Improviser and composer Laurent Peter - one half of Diatribes, co-ordinator of the Insub Meta Orchestra and co-curator of the Insubordinations label - has been a important figure in the Swiss Experimental scene for some years now. This new solo composition, although assembled from studio recordings, conjures gurgling volcanic pools, teeming with myriad amphibians and insects.

d'incise - im/permeability (excerpt)

Neil Davidson & Michael Duch - Øra

'three inclements' was recorded by Sally Ann McIntyre while in residency on Kapiti Island. The album is based around three outdoor shortwave tunings in kapiti landscapes, with the radio receiver acting as a listener to a largely ‘empty’ field, mirroring and mixed with Sally’s own listening to and recording of the acoustic space of the island.

Radio Cegeste - three inclements

'talabalàcco' is the first collaboration by Luciano Maggiore and Enrico Malatesta. The pair have deliberately eschewed the process of duo improvisation, recording material independently and composing with these fragments, resulting in a refined and purposeful combination of electronic and acoustic textures. The composition unfolds episodically, appearing to deny musical structure, but maintaining an incisive impact as its chapters accumulate.

Luciano Maggiore & Enrico Malatesta - talabalàcco

Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist based in the UK. She has exhibited and performed all over the world charming audiences with her inventive works of mechanical bricolage. In 2014 she received the Arts Foundation prize for Experimental Music. She co-curates the event series ’ ‘Sculpture‘ with David Toop and has collaborated with Miki Yui, David Cunningham, Phill Niblock, Pierre Berthet and many others.

Four Forms is the first audio-document of Nakajima’s work, comprising four pieces recorded in Oxford in January 2014:

"sources of sound that have the lives of small creatures, maybe small creatures that hibernate in darkness but then come to life when exposed to the light. These creatures of which I speak are activated to perform their own cycles of drumming or scraping, all working together as if moving inexorably toward the sudden miraculous synchronicity of flashing light that a few fortunate observers have seen in firefly displays. What I am saying, should it be unclear, is that this is a kind of intensely rhythmic music performed by an extra-human ensemble not susceptible to the orthodoxies of human culture, in a sense a step into another dimension."

- David Toop

Rie Nakajima - Four Forms

Founded in 2010 in Oxford, the Set Ensemble is dedicated to the performance of experimental music and contemporary composition. All of the members of the ensemble are also composers and they often write for one another, using the ensemble as a testing ground for new ideas, developing and rehearsing pieces together. This process is a collaborative endeavour with the score acting as one material amongst many, directing or shaping actions within a complex field of activity.

This disc contains six such compositions by Sarah Hughes, Bruno Guastalla, Patrick Farmer, Dominic Lash and Paul Whitty, the scores for which are all text- or instruction- based. Running the gamut from tonal instrumentation to fluxus antics, sometimes even within one work, this collection refuses to sit tidily within one strand of contemporary music, reflecting the broad influences and practices of the ensemble’s members.

This album was released in conjunction with the fourth issue of BORE. BORE was founded in 2013 by Sarah Hughes and David Stent and publishes scores that are primarily text-based, but may encompass any form of notation or instruction intended for the realisation of musical performance, staged events, texts, images or objects. The fourth issue of BORE collects a number of scores by members of The Set Ensemble, including Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Patrick Farmer, Bruno Guastalla, Sarah Hughes, Dominic Lash and Paul Whitty.

Sarah Hughes - Fires & Conifers (excerpt)

Excerpt from Giovanni Lami - Bias
A CD of etudes for buried and exhumed audio tape
Released April 2016

http://consumerwaste.org.uk/
http://www.giovannilami.com/

Giovanni Lami - Bias (excerpt)

available here: http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw20

In the last 10 years Akira Matsuoka (aka Veltz) has established himself as a key figure in the next generation of Tokyo noise artists. His work covers a wide range: metal junk noise, erased tapes, field recording and audio dedications to analogue television. Analogue broadcasting in Japan was switched of in 2011, an event recorded by Matsuoka and presented at the end of this album. The collection of CRT televisions he has since amassed have become his primary instrument, used in numerous performances and on his CD for edition omega point. The tracks on this disc demonstrate the range of this instrument. Recorded over a 6 year period, they comprise a catalogue of the sound fields Matsuoka is capable of provoking from these abandoned screens.

Released in oversized 7" package with letterpress back panel and a 16 page risograph booklet of macro photographs of analogue television noise.

Veltz - Broken TV Audio Report [excerpt]

available here: http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw21

Little known outside of his native Australia, Peter Blamey has been recuperating discarded electronics into artworks for more than a decade. As Douglas Kahn writes in his sleeve notes here, he belongs to an artistic tradition unique to Australia that trades sound and energy. Having cut his teeth in an extensive exploration of disposed motherboards, Blamey has more recently worked with photo-voltaic cells, homemade electromagnets and rudimentary turbines to propose dialogues between sound, power and the elemental forces of wind, water and light. The work here was produced at the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, located near the site of a large hydroelectric facility in the Victorian bush. The five interventions documented here comprise a quiet (and not so quiet) protest against this industrial instrumentalising of landscape.

