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Welcome to Splitrec - music from Sydney's vibrant exploratory and spontaneous music scene. Go to our shop to find out about or purchase any of our 22 releases.
Lucid - Great Waitress splitrecCD22
The sounds are tiny and delicate - just the faintest engraving upon silence - and as intricately connected as that spider's web. John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald.
Fragile and solid at the same time. Like touching the wings of a butterfly, Free Jazz.
a holistic pure music. Julien Héraud Improv Sphere.
It left me breathless, and I'm sure you will to. Excellent stuff. Vital 792.
From 2008 Laura Altman and Monika Brooks' duo excited the Sydney experimental scene with quiet, ambiguous, ephemeral music - they treated duration as if it were precious.
Altman's clarinet and Brook's accordion fused, not with lines, but with pools of sound, coexisting in an ecology that had no clear beginning or end - a calmly focussed, infinite field.
In January 2009 the Berlin-based pianist Magda Mayas collaborated with them on a memorable performance at Sydney's Now now Festival. Mayas injected not only an array of startling sounds, but insistent motion to contrast the stasis.
Two years later they reconvened as a band for an intense period - a return appearance at the 2011 Now now Festival, gigs around Sydney, the SoundOut Festival Canberra and finally this studio session.
If the duo suggested an infinite field then the collective conjures forces that make the music genuinely cosmic.
Multiplicity emerges in Great Waitress through virtuosic collective listening, and creates a unique lucidity. This is intricate, complex music – but as the last track shows, they can also converge to make the monumental.
This July they played the KONFRONTATIONEN Festival, Austria.
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a closely woven fabrik - splitrecCD21
west head project
Dale Gorfinkel - prepared trumpet, roots, automated sonic contraptions
Monika Brooks - accordion
Jim Denley - flutes and sax
Anthony Magen - recording.
...blending their sounds into the fabrik of those occurring naturally...Often enchanting, this takes the term 'live music' to another level. John Shand - Sydney Morning Herald.
Careful listening confirms the musicians' sympathetic interaction with the captured natural sound. This also substantiates why the overall session works as well ecologically as musically. Ken Waxman - Jazz Word.
Completely dreamy despite deep roots in reality, A Closely woven fabrik plunges the listener into sound territories hypnotic and dense, rich and original. Highly Recommended! - Julien Héraud Improv Sphere.
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calibrated - splitrecCD20
blip
Mike Majkowski - double bass, pitch pipes, objects
Jim Denley - alto sax, flutes
It is impossible not to appreciate that the music-making undertaken on Calibrated is part of a rich and ongoing conversation between two of Australia's most engaging improv artists. Gail Priest - Real Time.
We recorded this disc one afternoon, set up the mics, checked the levels and the music is pretty much as we played it - not much editing went on afterwards. Having said that, we'd been trying to make a CD together for a number of years (we think this is the 5th or 6th attempt). All through that process we kept listening, editing, mastering and then trying again - in the words of Samuel Beckett - "Try again. Fail again. Fail better". Recording became our process of review and we'd like to think that through this process, we were ultimately able to make something spontaneous and composed. blip.
calibrated, while exploring sound material richly and profoundly, is nevertheless musical, sensitive, intense, strong and compelling. Recommended! - Improv Sphere
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and our release from last year
GERM STUDIES for Guzheng and DX7 splitrecCD19
Chris Abrahams, DX7
Clare Cooper, Guzheng
198 scratches, itches and ailments.
...the analogy with germs is entirely appropriate - pieces flit to life like mating cells, making skewed, suprise lurches and appearing generally feverish throughout. The interplay between artists is never less than enthralling, their actions raw, revealing, and lovingly recorded, a ceaseless procession of sounds veering off in all directions. Instrumentally its an odd pairing, sure, but seen as an updated form of the violin sonata, in Webern-esque miniature, drawn by post-onkyo minimalists, it begins to make sense. Joshua Meggitt - Cyclic Defrost
Check out their myspace
Chris Reid writing in Realtime says
The musical language Cooper and Abrahams have created thus addresses the use of sound as an analogue to speech, text and imagery, and examines the relationships between sound, image, word, memory and meaning. Cooper and Abrahams are fine musicians and composers who have developed a closely shared musical sensibility, and this is an intriguing CD.
THE WIRE Review by Clive Bell – September Edition 2009
...this is a madly generous double album: 198 duets for Clare Cooper's traditional Chinese zither (guzheng) and Chris Abrahams's ancient (1980's) Japanese DX7 synth. Abrahams's heartbeat pulses, digital gargling and mutoid disco sci-fakery are a fierce proposition countered at every turn by Cooper's non-oriental bowing and scraping. The approach is pretty much one clear idea per piece, which makes for great improvising. Track lengths vary from four seconds to a minute, though there is one eight minute monster, "Neutrino", which demonstrates the principle of getting your sound perfect – in this case a two-note school – ruler – on – desktop buzz – jam plus a muffled, pumping beat – and then just repeating it... it's good to see an album so fully thought through as an artwork Each "Germ Study" has it's own accompanying drawing, many by fellow improvisers, and the resultant wall chart is warm and witty, a witness to Abrahams and Cooper's community of friends and co-workers. Five years in the making, it's a special release. My favourite of the 198 titles: Sting's Doorbell" (46 seconds).