Liquid Architecture 9: Festival of Sound Arts
Sydney 11 –12 July 2008
@ The Factory Theatre
105 Victoria Rd, Enmore
TICKETS: $12 (including booking fee)
From The Factory Theatre box office (02) 9550 3666 or online at www.factorytheatre.com.au
Liquid Architecture, Australia’s premier national sound-arts festival celebrates its ninth year with live performances, surround sound presentations, audio-visuals and recorded work, screenings and installations, featuring our most imaginative musicians, composers, sound designers and media artists in a sense-specific feast for the ears.
SYDNEY PROGRAM
Friday 11 July – 7:30pm
$12
TOY.BIZARRE (Bellac)
ROBERT NORMANDEAU (Montreal)
LAWRENCE ENGLISH (Brisbane)
NAT (Melbourne)
JACQUES SODDELL (Bendigo)
KUSUM NORMOYLE
Saturday 12 July - 7.30pm
$12
ANDREW PEKLER (Berlin)
MARCUS SCHMICKLER (Köln)
METALOG (Sydney/Melbourne)
KAZUMICHI GRIME
NICK WISHART + HIROFUMI UCHINO
HEIL SPIRITS
IVAN LISYAK
TOECUTTER
An international screening program featuring new A/V works. Plus an installation program exclusive to Sydney, featuring:
CÉDRIC PEYRONNET (Bellac)
JODI ROSE
RENE CHRISTEN
MELISSA HUNT
MARK BROWN
JASON SWEENEY
JESSICA TYRRELL
The first TEN people through the door each night will receive an ERIKM cd - Stéme (Room40). Giveaways courtesy of Room40.
Investigating Cross - Disciplinary Practice in the Areas of Music, Sound and Design.
Featuring : Kees Tazeelar (Netherlands) / Ernest Edmonds (UK) / Yasunao Tone (Japan)
+ Many More
Three Days of Keynotes, Panels and Workshops from 10am to 6pm at UTS.
Two nights of performances from 8pm at the ABC Studios, Harris St featuring Donna Hewitt, Julian Knowles, Philip Samartzis, Kees Tazelaar, Peter Blamey, Robin Fox, Darrin Verhagen and Yasunao Tone, all in glorious eight channel surround sound.
And… Robin Fox in Residence in the new UTS Interaction Studio
All free and open to the public!
For more information, the full program and contact details to book your place at the performances check out:
In the music scene there has always been a pretty strong division between those who play original music and those who are derisively, and sometimes unfairly, dismissed as covers bands. What’s the point of being in a band if you’re not playing your own songs? When was the last time that duo with a keyboard and a drum machine from your local RSL club had a breakthrough hit?
It’s not that covers bands aren’t talented, don’t make good music, don’t entertain or even have a good time. Hell, put enough drinks in me and I’ll hit the dance floor to an ’80s pop classic or wave a lighter with half a tear in my eye to, say, Flame Trees.
But no one seriously goes out of their way to suggest that covers bands are the most vital or important part of the music scene. Why then are covers bands - of the high-culture variety - receiving the bulk of arts funding?
An overwhelming amount of arts funding in Australia goes to organisations that either exclusively or primarily play covers. Think symphony orchestras, opera companies and state theatre companies that produce comparatively little in the way of original, innovative or even Australian work. Like classic hits radio, they are busting out the chart-toppers of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Confused? If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, grab yourself a copy of the Australia Council’s annual report. The nation’s cover bands, mostly the state-based symphony orchestras, collectively receive just under $50 million each year from the council.
Whether that figure seems average or outrageous would depend on the context that you choose to put it in. The context that I put it in is the $4.8 million pool that every single musician in Australia who isn’t in a symphony orchestra competes for every year. That’s more than a 10-fold disparity between the orchestras and everyone else combined.
The Sydney Symphony receives nearly $9 million each year. That is more funding than goes to all of Australia’s visual artists, or all of the nation’s writers and publishers, or all the dancers, or all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, or all the community art practitioners.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m no heathen or unreconstructed postmodernist. Okay, I’m a bit of a heathen but I’ve never entirely got the postmodern thing. My problem is not that we still fund classical European culture, it’s just that we fund so bloody much of it and so very little of everything else.
