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Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture.

Editorial Associate: Tiarney Meikus

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Index

Liquid Architecture

Content Types

Artist Profiles (15)

Audio (4)

Audio Papers (46)

Editorial (3)

Essays (68)

Conversations (27)

Scores (11)

Series (19)

Text Poems (10)

Contributors (208)

  • 33EMYBW

    • Shanghai native 33EMYBW (Wu Shanmin) has been an active member in the Chinese music scene for over a decade. She has also performed at CTM and Sinotronics in Germany, China Drifting Festival in Switzerland, and SXSW. Her 2018 album Golem, released on SVBKVLT, was met with critical acclaim and voted one of the best electronic albums of 2018 by Bandcamp. In 2019 she released DONG2 EP under Merrie Records Beijing, and will premiere her sophomore album Arthropods (SVBKVLT) at Unsound 2019.

  • Aasma Tulika

    • Aasma Tulika is an artist based in Delhi. Her practice locates technological infrastructures as sites to unpack how power embeds, affects, and moves narrative making processes. Her work engages with moments that disturb belief systems through assemblages of video, zines, interactive text, writings and sound. Aasma was a fellow at the Home Workspace Program 2019-20, Ashkal Alwan, her work has appeared in Restricted Fixations, Abr_circle, Khoj Art+Science program, HH Art Space. She is a member of the collective -out-of-line-, and collaboratively maintains a home server hosting an internet radio station. She is currently teaching at Ambedkar University Delhi.

  • A Hanley

    • A Hanley is an artist currently living on Wurundjeri Country in Melbourne, Australia. Their practice uses sound and media to explore relations among queer ecologies, attunement, situatedness, and speculative practices. Engaging forms of performance, installation, and collaboration, Hanley's work is interested in audition as an affective practice and the possibilities of sound and technology to support and alter the sonic expressions of humans and non-humans.

  • Aisyah Aaqil Sumito

    • Aisyah Aaqil Sumito is an artist and writer living near Derbarl Yerrigan on Whadjuk Noongar Bibbulmun lands. Their work reflects mostly on personal intersections of disability, queerness and diasporic ancestry in so-called 'australia'. They have recently made text-based contributions to Runway Journal and HERE&NOW20: Perfectly Queer, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery.

  • Alessandro Bosetti

    • Alessandro Bosetti is an Italian composer, performer and sound artist, currently based in Marseille. His work delves into the musicality of spoken language, utilising misunderstandings, translations and interviews as compositional tools. His works for voice and electronics blur the line between electro-acoustic composition, aural writing and performance.

  • Alexander Garsden

    • Alexander Garsden is a Melbourne-based composer, guitarist and electroacoustic musician, working across multiple exploratory musical disciplines. Recent work includes commissions from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Speak Percussion, Michael Kieran Harvey and Eugene Ughetti; alongside performances with artists including Tetuzi Akiyama (Japan), Oren Ambarchi, Radu Malfatti (Austria), Julia Reidy, David Stackenäs (Sweden), and with Erkki Veltheim and Rohan Drape. From 2014 to 2019 Garsden was Co-Director of the INLAND Concert Series. He has taught through RMIT University and the University of Melbourne.

  • Alexander Powers

    • Alexander Powers is a choreographer, performer and DJ from Naarm. In 2019 they premiered their first full length choreographic work Time Loop at the Melbourne Fringe Festival, receiving the Temperance Hall Award at the Fringe Awards. Under the moniker Female Wizard, they are known internationally for their forward-thinking DJ sets. They’ve performed at Golden Plains, Dark Mofo, Boiler Room, Hybrid Festival and Soft Centre and held a four year residency at Le Fag.

  • Alexandra Spence

    • Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician living on unceded Wangal land in Sydney, Australia. Through her practice Alex attempts to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment as a kind of communion or conversation. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions. Alex has presented her art and music in Australia, Asia, Europe, and North America including BBC Radio; Ausland, Berlin; Café Oto, London; EMS, Stockholm; Punkt Festival, Kristiansand; Standards Studio, Milan; AB Salon, Brussels; Radiophrenia, Glasgow; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; Sound Forms Festival, Hong Kong; MONO, Brisbane; The Substation, Melbourne; Soft Centre, and Liveworks Festival, Sydney.

  • Allanah Stewart

    • Allanah Stewart is an artist from Aotearoa/New Zealand, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. As well as her work in various experimental music projects, she is the presenter of a monthly podcast radio programme called Enquiring Minds, hosted by Noods radio, which explores old and new, lesser known and well known sounds that loosely fit under the banner of experimental music.

  • Allison Gibbs

    • Allison Gibbs is an artist living and working on Djaara Country/Maldon, Victoria. She is currently a PhD candidate at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture (MADA).
    Mouth Making an Orifice has been adapted for OOO/LA from a part of Allison’s doctoral research (Orificing as Method).

  • Amanda Stewart

    • Amanda Stewart is a poet, author, and vocal artist. She has created a diverse range of publications, performances, film and radio productions in Australia, Europe, Japan, and the USA, working in literature, new music, broadcasting, theatre, dance, and new media environments. Amanda collaborated with Chris Mann for many years in the Australian ensemble, Machine For Making Sense (with Jim Denley, Rik Rue, and Stevie Wishart), as well as in other contexts. Her poem ‘ta’ was written in honour of Chris Mann’s extraordinary vision and work.

  • Amy Cimini

    • Amy Cimini is a musicologist, violist, and Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego. She works on questions of power, community, and technology in twentieth & twenty-first century experimental music, sound art, and auditory culture. She is the author of Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life (OUP 2022) and numerous articles. She embraces feminist historiographic methods and, as a musician, centers performance-based epistemologies to query how culture workers negotiate power and difference within local, regional, and transnational histories.

  • Anabelle Lacroix

    • Anabelle Lacroix is a French-Australian curator, writer and radio contributor. Working independently in Paris, she is based at Fondation Fiminco for a year-long residency focused on the politics of sleeplessness (2020). She has a broad practice, and a current interest in experimental practice, working with performance, sound, discourse and publishing. She is a PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design.

  • Ander Rennick

    • Ander Rennick is a graphic artist based in Melbourne interested in the fetishisation of editorial, pedagogical, pornographic and mimetic commodities.

  • Andrew Brooks

    • Andrew Brooks is an artist, writer, and teacher who lives on unceded Wangal land. He is a lecturer in media cultures at UNSW, one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, and a member of the Rosa Press Collective. Homework, a book of essays co-written with Astrid Lorange, was recently published by Discipline.

  • Andrew Fedorovitch

    • Andrew Fedorovitch is compos mentis.
 Andrew Fedorovitch embodies professionalism in every aspect of his life, including music.

  • André Dao

    • André Dao is a writer, editor, researcher, and artist. His debut novel, Anam, won the 2021 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. He is also the co-founder of Behind the Wire, an oral history project documenting people’s experience of immigration detention and a producer of the Walkley-award winning podcast, The Messenger. He is a member of the Manus Recording Project Collective.

  • Ange Goh

    • Angela Goh is a dancer and choreographer. Her work poses possibilities for disruption and transformation inside the aesthetics and conditions of technocapitalism, planetarity, and the post-anthropocene. She lives and works in Sydney, and has toured her work across Australia, Europe, the UK, the USA and Asia. She received the 2020 Keir Choreographic Award and the inaugural Sydney Dance Company Beyond the Studio Fellowship 2020-21.

  • Anna Annicchiarico

    • Anna Annicchiarico has a bachelor's degree in Hindi language and literature and she specialised in anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. For her studies, she focused on the effects of orientalism in post-colonial imageries, especially on migrants in Italy, analysing religious places, and their meaning for different generations. In recent years, she has been increasingly involved in contemporary art and performance.

  • Anna Liebzeit

    • Anna Liebzeit composes for collaborations across installation, theatre, and film. Recent compositions include the feature film The Survival of Kindness (Rolf de Heer 2022), Sleeplessness Carriageworks (Karen Therese 2022), The Darkness of Enlightenment Samstag Museum of Art (James Tylor 2021), kipli pawuta lumi MONA FOMA (2020), and SHIT and LOVE by Dee and Cornelius (45 Downstairs, Venice Biennale 2019, and feature film SHIT 2021). Anna has made music for various NAIDOC events and has had work shown at various venues nationally.

    Her solo practice investigates erasure and becoming inscribed, as a personal and broader (Australian) cultural phenomenon. Her research is linked to the lived experience of Stolen Generations and relationality by drawing on Susan Dion’s educative provocation to complicate empathy when engaging with First Nations peoples. Anna has been an educator in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health and education for over twenty years and is an award-winning curriculum writer. In 2021 she received the Creative Victoria Creators Fund grant to research the intersections of her teaching and creative methodologies.

