Tag: Hiroshi Hasegawa

A couple of sites preview Romero’s Chicago show. First Gapers Block:

It’s hard to try to explain Damion Romero’s awesomeness without first starting by saying that he built his own automobile — a 1968 Plymouth Roadrunner — from scratch. Said automobile can be heard on his self-released 2003 3″ CD titled Idle. It’s just that — an unprocessed recording of 20 minutes in the driveway with the Roadrunner. Idling. It happens to be one of the 2000s’ finest experimental/noise documents, a constantly engaging series of rumbles and clatterings, more persnickety in tone than any car you’ve heard. Despite its unconventional name, his ’90s project, Speculum Fight, redefined elegant, monolithic audio (the low-end theory, mostly) at a time when deliberate filthiness in avant garde sound was the law of the land.

And the Chicago Reader:

On the recent album 9 Before 9 (Blossoming Noise), a collaboration with Polish-born noise maven Zbigniew Karkowski, LA sound artist Damion Romero traffics in drones so low you can feel them better than you can hear them. Last week I played the disc during dinner with my girlfriend, and though we could talk without raising our voices, we were consistently interrupted by the clinking of glasses vibrating in the kitchen cabinets. Romero, who also collaborates with Japan’s Hiroshi Hasegawa under the name Astromero, has long been fascinated with dense, layered, abstract sound that on first encounter seems static—just one long and ominous throb of industrial gray—but that beneath its intimidating surface swarms with tiny, frenetic ripples and interference patterns, like the audio equivalent of TV snow. He’s interested in the physicality of sound and how it behaves in specific spaces, and for his Chicago debut he’ll play with the resonance of the Lampo space using tone generators and two homemade feedback boxes that create oscillations inside their enclosures.