Peter Blamey - Five Fertile Exchanges [excerpt]

Object Shape Description is the debut recording by Brussels based Italian artist Marco Lampis'. Lampis works between the visual and auditory disciplines, creating installations both with and without sound, in which discrete sensory perceptions become entangled. How might we understand sound through sight or be able hear by looking? This collection of recordings is inspired by the rhetorical figure of Ekphrasis in which a visual artwork is described verbally. Here, Lampis uses experimental voice process akin to echo location to describe using disjointed phonemes the shape of various vases. Dense clouds of fragmented annunciations ricochet between subject and object. 

The CD is released in an edition of 150 in an oversized 7" sleeve. The CD is accompanied by a 12 page risographed booklet featuring drawings and 3D scans by Lampis, an essay by Elena Biserna, and a letterpressed backpanel.

Lampis - Object Shape Description [excerpt]

This CD features recordings of a now lost sculptural work that was originally commissioned in 2016 for Colour Out of Space festival. The work consists of over 100 empty computer cases, fitted with 16 customised and automated DVD drives. Between 2016 and 2018 it was exhibited in Brighton, Athens, Croydon, Oxford and Rennes, on each occasion being reconfigured into a new form. The most ambitious of these being at Detritus Festival in 2018, where a new and larger version of the work was constructed at the Onassis Cultural Centre from used computer sourced in the city. The work was sadly lost in transit between France and the UK, returning to the global trade in e-waste which its production initially sought to intervene in, so all that remains are these recordings. 

The CD is released in an edition of 150 in an oversized 7" sleeve accompanied by a 16 page risographed booklet featuring photographs and scans of the sculpture, essays by Danae Stefano and Stephen Cornford, and a letterpressed backpanel.

Stephen Cornford - Constant Linear Velocity [excerpt]

A 3" CD of duo improvisations for piano & objects and piano feedback, now sold out but available for digital download:

http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw01

Stephen Cornford & Samuel Rodgers - Zinc [extracts] (excerpt)

A CDr of field recordings by Patrick Farmer. Now sold out but available as a digital download.
http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw04

Patrick Farmer - Like falling out of trees into collectors' albums

Earle and Sussmann are best known for their minimal electronic work as Stasis Duo but this disc sees them in far more bracing mode for this all electronics trio. Recorded while Kahn was touring Australia in 2009.
http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw07

Matt Earle, Jason Kahn & Adam Sussmann - Draught (excerpt)

Recorded while the two were flatmates in Oxford this is Hughes and Kilymis' first duo outing. Beautiful, intricately woven improvisations for no-input mixing desk and zither.
http://consumerwaste.org.uk/cw08

Sarah Hughes & Kostis Kilymis - The Good Life (excerpt)

VA AA LR is the London based trio of Vasco Alves, Louie Rice and Adam Asnan. Their fearless experimentalism has previously seen them tackle instrumentation as variable as compressed CO2, distress flares and a CItroen. Here, while the tools are in more traditional electronics territory, the music is anything but. From a heap of pulsating speaker cones, whirring dictaphones and a virtuosic cameo by Stevie Wonder the trio forge a gently clattering morass that seems to continually reiterate itself as it develops, ever threatening to collapse into a heap of household waste and bass, but always kept afloat by the lightest of touches. 

VA AA LR - It Just Ain't Flapping (excerpt)

Nick Hennies is fast establishing himself as one of the most deft interpreters of contemporary solo percussion repertoire. His realisations are known for their rigourous attention to detail. Flourish is the latest in a series of works composed by Hennies for vibraphone that expand the sonic vocabulary of the instrument. Using mostly conventional playing techniques and a variety of mallets, two players move around a single instrument performing blocks of stationary sound. Through consistency and regularity in performance, the sounds are free and open up beautifully complex sound worlds from Nick's simple repetitive playing. 

Nick Hennies - Flourish (excerpt)

Consumer Waste is a low impact imprint for the publication of contemporary experimental music. Jointly run by Stephen Cornford & Samuel Rodgers, it aims to document and disseminate their collaborative work as well as that of their peers and contemporaries.

In an era when cultural material is most often received through digital means, the publication of physical documents has become for many musicians simply an expedient means to put their work in the hands of the pirates. We welcome this state of affairs and will restrict our releases to editions of one or two hundred, safe in the knowledge that should the work appeal to a wider audience, it will be downloaded by them. As such the discs will carry no official copyright.

We tacitly accept that cultural production, where it simply provides yet another avenue of our consumer driven society is a morally questionable activity and have no wish to support such a system. For these reasons, the label is to be run on a strictly not-for profit basis, with all proceeds going either direct to the artist or funding the activities of the label by providing opportunities for artists to collaborate, perform, record and publish their work. The label's name derives from the 100% post-consumer waste materials that we endeavour to use in our handmade packaging.

Supported by the Sonic Art Research Unit at Oxford Brookes University.


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