  • Anne Zeitz

    • Anne Zeitz is associate professor at University Rennes 2. Her research focuses on aural attention, the inaudible, the unheard, and the polyphony in contemporary art. She directed the research project 'Sound Unheard' and she co-organised the eponymous exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Paris, Paris and exhibition 'Échos magnétiques” at the MBA Rennes, Rennes in 2019.

  • Annika Kristensen

    • Annika Kristensen is Senior Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne.

  • Arben Dzika

    • Arben Dzika is an artist whose practice involves working with various media including, but not limited to: sound, image, word, and performance. His work primarily seeks to reflect on, interrogate, and play with technologies, systems, and human senses. Within his practice, he works as a producer and DJ under the moniker, Dilae.

  • Archie Barry

    • Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist working with a trans politics of quietude. Their practice is autobiographical, somatic, and process-led, and spans performance, video, music production, and writing. Cultivating a genealogy of personas, they produce self-portraiture that brings to question dominant notions of personhood and representation.

  • Arlie Alizzi

    • Arlie Alizzi is a Yugambeh writer living between Yawuru Country (Broome) and Wurundjeri Country (Melbourne). He is an editor, writer and researcher. He was an editor for Un Magazine with Neika Lehman in 2018, and co-edited a special issue of Archer Magazine in 2020. He was a writer-in-residence for MPavilion in 2019, and is interested in articulations of place in writing about urban areas.

  • Audrey Schmidt

    • Audrey Schmidt is a writer and editor based in Melbourne, Australia. She is a regular contributor to Memo Review, co-editor the third issue of Dissect Journal, and has written for various publications including Art Monthly, Art + Australia and un Magazine. She co-founded Minority Report with Adam Hammad in 2018 and released one online issue that was available until the domain expired in 2019. Audrey sits on the FYTA (GR) Board of Advisors.

  • Austin Benjamin

    • Austin Benjamin, known for his stage name Utility, is a Sydney-based music producer, artist & founder of the label Trackwork. He’s released projects through Room 40, Sumac, HellosQuare, and produced music for releases on labels including Universal NZ, AVTV, Warner & 66 Records. In 2019 Utility & close collaborator T. Morimoto released Nexus Destiny featuring a collection of 60 arpeggios made entirely with software synthesisers, released on Melbourne-based label Sumac.

    Earlier this year Utility performed alongside T Breezy, Walkerboy, Sevy & Bayang at Sydney Opera House’s Barrbuwari event. Austin has previously composed and performed new works for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and University of Queensland Art Museum with T. Morimoto, and MONA FOMA Tasmania with turntablist Martin Ng and has exhibited audio-visual gallery works including ‘Strategic Innovation’ with Coen Young at Kronenberg Wright, Sydney.

  • Autumn Royal

    • Autumn Royal is a poet and researcher based in Narrm/Melbourne. Autumn’s current research examines elegiac expression in contemporary poetry. Autumn is the interviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review, and author of the poetry collections She Woke & Rose and Liquidation.

  • Beau Lai

    • Beau Lai (formerly Lilly) is an artist and writer currently based in Paris, France. Beau spent their formative years working intensively within the contemporary arts industry on Darug and Gadigal land in so-called 'Australia'. They are most well known for self-publishing their essay and work of institutional critique, 'Working at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. It does not exist in a vacuum', in 2020.

  • Behrouz Boochani

    • Behrouz Boochani is a Kur­dish-Iran­ian writer, jour­nal­ist, scholar, cul­tural advo­cate and film­maker. He was writer for the Kur­dish lan­guage mag­a­zine Werya. He writes reg­u­larly for The Guardian and sev­eral other pub­li­ca­tions. Boochani is also co-direc­tor (with Arash Kamali Sar­ves­tani) of the 2017 fea­ture-length film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time, and author of No Friend but the Moun­tains: Writ­ing from Manus Prison. He was held on Manus Island from 2013 until 2019.

  • Ben Raynor

    • Ben Raynor is an artist, living in Melbourne.

  • Bianca Winataputri

    • Bianca Winataputri is a Melbourne-based independent curator and writer researching contemporary practice in Southeast Asia, and relationships between individuals and collectives in relation to history, globalisation, identity and community building. Currently working at Regional Arts Victoria, Bianca was previously Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the NGA. She holds a BA (University of Melbourne), and BA Honours from the ANU where she received the Janet Wilkie Prize for Art. In 2018 Bianca was selected for 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Curators’ Intensive.

  • Bola Chinelo

    • Bola Chinelo is a multimedia artist based in Los Angeles. Chinelo’s work uses esoteric symbolism, coding languages, and sonic and iconographic languages to convey messaging.

  • Brad Darkson

    • Brad Darkson is a South Australian visual artist currently working across various media including carving, sound, sculpture, multimedia installation, and painting. Darkson's practice is regularly focused on site specific works, and connections between contemporary and traditional cultural practice, language and lore. His current research interests include traditional land management practices, bureaucracy, seaweed, and the neo-capitalist hellhole we're all forced to exist within. Conceptually, Darkson's work is often informed by his First Nations and Anglo Australian heritage. Brad's mob on his dad's side is the Chester family, with lineages to Narungga and many other Nations in South Australia from Ngarrindjeri to Far West Coast. On his mum's side he is from the Colley and Ball convict and settler migrant families, both arriving in 1839, aboard the Duchess of Northumberland.

  • Brandon LaBelle

    • Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, and questions of agency. Guided by situated and collaborative methodologies, he develops and presents artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with others. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling, and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making, as well as extra-institutional initiatives, including The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-ongoing). From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality.

  • Brian Hioe

    • Brian Hioe was one of the founding editors of New Bloom, an online magazine covering activism and youth politics in Taiwan and the Asia Pacific, founded in 2014 in the wake of the Sunflower Movement. Hioe is a freelance writer on social movements and politics, as well as an occasional translator.

  • Bridget Chappell

    • Bridget Chappell works across dance and classical music, speculative technology, ungovernable space, and literature. She DJs and produces music as Hextape and tries to leave a trail of rave breadcrumbs wherever she goes.

  • Bryan Phillips

    • Bryan Phillips A.K.A. Galambo is a Chilean/Australian artist working in community arts, music and performance, using sound as a means to facilitate engagement with others. His practice has mainly been developed in Chile, but after completing his Masters in Community Cultural Development (VCA-2013) he has become involved in projects with artists from Timor-Leste, Indonesia and Australia.

  • Camila Marambio

    • Camila Marambio is a private investigator, amateur dancer, permaculture enthusiast, and sporadic writer, but first and foremost, she is a curator and the founder/director of Ensayos, a nomadic interdisciplinary research program in Tierra del Fuego.

  • Candice Hopkins

    • Candice Hopkins is a curator, writer and researcher interested in history, art and indigeneity, and their intersections. Originally from Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Hopkins is a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She was senior curator for the 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art, and worked on the curatorial teams for the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale, and documenta 14.

  • Casey (Nicholls-Bull) Jones

    • Casey (Nicholls-Bull) Jones is the assistant editor for Liquid Architecture's Disclaimer.
    She is also an artist who utilises embodied knowledge, plant and herbal study, research, and deep listening as the backbones of her practice. Through unhurried and repetitive processes such as pyrographic wood burning techniques, oil painting, and the observation of and connection to natural cycles and materials, Jones uses these methods to rearrange, layer, peel back, and continually connect to knowledges, memories and histories that are personally felt, encountered, and observed around her. Jones uses the moon cycle as a continual framework to maintain the rhythm and logic of her practise, and is continually in the midst of deconstructing the complexity of working as a settler on unceded Wurundjeri land through her processes of both making and understanding. Her hope is that through circling, living through, and re-curringly interrogating these things she studies and tends to, something fruitful may gradually become embodied, communicated and understood in new ways by herself and those who encounter her work.

  • Casey Rice

    • Sound Mastering: Casey Rice is an audio doula living and practicing on Djaara Country/Castlemaine, Victoria.

  • Catherine Ryan

    • Catherine Ryan is an artist who works with performance, sound, text, video and installation. She often uses humour and references to philosophical and pop figures to interrogate the neoliberal disciplining the body. She has exhibited at galleries and festivals in Australia and Europe, including Gertrude Contemporary, MUMA (Melbourne), the Royal College of Art (London), the Vienna Biennale and the Melbourne Art Fair. She is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University, researching how ideas from experimental composition, cybernetics and performance can help us wrestle with the existential threat of extinction that climate change and other catastrophes pose to life on our planet.

  • Cecilia Vicuña

    • Cecilia Vicuña's work dwells in the not yet, the future potential of the unformed, where sound, weaving, and language interact to create new meanings.