My argument isn’t about form and it isn’t an extreme one. It’s about scale, equity and magnitude. I do think it would be a loss if Australians were to lose all connection with our vast and glorious European cultural heritage.
But Opera Australia receives more than $10 million a year from the Australia Council. Sure, opera is lavish, expensive and glorious but I simply cannot think of a single sensible, logical or sane reason why one opera company is valued roughly on par with more than 400 separate organisations supported by the music, dance, literature and inter-arts boards of the same organisation.
Great art to me creates a resonance and opens up possibilities; it isn’t the echoes of the past. It’s not something you reproduce proficiently. Art is made out of anger or curiosity or awe or beauty or because you’re in love or want someone to fall in love with you.
Artists don’t just preserve the past. They make new things from the sum total of human experience. They tell new stories and find new ways of telling stories from the tools and influences that they have around them.
Culture isn’t something that happened in Europe centuries ago that needs preservation. It’s actually all that messy, beautiful, inspiring and wonderful stuff that is happening around us right now. Arts funding should reward innovation not preservation and vibrancy over bureaucracy.
Most importantly, no one art form or institution - however regarded - should have its funding quarantined and its position privileged so that it is never tested against all the other possibilities to which its resources may better be put.
Marcus Westbury is the writer and presenter of Not Quite Art on Tuesday nights on ABC TV. marcus.westbury@gmail.com
Electrofringe is just around the corner, and this looks to be a particularly good year. I’ll be there as usual, doing a few talks. No gig this time, but I am contributing to Patchwork, an exhibition of ‘patch art’. Here’s mine:
It’s a screenshot of an AudioMulch patch that I’ve been using for the past year or so for live performance, in conjunction with a Behringer BCR controller.
WHAT: SOUND OF FAILURE: Experimental Music in a Post-digital Era
WHEN/WHERE (TWO VENUES):
Saturday August 25, 6pm:
Petersham Bowling Club (Performances)
77 Brighton St, Petersham
Hosted by the irrepressible Schappylle Scragg.
Saturday/Sunday August 25/26 11am-5pm:
DON’T LOOK Experimental New Media Gallery (Installations)
419 New Canterbury Rd (Near Marrickville Rd), Dulwich Hill
Endurance performances at Don’t Look Gallery from 12-5pm Sunday.
WHO:
PERFORMERS (Petersham Bowling Club):
Est Et Non, Tom Hall (Brisbane), Lecter Macabre, Marquis De Sound, Glen Remington, Starella, Vilhelm the Tortoise & Friends (Belgium), Alex White
CONTACT: Greg Shapley - Ph: 0401 152 434
EMAIL: dontlookgallery@gmail.com
WEB: http://soundoffailure.com for a complete program.
SOUND OF FAILURE
Experimental Music in a Post-digital Era
We live in an era of failure. On the global stage, the President of the most powerful country on earth has overseen thousands of deaths in two failed wars. In the third world the stench of poverty seeps through the pores of humanity in the guise of genocidal skirmishes, starvation and disease. Fundamentalists of all creeds goad each other like contestants on some new deadly reality TV show. And the optimism of the ’90s is washed away in a tide of apathy, indifference and hopelessness.
So where does this leave culture? If art is holding up a mirror to society, how long before the mirror shatters in sympathetic resonance to the horror it beholds?
A couple of months ago Don’t Look Gallery put out an open call to sound artists to propose a piece for an event called the ‘Sound of Failure’. From dozens of responses, 20 artists have been chosen to perform at Petersham Bowling Club on Saturday August 25, or to install works at Don’t Look Gallery, Dulwich Hill over the weekend of August 25/26.
These works generally employ technological failure, both as a euphemism for the state of the world, but also as a way of exposing, exploring and problematising the digital façade. These artists have attempted transcend the small rectangular screens and the latest Microsoft releases, opting instead to look at unintended consequences of technology – when it misbehaves or just gives up the goat.
Some artists use humour. Starella, for instance, juxtaposes ‘instruments’ such as ‘old wine bottles’ with digital technology and lyrics written on the backs of beer coasters. The failure in her musical sound comes from spending her life slipping through the gaps of every system she has known: family; society, and professional systems. In her performances she feels her way through drunken rants and musically attempts to determine what went wrong.
