Category: Uncategorized

Club Sound Witches are Matt Earle and Nicola Morten. From their country NSW hideaway on the Hunter, they emit strange sounds that can alternatively be construed as dance music, electronic signal errors, or a combination of both. Their discography is lengthy and difficult to follow, usually limited edition releases, often untitled, and quickly out-of-print.

Shame File Music has released two CSW titles, both focussed on their unmistakable live sounds. The “#freakinmeout” CD (2020) consists of a live recording of duo’s transcendent 2019 live set at Melbourne’s Make It Up Club, backed with a lengthy studio track in two parts. Nicola’s ghostly vocalisations drift across both tracks, like Circe calling sailors into subterranean caves. CSW also share “Surface Noise Vol. 7” with Newcastle’s The Mermaids, this time with a more uncomfortable live set from 2017 (which overlaps with The Mermaids live performance as well). This limited edition CDR is sold out, but like the rest of the Surface Noise series, it is now available digitally.

Use the code FREAKINMEOUT for 10% off “#freakinmeout” (expires 27 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

With his wife and creative partner, Corinne, Arthur Cantrill is primarily known as a pioneer of experimental film making. Partly out of necessity, and partly out of his own creative curiosity and feel for sound, Arthur also created many of the soundtracks for Cantrill films. The breadth of his musical creativity across nearly five decades of work was collected in the Shame File Music release “Chromatic Mysteries: soundtracks 1963-2009”, with illuminating liner notes from Arthur and Warren Burt.

As startling as a lot of the works on “Chromatic Mysteries” are, Arthur’s 1970 soundtrack for the feature-length Cantrill film “Harry Hooton” is audaciously gob-smacking for its time. Released on limited edition vinyl by Shame File Music in 2014, “Hootonics” is a groundbreaking music/sound work 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.

Use the code CANTRILL for 10% off all Cantrill-related releases (expires 26 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

Music of Transparent Means was an evolving minimalist ensemble of up to 21 players led by Alex Carpenter, active in Adelaide from 2002-2007.  “Chord…” is a beautiful archival release from this time, recorded live in 2007, not long before Carpenter relocated to New York.

Big engulfing waves of music here, packing both an emotional and sonic punch with just a few intervals, but huge on texture and detail. I suppose it’s minimalism, or maxilimalism as well? Jon Dale’s liner notes sum it up as “joyous sensory over-stimulation…a kind of blissful, obliterated exhaustion…quite simply, a head-fucking blast to listen to and swim through”.

Also available is Carpenter’s solo “Excavation Patterns”, recorded a few years early and recently reissued on vinyl as well.

Use the code MUSIC for 10% off all Carpenter-related releases (expires 25 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

Following on from the previous Deep Dive on Warren Burt, we are now covering some major names in the last 40 years of Australian experimental music, as well as on an international scale. Rik Rue has been a key figure in Australian exploratory music since the early 1980s, with his many solo releases, as well as a member of Machine For Making Sense and collaborating with the likes of Tony Buck and performance artist Fifi L’Amour, amongst many others.

His cassette releases throughout the 1980s especially remain astounding listening today as a body of work that he dubbed (!) “pause culture”; cassette-based composition. Shame File Music have reissued a number of his key releases digitally as part of the Rik Rue Casssette Archive. A key collaborator of Rue’s throughout the 1980s and ‘90s was Shane Fahey. The formed the duo Social Interiors, but before the name came their first work on the  “Murmurs” cassette. Originally released on Rue’s Pedestrian Tapes label in 1986 (and reissued by Shame File Music digitally and on CDR in 2014), the main ingredients used are field recordings on East Coast Australian environments; birds, insects, frogs, but most predominantly water. Field recording as a compositional form is legion today, but Rue and Fahey’s mixes retain exquisite form and musicality that seems often lost on many practitioners, perhaps due to its subtlety.

Use the code RUE for 10% off all Rue-related releases (expires 20 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

One might say that Warren Burt needs no introduction, however given Australia’s propensity for cultural amnesia (particularly concerning music), let’s not take that for granted: Warren Burt has been a constant force in the world of Australian experimental music since his arrival from the USA in the mid-1970s. Educator, organiser, composer, performer, writer, advocate, mentor; Burt’s contribution to contemporary music in this country is immeasurable.