    'In January 1966, I began creating precarios (precarious) installations and basuritas, objects composed of debris, structures that disappear, along with quipus and other weaving metaphors. I called these works 'Arte Precario', creating a new independent category, a non-colonized name for them. The precarios soon evolved into collective rituals and oral performances based on dissonant sound and the shamanic voice. The fluid, multi-dimensional quality of these works allowed them to exist in many media and languages at once. Created in and for the moment, they reflect ancient spiritual technologies—a knowledge of the power of individual and communal intention to heal us and the earth.'
    —Cecilia Vicuña

  • Cher Tan

    • Cher Tan is an essayist and critic living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Country. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Runway Journal, Art Guide Australia, Catapult and Overland, amongst others. She is an editor at LIMINAL and the books editor at Meanjin. Her debut essay collection, Peripathetic: Notes on (Un)belonging, is forthcoming with NewSouth Publishing in 2024.

  • Chi Tran

    • Chi Tran is a writer, editor, and an artist who makes poems that may be text, video, object, sound, or drawing. Chi is primarily interested in working with language as a means of coming-to-terms. Their work has been published by Incendium Radical Library Press, Cordite Poetry Review, Australian Poetry and Liminal Magazine and exhibited at galleries including Firstdraft, Sydney; Punk Café, Melbourne; and ACCA, Melbourne. In 2019, as a recipient of The Ian Potter Cultural Trust Fund, Chi spent three months in New York developing their practice with renowned poets including Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Fred Moten, and Jackie Wang.

  • Christopher LG Hill

    • Christopher L G Hill is an artist, poet, anarchist, collaborator, facilitator, lover, friend, DJ, performer, sound pervader, publisher of Endless Lonely Planet, co-label boss; Bunyip trax, traveller, homebody, dancer, considerate participator, dishwasher, writer, bencher, eater, exhibitor: Sydney, Physics Room, Westspace, TCB, BUS, Punk Cafe,100 Grand street, Lismore Regional Gallery, Good Press, Gambia Castle, Conical, GCAS, NGV, VCA, Mission Comics, Slopes, Art Beat, Papakura Gallery, Neon Parc, UQ Gallery, Tate Modern, Connors Connors, Glasgow International, Sandy Brown, OFLUXO, New Scenarios, Margaret Lawrence, Flake, Utopian Slumps, World Food Books, Sutton, Rearview, Joint Hassles, a basement, a tree, Innen publications, SAM, Chateau 2F, etc, and tweeter, twitcher, sleeper, Biennale director (‘Melbourne Artist initiated’ 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2018-20), DJ, retired gallerist Y3K, conversationalist who represents them self and others, born Melbourne/Narrm 1980c.e, lives World.
    http://www.christopherlghill.com/
    https://twitter.com/CLGHill
    https://www.instagram.com/christopherlghill/
    https://bunyiptrax.bandcamp.com/
    https://jahjahsphinx.blogspot.com/
    https://boobasprite.tumblr.com/
    http://counterfeitnessfirst.blogspot.com/
    http://newtabandwindowshopper.blogspot.com/
    https://www.mixcloud.com/Christopher_L_G_Hill/
    http://anotheryouapictureavoicemessagemime.blogspot.com/

  • Chun Yin Rainbow Chan

    • Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is a Hong Kong–Australian artist, living in Sydney. Working across music, performance and installation, Rainbow is interested in the copy and how the ways in which it can disrupt Western notions of ownership. Central to Rainbow's work is the circulation of knock-off objects, sounds and images in global media. Her work positions the counterfeit as a complex sign that shapes new myths, values and contemporary commodity production.

  • Claire G. Coleman

    • Claire G Coleman is a Noongar writer, born in Western Australia, and now based in Naarm. Her family have been from the area around Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun on the south coast of WA since before time started being recorded. Claire wrote her black&write! Fellowship-winning book Terra Nullius while travelling around Australia in a caravan. The Old Lie (2019) was her second novel and in 2021 her acclaimed non-fiction book, Lies, Damned Lies was published by Ultimo Press. Enclave is her third novel. Since mid 2020 Claire has also been a member of the cultural advisory committee for Agency, a Not-for-profit Indigenous arts Consultancy.

  • Clare Cooper

    • Clare M. Cooper has brought together thousands of people to work together on community festivals, skill-share spaces, pleasure activism, speculative design, and critical listening through co-founding the NOW now (2001), Splinter Orchestra (2000), Berlin Splitter Orchester (2009), Frontyard Projects (2016), and Climate Strike Workshop (2019).

    She wrote her PhD thesis on the intersections of context-responsive improvised music practice and collaborative design, and is a Lecturer at the University of Sydney School of Design Architecture and Planning. Disclaimer journal's profile on Cooper, written by Jim Denley can be found here.

  • Clare Milledge

    • Clare Milledge is an artist and academic, she lives and works between the lands of the Arakwal people in Bundjalung country (Broken Head, Northern NSW) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal people (Paddington, Sydney). She is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design and is represented by STATION gallery.

  • Coco Klockner

    • Coco Klockner is an artist and writer living in New York City. Recent exhibitions include venues such as The Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Alfred, NY; Interstate Projects, Brooklyn; Guadalajara90210, CDMX; The Luminary, St. Louis; Bass & Reiner, San Francisco; Lubov, New York; ONE Archives, Los Angeles; and Egret Egress, Toronto. They are the author of the book K-Y (Genderfail, 2019) and have published writing with Montez Press, Real Life Magazine, Spike Art Magazine, and Burnaway.

  • Dale Gorfinkel

    • Dale Gorfinkel is a musician-artist whose stylefree improvisational approach informs his performances, instrument-building, and kinetic sound installations. Aiming to reflect an awareness of the dynamic nature of culture and the value of listening as a mode of knowing people and places, Dale is interested in bringing creative communities together and shifting perceived boundaries. Current projects include Prophets, Sounds Like Movement, and Music Yared as well as facilitating Art Day South, an inclusive arts studio with Arts Access Victoria.

  • Damiano Bertoli

    • Damiano Bertoli was an artist and writer who worked across drawing, theatre, video, prints, installation and sculpture. With works of great humour and intelligence, Bertoli was best known for his ongoing series Continuous Moment, which sprawled a range of mediums across multiple works, ultimately circulating on time itself. His practice gravitated toward aesthetic and cultural moments, particularly related to his birth year of 1969.

  • Daniel Green

    • Daniel Green is an artist and performer. His practice explores the objects and media we use to occupy our time, and how they are used to give our lives meaning. Daniel’s work has been exhibited within Campbelltown Arts Centre, Pelt, Artspace and BUS Projects, and has performed at Electrofringe, The Now Now Festival, Liquid Architecture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, and Cafe OTO in London. He lives and works in London.

  • Daniel Jenatsch

    • Daniel Jenatsch makes interdisciplinary works that explore the interstices between affect and information. His work combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces, and performances. He is the winner of the 2020 John Fries award. His works have been presented in exhibitions and programs at ACCA, UNSW, Arts House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Athens Biennale, NextWave Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Liquid Architecture Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the MousonTurm, Frankfurt.

  • Danni Zuvela

    • Danni Zuvela is a curator and writer based in Melbourne and the Gold Coast. Her research is informed by interests in feminism, activism, ecology, language and performance. With Joel Stern, Danni has led Liquid Architecture as Artistic Director, and continues to develop curatorial projects for the organisation.

  • Debris Facility

    • Debris Facility Pty Ltd is a para-corporate entity who engages im/material contexts with the view to highlight and disrupt administrative forms and their embedded power relations. Deploying print, design, installation, and wearables as the most visible parts of operations, they also work in experimental pedagogy and perforated performance of labour. They are a white-settler parasite with theft and dispossession as the implicated ground from which they work. They currently hold contracts with Liquid Architecture, Victorian College of the Arts, Monash University and Debris Facility Pty Ltd.

  • Denise Helene Sumi

    • Denise Helene Sumi is art historian, author and professionally involved in culture.

  • Diego Ramirez

    • Diego Ramirez makes art, writes about culture, and labours in the arts. In 2018, he showed his video work in a solo screening by ACCA x ACMI and he performed in Lifenessless at West Space x Gertrude Contemporary in 2019. His work has been shown locally and internationally at MARS Gallery, ACMI, Westspace, Torrance Art Museum, Hong-Gah Museum, Careof Milan, Buxton Cotntemporary, WRO Media Art Biennale, Human Resources LA, Art Central HK, Sydney Contemporary, and Deslave. His words feature in Art and Australia, NECSUS, un Projects, Runway Journal, Art Collector, and Australian Book Review. He is represented by MARS Gallery, Editor-at-large at Running Dog and Gallery Manager at SEVENTH.

  • Dimitri Troaditis

    • Dimitri Troaditis works in the Greek-Australian media. As a poet he has been extensively published in Greece and in Australia in numerous literary journals, websites, blogs and anthologies. He has published six poetry collections and two social history books so far. He has organised poetry readings in Melbourne for years and translates others’ poetry. He runs poetry website To Koskino and was a resident of Coburg for 19 years.

