sounds of the peoples being documented. From the very first minutes of the spacious whispers and slow, elongated notes of ‘buish honey (guku)’ the lister finds themselves in another place, another space, another mind. It feels, in ways which are hard to pinpoint, let alone articulate, spiritual, beyond the body, but at the same time closer to the earth – closer to the earth than I have ever been or even understand how to become. I realise I have been, and become so conditioned that such senses are beyond me, likely eternally, but on listening to the ringing sounds – not unlike the droning hum of a singing bowl – and breathy incantations of ‘Ŋurru Wäŋa Part I’ and revisited in the dark, sonorous rumbling of ‘Ŋurru Wäŋa Part II’ which brings the album to a close.

In between, swerving drones and impenetrable utterances evoke another time, another place, far removed, something mystical. It’s the sound of nature, of forests, of grass, of sky, as well as of soul, of heart, exultation, of but also the sound of humanity in a form so many of us have lost, and lost our capacity to connect to. This is the music of life, and it swells and surges, it’s the sound of being alive, and celebrating its magnificence.

Under capitalism, we forget that we’re alive, we trudge along, under duress, hating every day. Making it through a day is the goal for the most part, our ambitions are tied to capital, to the drudge, to the eye on the promotion, but, mostly on the commute, the team meeting, to clocking in and out, to the wage, to the 9-5, the confines of the shift, the need to pay the rent… We are all so numb, so desensitised. We’re not even living, but merely existing. With Ŋurru Wäŋa, Hand To Earth sing of another life – and it’s another world, and one we should all aspire to.

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