His recorded output is just as extensive; constantly challenging and pushing towards new forms and discoveries. His work with justly-intonated tuning forks stands out for me for its other-worldly beauty. “The Animation of Lists and the Archytan Transpositions” 2CD is a recording I regularly return to. The alunimium forks Burt uses are tuned to a 19 note scale derived from ancient modes created by Ptolemy. The overtones and harmonics created by the ringing tones of these forks ring around your room, completely enveloping you in their soundworld. This is perhaps Burt’s most astounding recorded achievement, and given his massive output, that gives you an idea just how special this is.

And listen here to a recent special programme on Burt and his music.

Use the code BURT for 10% off all Burt-related releases (expires 18 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

Researching the first Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music compilation revealed many startling hidden gems, none more so than the music of Jack Ellitt. Born in Manchester in 1902, his family settled in Sydney 6 years later. He met New Zealand artist Len Lye in 1920, and would become a key collaborator over coming years, composing music and designing sound for Lye’s nascent film experiments. Incredibly, we know now that Ellitt was developing a form of proto-musique concrete using film stock as early as 1930, long before the acknowledged work of Schaefer, etc. A range of circumstances, including what Ellitt perceived as a rejection by listeners of his music and a reclusive personality, led to Ellitt’s astounding work being forgotten or lost.

Much of Ellitt’s music was tragically thrown out after his death in 2001, but four precious works have been collected into the “Sound Constructions” CDR/digital release, including his mind-blowing early-1930s collage work “Journey #1), and his later-life tribute to Len Lye “Homage To Rachel Carson #2” (1987). As with a number of Shame File Music’s archival projects, extensive liner notes are available here.

Use the code ELLITT for 10% off “Sound Constructions” (expires 13 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

Astasie-abasie is a project of Ian Andrews which evolved out of a long running performance collaboration with Garry Bradbury. The project focuses on the amplification of sounds captured from small objects. Andrews’ contribution to Australian experimental music reaches back to the early 1980s, including projects like The Horse He’s Sick, Kurt Volentine, Cut with the Kitchen Knife and countless others.

On the surface, Astasie-Abasie’s 2021 “Molecular Gamelan” CD resembles something like solemn a Balinese trance-like processions, or intimate temple rituals with minimalist gamelan ensembles. The material is instead derived from a set of chance-based operations designed by Andrews involving the agitation of washers and other small metal objects with a variety of devices, including hand drills, film winders, and motorised screwdrivers. The result is what Vital Weekly described as, “beautiful, Zen-like music”.

A follow-up album “Elliptical Gamelan” is currently in-production for release by Shame File Music in the coming months, on limited edition vinyl and digital (discounted pre-orders now available).

Use the code ASTASIE for 10% off all Astasie-abasie releases (expires 14 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

One of the original aims of Shame File Music was to help make my own (then-nascent) music available. Over three decades (!) later, the label and online store has grown to be much more than this, but I still try to make most of my music available through this avenue.

Recommending one’s own music can be a fraught business. Over the years, I’ve moved on pretty quickly from a particular release, not wanting to spend much time with it, even though I was usually satisfied with the end product. My 2021 LP “Relativity/Only” is one exception to this, and remains an album I listen to quite regularly. I think the difference here is that I feel quite removed from the music; I didn’t “play” it, I just set up the situation and allowed it come to life. The music is played by percussion-based sound sculptures driven kinetically by turntables. A lot of care and attention did go into the preparations for each piece; I feel like a guardian and protector of these subtle compositions, rather than a creator.

Use the code GREEN for 10% off all Green-related releases (expires 11 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.

Pauline Oliveros was an American composer and performer whose impact on contemporary music. and listening practice in particular, is immeasurable. From the mid-1960s until her death in 2016, Oliveros was involved in early electronic and tape music experiments, just intonation, and the development of Deep Listening as an approach to both the playing and experience of music.

Shame File Music stocks range of her back catalogue, including solo releases and collaborative works with the likes of Joe McPhee, her Deep Listening Band and The Carrier Band amongst others. It is hard to go past “No Mo”, her astonishing mid-1960s electronic/noise/tape works. The two pieces featured here were recorded in 1966 (at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio, and the San Francisco Tape Music Center respectively) using a range of noise and tone generators, tape techniques and a Buchla Series 100 Box. As well as these timeless noise ecologies, her “Tara’s Room: two meditations on transition and change”, with just-intonated accordion and electronics, has been a particular comfort over recent turbulent years. Both are highly recommended.

Use the code OLIVEROS for 10% off all Oliveros-related releases (expires 8 July 2022).

As always, free postage for orders within Australia over $100.