  • Douglas Kahn

    • Douglas Kahn is an historian and theorist of energies in the arts, sound in the arts and sound studies, and media arts, from the late-nineteenth century to the present. He lives on unceded Dharug and Gundungurra land. His books include Energies in the Arts (MIT Press, 2019); Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013); Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press, 1999); Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of Digital Arts, edited with Hannah Higgins (University of California Press, 2012); and Source: Music of the Avant-garde, edited with Larry Austin (University of California Press, 2011).

  • Dr. Lawrence Abu Hamdan

    • Dr. Lawrence Abu Hamdan
    Internationally Known Private Ear
    Serving Industries of Culture Since 2007
    Licensed & Bonded: Goldsmiths College, University of London
    Civil | Criminal | Human | Marital | Theological | Supernatural
    Bureaus: Beirut, Berlin, Dubai, London

  • Dylan Martorell

    • Dylan Martorell is an artist and musician based in Narrm/Melbourne Victoria. He is a founding member of Slow Art Collective, Snawklor, Hi God People, and Forum of Sensory Motion. He has performed and exhibited internationally, including projects with; Art Dubai, Asian Art Biennale, Tarrawarra Biennale, Jakarta Biennale and Kochi Muzirus Biennale. His work often combines site-specific materiality and music to create temporary sites for improvised community engagement.

  • Dylan Robinson

    • Dylan Robinson is a xwélméxw (Stó:lō) writer, artist, scholar and curator, He is Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts, and associate professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He is author of Hungry Listening, Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, published by University of Minnesota Press.

  • Elena Biserna

    • Elena Biserna is a scholar and independent curator based in Marseille (France), working at the intersection of social, political and public spheres.

  • Eloise Sweetman

    • Eloise Sweetman loves art, misses her home in Western Australia, all the time loving Rotterdam where she became friends with Pris Roos whose artwork Sweetman speaks of. Sweetman is a curator, artist, writer and teacher working in intimacy, not knowing and material relation. She started Shimmer with Dutch-Australian artist Jason Hendrik Hansma in 2017.

  • Emile Frankel

    • Author of Hearing the Cloud (Zero Books), Emile Frankel is a writer and composer researching the changing conditions of online listening. In his spare time he runs the science fiction and critical fantasy publisher Formling.

  • Emma Nixon

    • Curious about the tender intersections between art, life and friendships, Emma Nixon is an emerging curator and writer. In 2018 she completed a Bachelor of Art History and Curating at Monash University and co-founded Cathedral Cabinet ARI in the Nicholas Building. In Melbourne she has curated and written about exhibitions that investigate subjects such as abstraction, the domestic, care and collage within contemporary art.

  • Emma Ramsay

    • Emma Ramsay is active across experimental dance and DIY music; sound performance; and other text collaborations. She works in community media and archives.

  • Emma Russell

    • Emma Russell is a critical carceral studies scholar and senior lecturer in crime, justice and legal studies at La Trobe University, Australia. She researches and writes on policing and criminalisation, prisons, detention, and activism. Emma is the author of Queer Histories and the Politics of Policing (2020) and co-author of Resisting Carceral Violence: Women’s Imprisonment and the Politics of Abolition (2018).

  • Eric Avery

    • Eric Avery is a Ngiyampaa, Yuin, Bandjalang and Gumbangirr artist. As part of his practice Eric plays the violin, dances and composes music. Working with his family’s custodial songs he seeks to revive and continue on an age old legacy – continuing the tradition of singing in his tribe – utilising his talents to combine and create an experience of his peoples culture.

  • Ernie Althoff

    • Ernie Althoff

  • Ernie Altohff

    • Ernie Althoff has been making experimental music since the late 1970s, and is well-known for his work. Throughout this period he has always remained true to his exploratory ideals.

  • Fayen d'Evie

    • Fayen d’Evie is an artist and writer, based in Muckleford, Australia. Her projects are often conversational and collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks. Fayen advocates the radical potential for blindness, arguing that blindness offers critical positions and methods attuned to sensory translations, ephemerality, the tangible and the intangible, concealment, uncertainty, the precarious, and the invisible. With artist Katie West, Fayen co-founded the Museum Incognita, which revisits neglected or obscured histories through scores that activate embodied readings. Fayen is also the founder of 3-ply, which investigates artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the creation, dispersal, translation, and archiving of texts.

  • Fileona Dkhar

    • Fileona Dkhar is an Indigenous Khasi visual artist based in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Shillong, India. Her work entwines the personal with mythology and history as storytelling devices.

  • Fjorn Butler

    • Fjorn Bastos is an artist, researcher, and event organiser. As an artist, she works primarily in sound and performance under the name Papaphilia. As a researcher, she interrogates how biological discourses are used in neoliberal/colonial governance structures to shape the political. Fjorn's research informs her writing on sound-poetics and the challenges this framework poses to anglophone notions of property. She is also co-director of Future Tense and co-curator of Writing and Concepts.

  • Frances Barrett

    • Frances Barrett is an artist who lives and works on Kaurna land in Tarntanya/Adelaide. Frances is currently Lecturer in Contemporary Art at University of South Australia.

  • Francis Carmody

    • Francis Carmody’s artistic practice serves as a useful alibi to reach out to people he admires across disciplines and technical capabilities to share stories and complete projects. Through tracing networks and natural structures, he would like to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on.

    This process of enquiry draws on meticulous research, cold calling, persistence and frequent rejection. Creating an ever-expanding list of Project Partners.

  • Francis Plagne

    • Francis Plagne is a musician and writer. He has written about contemporary art for several major Australian publications and institutions. His musical work integrates idiosyncratic forms of songwriting with a variety of other approaches, including group improvisation, instrumental miniatures, and domestic musique concrète. He has been performing live regularly since 2005 and has released recordings on labels such as Black Truffle, Horn of Plenty, Kye Records, Penultimate Press and his own Mould Museum micro-label.

  • Freya Schack-Arnott

    • Freya Schack-Arnott is an Australian/Danish cellist who enjoys a multi-faceted career as a soloist and ensemble performer of classical and contemporary repertoire, curator and improviser within experimental music, electronics, popular and cross-disciplinary art forms. Schack-Arnott regularly performs with Australia's leading new music ensembles, including ELISION Ensemble (as core member) and Ensemble Offspring. Her curatorial roles include co-curator/founder of the regular 'Opus Now' music series and previous curator of the NOW Now festival and Rosenberg Museum.

  • Geoff Robinson

    • Geoff Robinson is a Melbourne-based artist working on Wurundjeri country. Robinson creates event-based artworks that utilise the temporal qualities of sound and performance and the spatial conditions of physical sites to unravel the durational layers of place. Robinson has presented projects with Titanik, Turku; Bus Projects, Melbourne; Liquid Architecture, Melbourne; and MoKS, Mooste, Estonia. He was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture 2014 and completed the PhD project Durational Situation at MADA, Monash University, Melbourne, 2018.

  • Georgia Hutchison

    • Georgia Hutchison is a cultural development practitioner and arts executive in Naarm/Melbourne, and Executive Director/CEO of Liquid Architecture. Her practice as an artist, educator, organiser and strategist crosses contemporary art, music, design and social justice.

  • Gooooose

    • Gooooose (Han Han) is an electronic music producer, visual artist and software developer based in Shanghai, China. His current releases include They (D Force, 2017), Dong 1 (D Force, 2018), Pro Rata (ANTE-RASA, 2019). Gooooose's 2019 SVBKVLT–released RUSTED SILICON received positive reviews from media including boomkat, Resident Advisor, Dusted Magazine, and The Wire. Gooooose has performed live at CTM (Berlin, 2018), Nyege Nyege (Kampala, 2019), Soft Centre (Sydney, 2019), Unsound (Kraków, 2019) and Recombinant (San Francisco, 2019).

  • Hannan Jones

    • Hannan Jones is an artist working at the intersections of sound, installation, performance and moving image.

  • Han Reardon-Smith

    • Han Reardon-Smith (they/them) is a white settler of Welsh and Turkish heritage and is a musicker, radio/podcast producer, community organiser, and thinker-scholar.

  • Harmony Holiday

    • Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, director, and the author of four collections of poetry, Negro League Baseball, Go Find Your Father/A Famous Blues, Hollywood Forever, and A Jazz Funeral for Uncle Tom. She lives in New York and Los Angeles.

  • Haroon Mirza

    • Haroon Mirza is an artist who intertwines his practice with the role of composer. Mirza considers electricity his main medium and creates atmospheric environments through the linking together of light, sound, music, videos and elements of architecture. Regularly showing internationally in group and solo exhibitions, Mirza’s work has also been included in the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China (2012) and the 54th Venice Biennale, Italy (2011), where he was awarded the Silver Lion.

