Music is what?
Experimental music is alive and well in Australia, as the What Is Music? festival makes abundantly clear.
By Andrew P Street
Burn firewater burn... Miles van Dorssen steams up the windows
What Is Music? began life in 1994 when Robbie Avenaim and Oren Ambarchi – then playing together in noise band Phlegm – curated the first What Is Music? festival. Running almost annually since then, it has developed into the nation’s premier celebration of experimental music and noise culture, expanding from its Sydney home base to satellite events in Melbourne and Brisbane and attracting participants from all over the world.
After taking 2007 off, this year’s event moves into Redfern’s Carriageworks with an impressively diverse range of performers. Below we have a look at what you might be able to expect – although if there’s one thing What Is Music? promises, it’s to confound whatever expectations you might bring with you.
Owen Ambarchi
Festival co-founder Owen Ambarchi has been recently touring with Sun O))), as well as recording with a couple of the band members under the name Burial Chamber Trio, but for this performance he’ll be wrangling sounds out his guitar solo, using a vast array of pedals and multiple speakers and other electronics to create a series of densely layered drones in a sonic exploration of the tonal possibilities of the instrument.
Robbie Avenaim
The Festival’s other founder. Robbie Avenaim (who is also half of wOg, with The Hard Ons Ray Ahn), will be extending the range of the humble drum kit, premiering a new work for four specially-developed automated percussion instruments, built specifically for the piece.
Cor Fuhler
Cornelius Fuhler is an experimental and improvisational musician and instrument maker based in Amsterdam, known for his relentless exploration of the acoustic piano. And when we say ‘relentless’, we’re not delving into hyperbole: the man augments his pianos with e-bows (most often used on guitars to produce sustained drones), rotating discs and what he calls his “web disc” (a creation something like a hurd-gurdy, only operated with an electric drill) to produce unique sounds and tones.
He also builds his own modular synths and other instruments, including the Keyolin (a violin with piano keys) and will be performing at the festival inn exclusive one-off collaboration with Chris Abrahams (he of the Necks).
Robin Fox
Melbourne artist Robin Fox blurs the line between music and visual art with his multi-laser show in which, as he explains, “The same electricity generated to move the speaker cones is sent simultaneously to high-speed motors that deflect the laser light on an x/y axis converting sonic vibration into light movement. The experience resembles a synaesthetic experience where what you hear is also what you see. The same electricity generated to move the speaker cones is sent simultaneously to high-speed motors that deflect the laser light on an x/y axis converting sonic vibration into light movement.”
Got that? Basically, the man makes light do things you’d never expect possible. His work has been captured on the Backscatter DVD released through Synaesthesia Records.
Marco Fusinato
Marco Fusinato is an internationally exhibited visual artist and musician, whose What Is Music? performance promises “the exploration of noise as music via the use of guitar/electronics, [combining] disregarded electronic detritus into sheer amplified shards and walls of free-noise ecstaticism.” His previous work has included the TM/MF album, a collaborative piece with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore in which Fusinato improvised paintings to Moore’s improvised guitar pieces.
Dale Gorfinkel
While the notion of the modified guitar is hardly a new one, Dale Gorfinkel has spent the last seven years taking instrument modification to strange new places – specifically, the vibraphone. Among his innovations are the addition of motorised mechanisms to play the instrument, adding extra bars tuned to microtones (notes between the notes), unit amplication and more, which might give some insight into what he describes as his “vibraphone deconstructions”.
Not only does he coax impossible sounds out of his instrument – the modifications themselves transform the vibraphone into an artwork in its own right.
Feurwasser
This work mixes fire and water – or, as artist Miles van Dorssen describes it, “a dynamic synthesis of elemental forces” – in a tempest of symbolism. Feurwasser toured with the 2007 Big Day Out and the piece will be belching steam and static in the Carriageworks foyer at the festival.
And that’s not all: another overseas visitor is the acclaimed ‘musique concrete’ artist Valerio Tricoli, whose unique take on conceptual forms of sound has spreading from his hometown of Palermo, Italy, throughout the world, and the event will also mark the debut performance of the piano-meets-grindcore-drums duo Maxximal Paterrorist.
What Is Music? takes place at Carriageworks, Bay 20 on Sat 12 April from 5pm.