Bio:
Zach Webber, aka Paperghost, is a composer, visual artist and video game designer based in Te Whanganui a Tara.

Links:
sonorouscircle.com/artists/paperghost/

Programme Note:
This piece was written as an experiment in subtractive composition. I took a dense, many-layered composition that I had previously made and stripped back the elements to their barest bones, leaving a sparse soundscape with only minimal fragments of rhythm and melody remaining. The track encourages the listener to search for sounds that aren't there, with the most vital elements being those marked by their absence; the missing pieces.

Bio:
Andrew Reddy is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist from Kildare, Ireland, now based in Wellington, New Zealand. He works to create immersive ambient soundscapes, emotive melodies and repugnant noise. Often fusing disparate sound sources such as wildlife recordings and sonifications of data from his scientific research, his composition process is as much an exploration of sound as a phenomenon as it is an attempt to craft intriguing sonic aesthetics.

Link:
https://andrewreddy.wordpress.com/

Programme note:
This track was created predominantly from pulling apart recordings of household appliances and adding some synth bass and topped with some detuned guitar textures.

Bio:
Nebula Noise is the ambient project of Mat Dal Din, formerly of Aotearoa, now based in Helsinki, Finland. He also makes techno under the name Techno Neighbour.

Link:
https://nebulanoise.bandcamp.com/

Programme note:
This piece uses self-sampling techniques from material generated in Max (a visual programming environment). It incorporates sounds from a computer keyboard, voice, and VSTs to craft a glitch-adjacent, beat-based soundscape. Low-frequency tones underline the oppressive weight of bureaucracy, making audible the often-unseen toll of intellectual labor. As part of the larger project Songs to Decompress from Your PhD to:, this work invites listeners to immerse themselves in a sonic representation of academic struggle and release.

Bio:
Sophie Rose is an award-winning multi-instrumentalist, extended vocal technique enthusiast, composer, improviser, researcher, multi-media artist, and maker. Her doctoral project explored a trauma-informed approach to gesturally mediated vocal composition and performance. Rose's work explores creative practice, interactive technologies, new instrument design, phenomenology, feminism, embodiment, time, and space. In performance works, she mixes technology and technical proficiency to explore the nexus between human potential and the affordances of machines.

Bio:
John Kingston is a guitarist and performer based in Wellington, New Zealand. Box Of Hammers is his solo ambient project based on painterly use of guitar tones and drones.

Links:
strangebehaviour.bandcamp.com/album/ghosts-of-the-drowned

boxofhammers.bandcamp.com

Programme note:
Country Soundtrack to a Riot is part of an on-going project combining field recordings and musical improvisation.

Bio:
Christopher Thompson is an image and sound maker interested in labour rights, more-than-human perspectives, radical environmental action, and peace.

Links:
junkm.bandcamp.com
instagram.com/nice_one_chris

Info:
Noise Not Music: "Yan Jun describes Mirror One as “like meteorolites hiting the earth. they are buring in the atmosphere, hiting on ground, smoking, but nobody was hurt. we sitting and watching it from afar. drinking bear, crunching chips through all afternoon. at the end we clapped as well [sic].” The Beijing musician is well known for his practice of artful nonparticipation, often leaving his mysterious electronics systems to do the work on their own while he fixes a cup of tea or “crunches chips,” and one might expect this tape to be no different, especially in conjunction with the artist’s own words on the matter. But even though the two halves of this duo were polarized in separate hemispheres and unexposed to the other’s contributions for the entirety of their collaboration, Yan and Meek’s improvisations are not just active on their own, but actively converse with one another. The Auckland-based Meek, credited with “stone, metal, [and] wood,” is elbows deep in a trunk full of abstract woodland oddities at all times; whether he’s whirling resonant drones from singing bowls and resonant sheets or making a mortar-and-pestle mash of twigs and gravel, his musical gestures are steeped in earthy tactility and wide-eyed exploration, serving as an excellent counterpoint for the raw purity of Yan’s humming, screeching feedback. The pair is at their best, I think, when they’re relegated to completely opposite ends of the texture-spectrum, like in the earlier moments of “M81” when the electronics are stripped to an unstable, anemic whine against percussive clunks like woodpecker pecks recorded from inside the tree. Meek also does some hard-to-define but definitely mesmerizing work with breath on the opening track; I would love to see video footage of the musicians recording their tracks in addition to the layered tracks themselves."

Link:
noel-meek.bandcamp.com/album/mirror-one

Bio:
Andrew Weathers (1988) is a composer, improviser, and intermedia artist based in the Front Range region of Colorado. His work is equally concerned with the disjunction of duration and place, as well as improvisation’s prospect as a vessel of discovery and collective practice. His projects and performances span the idioms of field recording, prepared guitar, surrealist soundscape, and minimalist composition rooted in repetition and drone. Apart from his longtime commitment to collaboration alongside a wide swath of figures inhabiting the sonic underground, Weathers was also founder and operator of Full Spectrum Records. Founded in his home state of North Carolina in 2008, the label released the works of sundry sound artists and experimental musicians, eventually moving its operations to the Llano Estacado region of northwestern Texas before reaching a conscious conclusion in 2024. On top of frequent credits as a mixing and mastering engineer, he has also produced various projects for Other Minds Records and Rural Situationism.

Programme note:
Colophony is part of a larger sound work comprised almost entirely from processed field recordings made in Venice, Italy. The wider piece addresses our precarious situation in the face of climate change.