  • Holly Childs

    • Holly Childs is an artist and writer. Her research involves filtering stories of computation through frames of ecology, earth, memory, poetry, and light. She is the author of two books: No Limit (Hologram, Melbourne) and Danklands (Arcadia Missa, London), and she collaborates with Gediminas Žygus on ‘Hydrangea’. She is currently writing her third book, What Causes Flowers Not to Bloom?.

  • Holly Herndon

    • Holly Herndon experiments at the outer reaches of dance music and pop. Born in Tennessee, Herndon spent her formative years in Berlin’s techno scene and repatriated to San Francisco, where she completed her PhD at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Her albums include Platform (2015) and Proto (2019).

  • Iliass Saoud

    • Iliass Saoud was born in Halba, Lebanon in 1960 as the sixth of eight children of Wakim and Nadima Saoud. Escaping the Lebanese Civil War in 1977, Iliass migrated to Canada pursued a BA in Mathematics from Dalhouse University in 1982. In 1987 he married Janice Joseph (Fakhry) before settling in Australia to raise his family in 1997, owning a variety of small businesses including the Gaffney Street post office across from the Lincoln Mill’s Centre in Coburg from 2005-2011. Currently, Iliass works part time at a local newsagency and is an avid Bridge player and a dedicated grandfather of one.

  • Immy Chuah and The Convoy

    • The Convoy conjure illustrious soundscapes from the abyss of chaos, revealing hidden worlds of the imagination as the performance takes form and infuses with subjective experience. Using instruments of sound, light and smell, The Convoy enchant space with themes of tension, evolution, entropy and regeneration. Sensorial immersion transports audiences through highly dynamic environments that shift and blend into one single, breathing moment. As entity, rather than singular, Immy Chuah is a guest within The Convoy on unceded land.

  • Isabella Trimboli

    • Isabella Trimboli is a critic, essayist, editor, and publisher based in Melbourne, Australia. Her essays and criticism have been published widely, for publications including Metrograph Journal, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly, The Guardian, and The Sydney Reviews of Books. She is a 2023 recipient of a Seventh Gallery residency and is the co-founding editor of feminist music journal Gusher.

  • Isha Ram Das

    • Isha Ram Das is a composer and sound artist primarily concerned with ecologies of environment and culture. He works with experimental sound techniques to produce performances, installations and recordings. He was the 2019 recipient of the Lionel Gell Award for Composition, and has scored feature-length films and nationally-touring theatre installations. He has performed at institutions such as the Sydney Opera House; Black Dot Gallery, Melbourne; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Metro Arts, Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Boxcopy, Brisbane.

  • Ivan Cheng

    • Ivan Cheng's recent works are context specific situations, dealing with language and driven by relations with collaborators and hosts. His background as a performer and musician form the basis for using performance as a critical medium. Invested in questions around publics and accessibility, he produces videos, objects, paintings and publications as anchors for the staging of complex and precarious spectacles. His work is presented internationally, and he has initiated project space bologna.cc in Amsterdam since 2017.

  • Ivy Alvarez

    • Ivy Alvarez’s poetry collections include The Everyday English Dictionary, Disturbance, and Mortal. Her latest is Diaspora: Volume L (Paloma Press, 2019). A Fellow of MacDowell Colony (US), and Hawthornden (UK), her work is widely published and anthologised (twice in Best Australian Poems), with poems translated into Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean. Born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived in Wales for almost a decade, before arriving in New Zealand in 2014.

  • Jacqui Shelton

    • Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. Her work uses text, performance, film-making and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. She is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible. She has produced exhibitions and performance works in association with institutions including Gertrude Contemporary, the Institute of Modern Art, West Space, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Tarrawarra Museum, and with Channels Festival and Liquid Architecture. Shelton has shown work internationally in Milan at Care-Of, and at NARS Inc in New York City. She teaches photography at Monash University and in the Masters of Media program at RMIT, and holds a PhD from Monash University.

  • Jamal Nabulsi

    • Jamal Nabulsi (he/him) is a Palestinian diaspora activist, writer, scholar, thinker, and rap musician.

  • James Hazel

    • James Hazel is a composer/artist/researcher based on the unceded Gadigal land of the Eora Nation. As someone who lived in an underclass (social-housing) community for fourteen years, James employs extended score practices across sound, music, utterance, and (re)performance to interrogate what it means to live, love, and listen under precarity – stemming from both lived/researched experiences of poverty. As an advocate in this area, James has commissioned several artists from low-SES backgrounds through ADSR Zine.

    In recent years, James has 'worked' for the dole; various call centres; and, more recently, as a casual academic in musicology at USYD. In 2021, James was selected as one of the ABC Top 5 Researchers (Arts).

  • James Parker

    • James Parker is an academic at Melbourne Law School and long-time associate curator with Liquid Architecture. His work explores the many relations between law, sound and listening. He is currently working on machine listening with Joel Stern and Sean Dockray.

  • James Rushford

    • James Rushford is an Australian composer-performer who holds a doctorate from the California Institute of the Arts, and was a 2018 fellow at Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. His work is drawn from a familiarity with specific concrète, improvised, avant-garde and collagist languages. Currently, his work deals with the aesthetic concept of musical shadow. James has been commissioned as a composer by ensembles including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Glasgow), and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and regularly performs in Australia and internationally.

  • Jannah Quill

    • Jannah Quill’s deconstructive exploration of electronic instruments and technologies manifests in electronic music production and experimental audio-visual performance and installation. Jannah modifies existing technologies (such as solar panels) into innovative light-to-audio systems, used with software/hardware experimentation and modular synthesis to carve a distinct voice in electronic music and art.

  • Jared Davis

    • Jared Davis is a writer and curator based in London with an interest in independent music, sound culture, and its politics. He is Associate Editor of AQNB and co-host of the editorial platform’s Artist Statement podcast.

  • Jasmine Guffond

    • Jasmine Guffond is an artist and composer working at the interface of social, political, and technical infrastructures. Focused on electronic composition across music and art contexts her practice spans live performance, recording, installation and custom made browser add-ons. Through the sonification of data she addresses the potential of sound to engage with contemporary political questions and engages listening as a situated-knowledge practice.

  • Jason De Santolo

    • Jason De Santolo (Garrwa and Barunggam) is a researcher & creative producer based in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney, Australia. He has worked with his own communities as an activist and advocate using film and performance, protest and education to bring attention to injustices and design solutions using Indigenous knowledge.

  • Jazmina Figueroa

    • Jazmina Figueroa initiated the nineteenth call for Web Residencies and the collaboration between Digital Solitude and Liquid Architecture. Figueroa is a writer and performer.

  • Jen Callaway

    • Jen Callaway is a Melbourne musician, sound and performance artist, photographer, and community services worker raised in various parts of Tasmania. Current projects include bands Is There a Hotline?, Propolis, Snacks and Hi God People; and upcoming film Here at the End, by Campbell Walker, as actor/co-writer.

  • Jessica Aszodi

    • Jessica Aszodi is an Australian-born, London-based vocalist who has premiered many new pieces, performed work that has lain dormant for centuries, and sung roles ranging from standard operatic repertoire to artistic collaborations. She has been a soloist with ensembles including ICE; the Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras; and San Diego and Chicago Symphony Orchestras’ chamber series. Aszodi can be heard on numerous recordings and has sung in festivals around the world. She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from the Queensland Conservatorium, an MFA from the University of California, and is co-director of the Resonant Bodies Festival (Australia), and artistic associate of BIFEM.

  • Jessie Scott

    • Jessie Scott is a practising video artist, writer, programmer and producer who works across the spectrum of screen culture in Melbourne. She is a founding member of audiovisual art collective Tape Projects, and co-directed and founded the inaugural Channels Video Art Festival in 2013.

  • Jim Denley

    • Jim Denley is one of Australia's foremost improvisers. Over a career spanning four decades his work has emphasised the use of recording technologies, collaboration, and a concern with site-specificity.

  • Joee Mejias

    • Joee Mejias is a musician and video artist from Manila. She is co-producer of WSK, the first and only international festival of digital arts and new media in the Philippines and co-founder of HERESY, a new platform for women in sound and multimedia. She performs as Joee & I: her avant-pop electronica solo project.

  • Joel Sherwood Spring

    • Joel Sherwood Spring is a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs who works across research, activism, architecture, installation and speculative projects. At present, his work focuses on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation.

  • Joel Stern

    • Joel Stern is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the School of Media and Communication at RMIT, and an Associate Editor at Disclaimer. With a background in experimental music, Stern’s work — spanning research, curation, and art — focuses on practices of sound and listening and how these shape our contemporary worlds. From 2013-2022 he was the Artistic Director of Liquid Architecture.

