Robert Millis

A Magnetic Road to Hell” is Robert Millis and Bardo Todol’s first release as a duo. Recorded transcontinentally throughout 2021 and 2022 they traded sounds and ideas between Cordoba, Argentina and Seattle, USA with a stop in Mexico along the way: screamings, rivers, kids, radios, mellotron, records, 78rpm shellac, wax cylinders, field recordings, birds, electronics, guitars, percussion, haze, static, a destroyed Indian piano, talkative violins, talkative people from the 1920s, talkative black and white dreams, tin cans from the streets, Argentinian children’s tales about cows being teachers, and more. You’re riding on an unspooling reel of tape, through sounds real and imagined, the tape flapping dangerously, shredding; we are all of us magnetized, attracting together, pushing apart, unwinding onto the floor, stumbling along the road to hell.

Robert Millis and Bardo Todol have each released music on many different labels: Sublime Frequencies, Dinzu Artefacts, The Helen Scardale Agency, Discrepant, Abduction Records, Dust-to-Digital, Fire Breathing Turtle, Sub Pop, and Ikuisuus.

Check it out HERE

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“Branded as unbrandable…” Read the interview HERE

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Solo performance in Seattle at the Chapel

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Double 7 inch collaboration with Italian experimentalist DJs, Ear Explorer

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Available September 10, 2021 from HELEN SCARSDALE AGENCY

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Seattle Sacred music and arts interview

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A review of the LP of early Japanese music I produced for Sublime Frequencies:

118 Years Later, Japan’s Earliest Sound Recordings Still Resonate

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“A veritable rainstorm of temporal noise…”

“A worthwhile and extraordinary journey…”

Full review can be read HERE.

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My LP about the first Japanese recordings is available at SUBLIME FREQUENCIES

Here’s a REVIEW

The first commercial recordings from Asia were made in Japan in 1903 by Fred Gaisberg, the legendary producer and recording engineer who traveled the world making recordings for the Gramophone Company (later His Masters Voice). The recording industry barely existed at this time. Man’s ability to record and reproduce sound had only existed since 1877 (with the invention of Edison’s cylinder phonograph) and flat disc records, what we all collect and obsess over today, had only come into being in the late 1890s.

It is a miracle what these fragile discs have survived: wars with Russia and China, the fire bombings (and worse) of World War II, modernization, the onslaught of Western media. They document, through a dreamlike haze of surface noise, a Japan that had just barely begun to open its doors to the rest of the world.

Including gagaku, shakuhachi, shamisen, storytelling, folksong and more. these recordings are a unique glimpse into an ancient culture and an important document of the beginnings of the recording industry. Simple and complex. Alien and familiar. Featuring important artists and those who only appeared to sing before the strange Western recording horn and then vanished.

Sound Storing Machines spans only 9 years of recording—-from 1903 and the first commercial recordings made by Fred Gaisberg to 1912, the beginning of Japan’s homegrown record industry, including a few sides taken from Japan’s notorious bootleg 78rpm industry.

Collected on various trips to Japan and compiled by sound artist Robert Millis (Indian Talking Machine, Victrola Favorites, Climax Golden Twins, Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan, This World is Unreal Like a Snake in a Rope, etc). This is part three in a series (all produced by Millis) of early recording from Asia—including Sublime Frequencies’ The Crying Princess: 78rpm Records from Burma and Scattered Melodies: Korean Kayagum Sanjo.

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Mix of 78rpm and vinyl from Japan.

You can listen HERE

The surface noise pulls me back through time: Tsugaru samisen, Buddhist chants, gagaku, flutes, folk song, popular tunes, street music, and more…mostly from scratchy noisy Japanese 78rpm records (with some vinyl thrown in for good measure) that managed to survived the turbulent 20th century for your listening pleasure here in the 21st. If 78rpm surface noise interests you, I recently finished an LP for SUBLIME FREQUENCIES called Sound Storing Machines: The First 78rpm Records from Japan (1903-12). Out in April 2021. The first records made in East Asia at the dawn of man’s ability to record and the beginnings of what would become one of the largest physical record industries in the world—Japan.

Impossible without the fantastic work done by Riyo Mountains:
www.mixcloud.com/riyomountains/
www.facebook.com/riyomountains/
Not to mention DJ Pallaksch, Soi48, Yuichi Kishino and many others. Look their work up.

Tracklist:
I love the sound of these tracks, outside of context or translations and I have imposed on my Japanese speaking friends more than enough lately and the labels are in Japanese kanji—old Japanese kanji at that. So write to me with specific questions and I’ll see what I can trace down for you.

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Mix for Belgian radio.

https://www.radiopanik.org/emissions/soundtrack-de-minuit/soundtrack-du-01-02-2/embed/10703/

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