Others employ the literal failure of the technology itself. Tom Hall, a renowned sound artist from Brisbane, uses the degenerate sounds formed from the destruction of flimsy CD media combined with the glitch/skip/malfunction from ageing and damaged CD players. These form the basis of a live performance that combine in a progressive and layered manner, juxtaposing the usual frustration experienced when one strikes this inferior malfunction.
As part of the NightTime concert series the Splinter Orchestra will
perform in the massive foyer at Carriage Works, allowing for further
explorations in density and spatialisation.
“NightTime is an evening of music, improvisation, performance &
interventions. Each NightTime will hone in on live artworks from
(sub)cultures around the city.”
NightTime is co-ordinated by: Trevor Brown, Rosie Dennis and Lara Thoms.
The full program for Electrofringe is now online. This year sees an unprecedented diversity in the Electrofringe program, as well as a stock of brilliant and stimulating events of the calibre you’ve come to expect from the October long weekend in Newcastle. Themes include accessibility and collaboration in electronic arts, wearable art, rethought radio and new approaches to electronic music. Screen works, contemporary dance, immersive and site specific works are nestled alongside dynamic panel discussions, workshops and gigs.
International guests include Tim Hecker (Canada), Leafcutter John (UK), Sebastien Roux (France), Jason Kahn (USA) and Ralph Steinbruchel (CH) alongside local artists including Robin Fox, Machina Aux Rock, Darrin Verhagen, SpatnLoogie, Sanso-Xtro, Pimmon, Shannon O’Neill and Gail Priest, plus may more.
Head to the Electrofringe website, www.electrofringe.net to check out the program and stay tuned for further updates.
I know this blog is becoming little more than a YouTube feed, but I just have to share this old favourite which recently appeared there:
Ah, the beauty and brilliance of Severed Heads. This work means more to me than I can explain. It’s in my blood.
Tom Ellard’s description:
(By request) This 1985 video was created in real time as a video ‘jam’ or improvisation. It features a preacher scratched by Ian Andrews on betacam tape, fed through Fairlight CVI and analogue video synthesiser.
The CVI signal is notable for not filling the whole screen (it had a resolution of 256 squared) and introducing a delay that causes the signal to shift to the right.
I’m supposed to be at an Ian Andrewsexhibition opening right now, but I crashed my bike today, so am staying home to lick my wounds and hopefully catch up with some overdue writing.
ANAT is offering the opportunity for young and emerging practitioners working with distributed, portable, online, wearable, gaming, mobile and emerging platforms to undertake a three-month mentorship with an established practitioner of their choice.
The mentorship enables an emerging artist to explore new creative directions, to expand technical skills and increase knowledge of networks, debates and business practice. Applicants are invited to select a mentor and develop a program of activity spanning a three-month period. By utilising emerging technologies the mentor may be accessed locally, nationally or internationally and the successful applicant will maintain a blog for the duration of the mentorship on the ANAT server.
Applicants must be emerging technologies practitioners who are 30 years or under. The mentorship will provide a fee for the mentoree ($7,200 excl GST) and a fee for the mentor ($1,800 excl GST). The mentorship program should be completed by early December 2007.
ANAT APPLICATIONS CLOSE 3 AUGUST 2007
ANAT guidelines and application forms are available on our web site http://www.anat.org.au. For further information please contact Gavin Artz, ANAT General Manager - manager@anat.org.au, 08 8231 9037, Monday Friday, 10am 4pm CST.
This mentorship is a part of the Australian Government¹s Young & Emerging Artists Initiative through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Australian Media Arts Organsiations d.lux, Experimenta and MAAP are also offering mentorships:
+ d.lux will hold their mentorship inside Second Life or a similar online virtual community, contact malcolm@dlux.org.au for more
information.
+ Experimenta’s focus is on Site Related and/or Public Work, contact caroline@expeirmenta.org for more information.
+ MAAP will focus on projects that intersect or consider connections with the Asia Pacific regions, contact info@maap.org.au for more information.
ANAT gratefully acknowledges the assistance of CraftSouth in establishing the ANAT Emerging Technologies Mentorship Program.
ANAT is assisted by the Australia Council for the Arts, by the South Australian Government through Arts SA http://www.arts.sa.gov.au and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.
Liquid Architecture 9: Festival of Sound Arts