  • Johnny Chang

    • Berlin-based composer-performer Johnny Chang engages in extended explorations surrounding the relationships of sound/listening and the in-between areas of improvisation, composition and performance. Johnny is part of the Wandelweiser composers collective and currently collaborates with: Catherine Lamb (Viola Torros project), Mike Majkowski (illogical harmonies), Phill Niblock, Samuel Dunscombe, Derek Shirley and others.

  • Jolyon Jones

    • Jolyon Jones is a Berlin-based student of fine arts at the University of Arts Berlin. He works primarily between sculpture, drawing, print media and sound. With an interest in practices of labour, Jolyon draws upon his background in anthropology exploring embedded concepts through research and architecture and the latent possibilities of everyday materials such as concrete, graphite, and silicone to access speculative narratives and the construction of mementos.

  • Jon Watts

    • Jon Watts is a Melbourne/Naarm based musician, designer, 3D artist and animator. His music has been released through cult labels SUMAC and Butter Sessions, and he is currently Senior Multimedia Installer at the National Gallery of Victoria.

  • Josten Myburgh

    • Josten Myburgh is a musician based on Whadjuk Noongar boodja country who plays with techniques from the worlds of electro-acoustic music, radio art, free improvisation, field recording and experimental composition. He co-directs exploratory music label Tone List and the Audible Edge festival. He has performed in South Africa, the United States, and throughout South East Asia, Europe and Australia. He is a Schenberg Fellow and a student of Antoine Beuger and Michael Pisaro.

  • Joy Zhou

    • Joy Zhou is a China born emerging artist and design practitioner based in Naarm/Melbourne. Informed by their background in Interior Design, Joy’s practice entails gestures of queering which unfold encounters and events that draw relationships between people, places, and spaces.

  • Julius Killerby

    • Julius Killerby is an artist living and working in London. His work focuses on the psychological ripple effects of certain cultural and societal transformations. Part of Julius’ practice also includes portraiture, and in 2017 he was nominated as a finalist in the Archibald Prize for his portrait of Paul Little. His work has been exhibited at VCA Art Space, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of Ballarat, and Geelong Gallery.

  • Katie West

    • Katie West is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives on Noongar Ballardong boodja and belongs to the Yindjibarndi people of the Pilbara tablelands in Western Australia. The process and notion of naturally dyeing fabric underpin her practice – the rhythm of walking, gathering, bundling, boiling up water and infusing materials with plant matter. The objects, installations and happenings that Katie creates invite attention to the ways we weave our stories, places, histories, and futures.

  • Kaz Therese

    • Kaz Therese (they/them) grew up on Darug land in Mt Druitt, Western Sydney. They are an interdisciplinary artist and cultural leader with a practice grounded in performance, activism and community building. Their work is inspired by place and narrative from working class & underclass settings. From 2013- 2020 they were the Artistic Director of PYT Fairfield. Kaz directed the Helpmann nominated PLAYLIST (premiered 2018), UnWrapped, Sydney Opera House (2019) Other works include TRIBUNAL presented at Griffin Theatre, ArtsHouse Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, Sydney Festival; WOMEN OF FAIRFIELD with MCA C3West and STARTTS, winning the Sydney Myer Arts & Cultural Award for Best Arts Program (2016).Kaz is founder of FUNPARK ,Mt Druitt (Sydney Festival 2014) and a graduate of the 2019 Australia Council Cultural Leadership program.

  • Kengné Téguia

    • Kengné Téguia is a Black Deaf HIV+ cyborg artist, who works from sound deafinitely. #TheBLACKRevolutionwillbeDEAFinitelyLoud

  • Kenneth Constance Loe

    • Kenneth Constance Loe (he/they) is an artist, writer, and performer from Singapore, and currently based in Vienna, Austria.

  • kirby

    • kirby is a fledgling. They garden, listen, and learn in Wurundjeri Country. kirby’s ecological listening project Local Time combines field recording and experimental web development to explore more-than-human neighborhood entanglements.

  • KT Spit

    • Kt Spit (Katie Collins) is an artist and musician based in Narrm (Melbourne). Lyrically and visually her work explores subcultural narratives and challenges dominant representations of loss, grief, and true love. In 2015 Kt independently released her debut album, Combluotion, and in 2019 will release a visual album entitled Kill the King.

  • Kynan Tan

    • Kynan Tan is an artist interested in the relations and conditions of computational systems, with a focus on data, algorithm, networks, materiality, control, and affect. These areas are explored using computer-generated artworks that take the form of simulations, video, sound, 3d prints, text, code, and generative algorithms.

  • Las Chinas

    • Las Chinas is the cosmic coincidences led to the meeting of Chileans Sarita Gálvez and Camila Marambio in Melbourne. Their shared reverence for the ancestral flautón chino from the Andes Mountains lead to playful explorations of its unique dissonant sounds and thereafter to experimenting with atonal signing and other technologies of the spirit.

    Influenced by Chilean feminist poet Cecilia Vicuña, the now deceased poet Fidel Sepúlveda, the musical ensemble La Chimuchina and the chino bands from the townships of La Canela and Andacollo, Las Chinas honours the ancestral tradition by enacting the principle of tearing each other apart.

  • Laura McLean

    • Laura McLean is a curator, writer, and researcher based in Naarm Melbourne. She is an Associate Curator at Liquid Architecture, member of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), and is currently undertaking a PhD in Curatorial Practice at MADA, Monash University. Past curatorial projects include CIVICS, Maroondah Federation Estate Gallery, Melbourne (2020); Startup States, Sarai-CSDS, Delhi (2019); and Contingent Movements Archive, Maldives Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale (2013). Her writing is included in edited books published by Arena, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the MIT Press, among others, and has been published by journals including Eyeline, Realtime, HKW Technosphere Magazine, and ArtAsiaPacific.

  • Laurie May

    • Originally from the Gulf of Carpentaria, Laurie May has made home here in the desert in Mparntwe. With Aboriginal ancestry from Central Queensland from her father and New Zealand heritage from her ma they have the saltwater, the red dirt and long white cloud in their veins. Embracing trauma and a troubled youth to bring you anti-capitalist poetry that makes you think. Laurie is also the Festival Director for the Red Dirt Poetry Festival and an award winning event producer.

  • Leighton Craig

    • Leighton Craig is an artist living in Meanjin/Brisbane. He has been in a number of bands (The Lost Domain, G55, The Deadnotes et al) and is currently a member of the duo Primitive Motion with Sandra Selig.

  • Liang Luscombe

    • Liang Luscombe is a Naarm/Melbourne-based visual artist whose practice encompasses painting, sculpture and moving image that engage in a process of generative questioning of how media and film affect audiences.

  • Lin Chi-Wei

    • Lin Chi-Wei is a legend of Taiwanese sonic art, whose practice incorporates folklore culture, noise, ritual, and audience participation.

  • Lisa Lerkenfeldt

    • Lisa Lerkenfeldt is a multi-disciplinary artist working in sound, gesture and performance. Central to her practice is languages of improvisation and intimacy with technology. Traces of a personal discipline and form of graphic notation are introduced in the online exhibition 14 Gestures. The associated recorded work Collagen (Shelter Press, 2020) disrupts the role of the common hair comb through gesture and sound.

  • Lucreccia Quintanilla

    • Lucreccia Quintailla is a multidisciplinary artist, DJ, educator, co-director of Liquid Architecture, and a sound system operator. She is interested in sound and collectivity and collaboration.

  • Luisa Lana

    • Luisa Lana was born in Australia in 1953. Her mother Nannina had arrived in Australia in 1950 with a 3 month old son, and worked for many years on the sewing room floors and her father Angelo worked on the docks where he helped unionise the Italian workforce. Luisa and her brother were latchkey kids, as they looked after themselves in the morning and ran the ‘Continental’ deli in the evenings. Luisa attained a teaching degree, then a postgrad in Social Sciences, and twice studied Italian at The University for Foreigners in Perugia, Italy. Luisa married Luigino Lana, a Venetian migrant who operated a mechanic business in Brunswick for over 30 years. She devoted her life to being an educator and a mother, teaching Italian to English speakers and English to generations of migrants from around the world. Currently Luisa is translating her father's memoirs from Italian to English, and enjoying being a Nonna.

  • Luke Conroy

    • Luke Conroy is a Tasmanian multidisciplinary artist currently based in The Netherlands. With a background in sociology and arts education, Luke’s artistic practice engages with socio-cultural topics in meaningful yet playful ways, utilising humour and irony as essential tools for critical reflection and expression. The outcome of his work utilises an ever-evolving multimedia and audio-visual practice which includes photography, digital-art, video, sound, VR, textile, text, and installation.

  • Lu Yang

    • Lu Yang (b. Shanghai, China) is a multimedia artist based in Shanghai. Mortality, androgyny, hysteria, existentialism and spiritual neurology feed Lu’s jarring and at times morbid fantasies. Also taking inspiration and resources from Anime, gaming and Sci-fi subcultures, Lu explores his fantasies through mediums including 3D animation, immersive video game installation, holographic, live performances, virtual reality, and computer programming. Lu has collaborated with scientists, psychologists, performers, designers, experimental composers, Pop Music producers, robotics labs, and celebrities throughout his practice.

