Von Samartzis heißt es: “In January 2006, Sean Baxter, David Brown, and I had the opportunity to record inside West Space—a Melbourne artist-run initiative—during its summer shutdown. With the gallery empty and silent, we spent two evenings exploring its acoustic and spatial dimensions through a series of improvised performances. Using percussion, electro-acoustic guitar, electronics, field recordings, and found objects, we responded directly to the material qualities of the space—its concrete floors and walls, reverberant surfaces, and the presence of an elevator shaft that acted like a resonant chamber. The recordings were archived soon after and left untouched until the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, when the stillness of that period prompted me to listen back. What I found was a striking intimacy—a sonic record shaped as much by the architecture as by our actions. Room tone, reverberation, duct and electrical hums, and incidental noises imprint the performances with the space’s quiet presence. Originally recorded by Thomas Couzinier and myself, and newly mixed and mastered in April 2025,  After Hours is both a document and a memory. It captures a fleeting moment when Western Grey tuned into West Space—and allowed it to speak back”. Western Grey bestehen aus Sean Baxter (Perkussion, Raumakustik, gefundene Objekte), David Brown (elektroakustische Gitarre) und Philip Samartzis (Elektronik, Field Recordings, Turntable, Mikros).

“‘apsomeophone’ grew out of love for and, from a listener’s point of view, an historical immersion in a tight group of compositions by musique concréte, film soundtrack and Twentieth Century Classical composers. These listening experiences became entwined, at some stage, with my own ponderings round a desire to compose a group of very personally suited recordings, to be utilised in a live context as a proxy ensemble accompaniment to my slowly blossoming and evolving prepared guitar techniques. Through a compositional process that I would loosely describe as ‘aural sculpture’, I extracted snippets of sound and short musical passages from these adored compositions (the list of composers borrowed from includes Béla Bartók, John Cage, Pierre Henry, György Ligeti, Tōru Takemitsu and Edgard Varése). These small sonic extractions I then processed heavily, augmented spatially and timbrally and began to arrange into fragmented groupings, making correlations pleasing to my ear.

This transfigurative process became a long drawn out undertaking, soon enriched and complicated by the systematic and responsive addition of other fragmentary sounds generated through the use of my own guitars, stringed instruments and electronics. And…., on the layering and editing went as I meandered towards a final point of sonic sculptural satisfaction. As a group of odes, each of the final compositions on ‘apsomeophone’ focuses on one or two of the aforementioned, inspirational listening antecedents. Fifteen years later, the compositions throughout ‘apsomeophone’ still hold a warm grip on me and, though distant timewise, I still feel saturated with all the minutiae of the compositional processes, a feeling akin to being immersed in a supportive body of warm water. It’s a record that I’m really attached to and remain entwined with to the point where the working methods which gestated there have become the norm for me. It’s a heavily pored over record, where somehow nothing is out of place, and I believe it’s a record loosely in the mode of its predecessors.” (David Brown)

@ Vinyl