ROOM40 presents this double bill with a rare appearance from New Zealander Dean Roberts - an artist whose mercurial presence has manifested across the full spectrum of avant-praxis from his early NZ rock-informed improv/drone group Thela (Ecstatic Peace) and work under the White Winged Moth alias to his later group Autistic Daughters (with Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Valerio Tricoli producing), various recordings of cracked electronics and a lengthy stint as a member of the Tower Recordings in between all that. John Chantler will open the evening launching his new LP of modular electronics for the label 'Even Clean Hands Damage The Work'.

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DEAN ROBERTS

Dean Roberts is an artist whose mercurial presence has manifested across the full spectrum of avant-praxis kicking off with his early NZ rock-informed improv/drone group Thela (Ecstatic Peace) and work under the White Winged Moth alias. He performed and recorded regularly as a member of Tower Recordings (with Matt Valentine Erica Elder, Tim Barnes, PG Six and others) during a lengthy illicit stay in NYC. His later group Autistic Daughters (with Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr and Valerio Tricoli producing) are majestic examples of the possibility of detourned songform and rock dynamics. He has since continued those explorations whilst also making music for dance and installations.

"Be Mine Tonight is also Dean's first set of "songs", although these are slow, ached, bloodied documents. It's the long-awaited final record in the trilogy begun by Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and followed through by Bark Psychosis' Hex. If Laughing Stock made emotion rich and resonant, and Hex stripped away some of Laughing Stock's crescendos to reveal a burnt-out grotto, a map of urban decay and sonority that ultimately trades its surface dissent for a complete view of the compassion of the human spirit, Be Mine Tonight adumbrates a position somewhere between loss and stress, a skeletal remnant of Hex's helix. Be Mine Tonight attempts to both refine and resolve the implicit tension between structure and freedom; it turns songs into spectral and sepulchral things, and reinvests the song with a heart both unsteady and brave. Be Mine Tonight is rock music, caught somewhere between twilit world and everyday processional, drawn like curtain fabric so most of the cracks and tears in the cloth show." - Jon Dale (Dusted Magazine)

JOHN CHANTLER

Even Clean Hands Damage The Work is the new LP from UK based artist John Chantler. Following on from The Luminous Ground, his critically acclaimed album from 2011, Even Clean Hands Damage The Work sees Chantler delve ever deeper into the inner zones of audible electricity. Like its predecessor, this is an album generous in texture and dimension, but moreover it is a record of incendiary dynamic force; shifting and arcing with a relentless ferocity.

Recorded across a range of studios including Stockholm’s hallowed EMS (Elektronmusikstudion) using their classic Buchla 200 and Serge systems, the album’s composition bares the marks of over two years of refinement. At times intensely fierce and brutal in its sonic character, Even Clean Hands Damage The Work is at its heart an expression of the power of dynamics. The LP throws huge blocks of massed harmonics into suspension, sometimes smearing them into distorted half phrases and twisted variations through spectral and time domain processing. At other times it freezes them in a way that appears to deconstruct time without ever being overtly rhythmic. The pieces slow down to rest around beds of beating tones and difference frequencies that affect a tripping, acceleration via momentary interventions. It also relies less on recognisable melodic motifs and though they’re hidden across the record’s duration Even Clean Hands Damage The Work is more readily characterised by variations of timbre and apparent repetition.

The five discrete movements of the LP are compiled as two continuous side-long suites, each one constantly straining to find moments of balance between an uneasy sea of swarming, voltage controlled electronics.

"... these are dense and occasionally gorgeous drone epics, exhibiting the sort of character we rarely hear from modern synthesizer music." - FACT