    Lu Yang has held exhibitions at UCCA (Beijing), MWoods (Beijing), Cc Foundation (Shanghai), Spiral (Tokyo), Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art (Fukuoka, Japan), Société (Berlin), MOCA Cleveland (Cleveland, Ohio). He has participated in several international biennials and triennials such as 2021 Asia Society Triennial (New York), 2012 & 2018 Shanghai Biennial, 2018 Athens Biennale, 2016 Liverpool Biennial, 2016 International Digital Art Biennale (Montreal), Chinese Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale, and 2014 Fukuoka Triennial. In 2020, Lu Yang was included in Centre Pompidou’s exhibition Neurons, simulated intelligence in Paris. In 2019, Lu was the winner of the 8th BMW Art Journey and started the Yang Digital Incarnation project.

  • Makiko Yamamoto

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  • Mandy Nicholson

    • Mandy Nicholson is a Wurundjeri-willam (Wurundjeri-baluk patriline) artist and Traditional Custodian of Melbourne and surrounds. Mandy also has connections to the Dja Dja wurrung and Ngurai illam wurrung language groups of the Central/Eastern Kulin Nation. Mandy gained a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Aboriginal Archaeology in 2011, worked for the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages for six years and is now a PhD candidate studying how Aboriginal people connect to Country, Off Country.

  • Mara Schwerdtfeger

    • Mara Schwerdtfeger is a composer / curator / audio producer based in Eora / Sydney. She plays the viola and collaborates with her laptop to create live performances and recorded pieces for film, dance, and gallery spaces.

  • Maria Moles

    • Maria Moles is an Australian drummer, composer and producer based in Narrm/Melbourne.

  • Martina Becherucci

    • Martina Becherucci graduated in Cultural Heritage at the University of Milan and is currently completing her studies with a Master degree in Economics and Management of Arts and Cultural Activities at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. Martina loves being in contact with visitors in museums and galleries, during temporary exhibitions and cultural events.

  • Martyn Reyes

    • Martyn Reyes is a Filipino-Australian writer and artist based in Madrid. His work can be found in the Sydney Review of Books, Kill Your Darlings, SBS Voices, LIMINAL Magazine and more. He is currently working on a book-length project.

  • Mat Dryhurst

    • Mat Dryhurst is an artist who releases music and artworks solo and in conjunction with Holly Herndon and the record label PAN. Dryhurst developed the decentralised publishing framework Saga, which enables creators to claim ownership of each space in which their work appears online, and a number of audio plays that derive their narrative from the personal information of listeners. He lectures on issues of music, technology, and ideology at NYU, and advises the blockchain-based platform co-operative Resonate.is.

  • Mat Spisbah

    • Mat Spisbah is a New Media curator with a unique portfolio of programming that seeks to integrate non-traditional artistic methods and emerging technologies. Having lived in Hong Kong for 14 years, he is connected to the region’s art and culture, and has created professional networks with artists, curators, galleries, promoters and industry professionals across Australasia. Portfolio highlights include the debut Australian performances of north Asian artists including: Howie Lee, Rui Ho, Meuko Meuko, Pan Daijing, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Tzusing, and Gabber Modus Operandi.

  • Mattin

    • Mattin is a cross disciplinary artist working with noise, improvisation and dissonance. His work Social Dissonance was presented at documenta 14 in 2017 in Kassel and Athens.

  • Megan Alice Clune

    • Megan Alice Clune shifts between musician, composer and artist. Primarily, her work explores both the concept and aesthetics of ambient music through sound installation, collaboration and performance. Megan is the founding member of the Alaska Orchestra, and has presented work and undertaken residencies across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, including the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival (MA), Next Wave Festival, Underbelly Arts Festival, Performa 15 (NYC) and VividLIVE at the Sydney Opera House.

  • Megan Cope

    • Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman (North Stradbroke Island) in South East Queensland. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings investigate issues relating to identity, the environment and mapping practices. Cope’s work often resists prescribed notions of Aboriginality and becomes psychogeographies across various material outcomes that challenge the grand narrative of ‘Australia’ as well as our sense of time and ownership in a settler colonial state.

  • Mehak Sawhney

    • Mehak Sawhney is a scholar, curator, and activist with research interests in sound and media cultures of South Asia. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Communication Studies at McGill University. Funded by the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, her doctoral project explores audio and targeted state surveillance in postcolonial India. She has also been associated with Sarai-CSDS in Delhi since 2017. Previously, her ethnographic work has studied urban sound and listening cultures as well as the politics of machine listening and voice interfaces in contemporary India. Her academic and public writing has been published in Media, Culture & Society, Amodern, and The Wire, among others.

  • Melissa Johnson

    • Melissa Johnson is Associate Professor of Art History & Visual Culture at Illinois State University (Normal, IL). Her scholarly research focuses on the histories of craft and its intersections with modern and contemporary art. She is currently working on a project that explores artists making work in response to the writings of Virginia Woolf. She’s deeply interested in situating her academic writing and her textile-based work as parallel practices, and is working on two writing and textile projects, “Woolf Words” and “Haptic Investigations,” and a project on mending and repair.

  • Michael Terren

    • Michael Terren is a musician and educator from Boorloo/Perth. Grounded in experimental studio-based practice, his work explores the social construction of the technologies of music’s creation and distribution. He is a sessional academic teaching music at two Boorloo universities, and in 2019 finished a PhD thesis entitled 'The grain of the digital audio workstation'.

  • Michiko Ogawa

    • Michiko Ogawa is a performer-composer specialising in the clarinet, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan. She performs not only classical repertoire but also contemporary and experimental music, including free improvisation and film soundtrack work. In 2019 she was awarded a doctorate (DMA) from the University of California San Diego, with a dissertation focusing on the film music of Teiji Ito. She is in the begin­ning stages of writ­ing a biogra­phy of Ito’s life.

  • Mitch L Ryan

    • Mitch L Ryan is a writer whose work explores histories of countercultures, music, media, and politics.

  • Moritz Nahold

    • Moritz Nahold is a Vienna-based sound artist and composer.

  • MP Hopkins

    • MP Hopkins is an artist working on Gadigal and Wangal land in Sydney, Australia that makes audio, performance, radiophonic, and textual works. He uses voice, feedback, recording/playback devices, and verbal notation within different acoustic environments, which are deconstructed and presented to the listener in delicate and degraded ways. Hopkins has released recordings with Penultimate Press, Canti Magnetici, Tahalamos, Mappa Editions and Regional Bears. He has presented projects for the NOW now, Liquid Architecture, Avantwhatever, and The Make It Up Club. International appearances include Café Oto, UK; LaSalle College of the Arts, Singapore; Les Ateliers Claus, Belgium; TUSK Festival, UK; Colour Out of Space Festival, UK; and he has produced radiophonic works for Radiophrenia, Kunstradio, and the Radia network.

  • MSHR

    • MSHR is an art collective that builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their practice is a self-transforming entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, expressing its form through interactive installations, virtual environments and live improvisations. MSHR was established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Their name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time.

  • Myriad Sun

    • Myriad Sun are an experimental audio/visual/rap trio from Walyalup (Fremantle), Australia, composed of electronic producer Ben Aguero, Mc POW! Negro, and Limit Bashr. Additional performers: Mali Jose, Billy Jack Narkle and Polly-Pearl Greenhalgh.

  • Natasha Tontey

    • Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. Through her artistic practice she investigates the idea of how fear, horror, and terror could be manifested in order to control the public and how fictional accounts of the history and myth surrounding ‘manufactured fear’ might operate as a method of speculative fiction that determines expectations for the future.

  • Nathan Gray

    • Nathan Gray is an artist whose recent works use voice as their medium, taking form as lecture-performances, radio-plays and documentaries, DJ sets, narrative and rumour.

  • Neil Morris

    • Neil Morris is a Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung man. He is well known in Narrm/Birraranga for his musical project DRMNGNOW, a project built on subject matter tackling the colonial nature of the Australian construct and how that affects contemporary society upon this land. The work is unapologetic, clear, and deeply poetic. It hints toward Morris's extensive experience as a spoken word artist in Narrm since 2015. Morris's work is triumphant in the face of severe adversity often imbued in a quite fortified melancholy, a powerful marker of the survival of First Nations peoples in the now.

  • Nick Ashwood

    • Nick Ashwood is a guitarist, composer, improviser and performer from Nipaluna/Tasmania now residing in Sydney. His focuses have been exploring deep listening, harmonic space and the possibilities of the steel-string acoustic guitar by means of preparations, just intonation, objects and bowing.

  • Nico Niquo

    • Nico Niquo, a.k.a Nico Callaghan, works and lives in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Since 2015, he has produced and released music under a variety of monikers with the North American label Orange Milk Records and Australian label Daisart. He has performed across Australia, East Asia, and Europe.

  • Noah Simblist

    • Noah Simblist works as a curator, writer, and artist with a focus on art and politics, specifically the ways in which contemporary artists address history. He has contributed to Art in America, Terremoto, Art Journal and other publications.
    He is also an Associate Professor of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.

  • Noemie Cecilia Huttner-Koros

    • Noemie Cecilia Huttner-Koros is a queer Jewish performance-maker, writer, dramaturg, poet, teaching artist and community organiser living and working on Whadjuk Noongar country in Boorloo (Perth). Her practice is driven by a deep belief in the social, political and communal role of art and performance and in engaging with sites and histories where queer culture, composting and ecological crisis occur.

  • Oren Ambarchi

    • Oren Ambarchi is an Australian multi-instrumentalist whose practice focuses on the exploration of the guitar. He is a prolific solo artist and consummate collaborator who has performed and recorded with a diverse array of artists over the last three decades including; Fennesz, Charlemagne Palestine, Sunn 0)), crys cole, Thomas Brinkmann, Keiji Haino, Alvin Lucier, John Zorn, Annea Lockwood, Alvin Curran, Loren Connors, Manuel Gottsching/Ash Ra, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke, Keith Rowe, David Rosenboom, Akio Suzuki, Phill Niblock, John Tilbury, Richard Pinhas, Evan Parker, Fire! and many more. He has released numerous recordings over the years for labels such as Touch, Editions Mego, Drag City, PAN, Kranky, Staubgold and Tzadik. Since 2009, Ambarchi has run the Black Truffle record label.

    Ambarchi's latest album Shebang is released via US label Drag City.

  • PAN-PAN Kolektiva

    • Pan-Pan Kolektiva was established in March 2020, as a research group on listening. Pan-Pan is a standard emergency call based on the acronym Pan which stands for Pay Attention Now.

  • Patrick Hase

    • Patrick Hase is a digital media artist and researcher, focusing on work that often involves digital interfaces, experimental web design, and collaborative a/v. The entwined practical and theoretical aspects of his work are interested in exploring the embedded cultural and emotional impacts of how people are extended into the virtual via digital processes and designs.

  • Penelope Cain

    • Penelope Cain is interested in landscape in its widest definition, from the extracted, transformed and occupied landscapes of the Anthropocene, to the emergent Post-Carbon.
    Her art practice is located interstitially between scientific knowledge and unearthing connected and untold narratives in the world. She works across media and knowledge streams, with scientists, datasets, people, stories, and land, to connect yet to be heard storytellings from the present and near future. She was awarded the Fauvette Loureiro Travelling Scholarship, Glenfiddich Contemporary Art Residency and is currently undertaking a one year S+T+ARTS residency in the Hague, for Rewild, Maxxi, Rome.

  • Philip Brophy

    • Philip Brophy writes on music, among other things.

  • Poppy de Souza

    • Poppy de Souza is a Meanjin (Brisbane) based researcher affiliated with Griffith University and UNSW. Her work focuses on the politics of voice and listening—broadly defined—in conditions of inequality and injustice, including the relationship between sound, race, and conditions of (not) being heard. Poppy has previously worked in community arts and cultural development (CACD), and with the national Film and Sound Archive as a curator on australianscreen.

  • Pris Roos

    • Pris Roos grew up in Rhenen, the Netherlands. Her family migrated from Bogor, Indonesia, to start their own toko in the Netherlands. Toko is the Indonesian word for shop, and they sell non-Western food (products). Roos grew up in the toko, a space of being together, and full of colours, smells, food, stories and images of immigrants. The toko is a source of inspiration for her artistic practices. Stories that are normally not heard find their way in her works. Roos makes portraits of immigrants that she meets in the toko, on the streets or in her surroundings of the South of Rotterdam. She visits them at home or invites them to her atelier. The stories are translated into painted portraits, videos, installations and spoken word performances.

  • Raven Chacon

    • Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. His work ranges from chamber music to experimental noise, to large scale installations, produced solo and with the Indigenous art collective Postcommodity. At California Institute of the Arts, Chacon studied with James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro and Wadada Leo Smith developing a compositional language steeped in both the modernist avant-garde and Indigenous cosmologies and subjectivities. He has written for ensembles, musicians and non-musicians, and for social and educational situations, and toured the world as a noise artist.

  • Rhianna Patrick

    • Rhianna Patrick is a freelance Torres Strait Islander journalist, broadcaster and audio content creator with 25 years' experience as a media professional. She's worked across news, tv documentaries, national radio programming and podcasting. Her work has been featured in Kill Your Darlings, NME Australia, Guardian Australia, The Australian Music Vault, The Stoop podcast and IndigenousX.

  • Robin Fox

    • Robin Fox is an Australian audio-visual artist. His AV laser works, which synchronise sound and visual electricity in hyper-amplified 3D space have been performed in over sixty cities worldwide to critical acclaim. He produces large public artworks and has scored over twenty contemporary dance works. Fox holds a PhD in composition from Monash University and has written a history of experimental music in Melbourne that focuses on 1975-1979. He is a founding director of MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio).

  • Rob Thorne

    • Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu) is a new and original voice in the evolving journey of Taonga Puoro. His debut album Whāia te Māramatanga (Rattle Records) is a deeply felt and highly concentrated conversation between the past and the present—a musical passage of identity and connection. Using modern loop technology and traditional Māori flutes and horns made from stone, bone, shell and wood, Thorne creates a transcendent aural experience that touches the soul with timeless beauty. Every performance of Whāia te Māramatanga is a stunning and very personal exploration of the spiritual and healing qualities of an ancient practice.

  • Sage J Harlow

    • Sage J Harlow received a PhD from WAAPA exploring improvised ritual magick using extra-normal vocal technique. She performs under the moniker Sage Pbbbt. Her work is inspired by Tuvan and Mongolian throat singing, Inuit throat singing, extreme metal, sound poetry and an ongoing exploration of extra-normal vocal technique. As well as industrial musick, trance, and drone; insight meditation practice, shamanism and chaos magick; feminist, queer and trans praxis; and Discordianism. As well as a vocalist, Sage plays percussion, bass and theremin. She creates sample-based electronic music and writes text scores that explore the ethics and politics between the players and composer.

  • Sam Peterson

    • Sam Peterson is interested in what can be done with one’s identity and the space around it.

    'Both my body and mind, touching everyday feelings between the rational, the playful and the political. Of course, this is often to do with my disability and my sexuality. My work has been focused on access, and the lack of it — to places, people’s minds and opportunities. I find plasticine is a great subverter of space and potentially of people’s minds. And the continued flexibility of it is something I am really enjoying — covering or filling up gaps and playing with crevices. But I’m finding that my work is drawing more and more to spoken word as a powerful format.'

  • Sarah McCauley

    • Sarah McCauley is a Melbourne-based music producer, editor and writer.

  • Sean Baxter

    • Australian musician Sean Baxter died on 15 March 2020. Part of Melbourne's improv scene, he is described by musician Anthony Pateras as possessing “a unique aesthetic vision and intellectual depth, mixing highbrow philosophical concepts with punk sensibilities in how he lived, spoke and played. He was pure energy.”

    Drumkit and percussionist, Sean was an Australian improviser who forged an international reputation as a bold explorer of percussive possibilities both as a soloist and through his work with the acclaimed avant-garde trio, Pateras/Baxter/Brown. Focusing on the use of extended techniques applied to the conventional drum kit, he utilised an arsenal of metallic junk and other percussive detritus to expand the sonic palette of the percussion tradition. In addition to Pateras/Baxter/Brown, he was involved in many collaborations and was drummer for groups The Throwaways, Bucketrider, Lazy, SxSxSx and Terminal Hz.

  • Sean Dockray

    • Sean Dockray is an artist, writer, and programmer living in Melbourne whose work explores the politics of technology, with a particular emphasis on artificial intelligences and the algorithmic web. He is also the founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg.

  • Sebastian Henry-Jones

    • Sebastian Henry-Jones is a curator led by an interest in writing and DIY thinking. He looks to centre the ideas and requirements of those that he works with, and so his practice is informed by striving for a personal ethics with sincerity, generosity, honest communication and learning at its core.

    Seb has staged group exhibitions and independent projects in Sydney and interstate, and is a co-founder of Desire Lines and Emerson. He works as a Curatorial Assistant at the Biennale of Sydney, Associate Curator at West Space, and was previously Editor at Runway Journal. He is currently based in Naarm.

  • Shamica Ruddock

    • Shamica Ruddock is an artist-researcher often found working between sound and moving image

  • Shareeka Helaluddin

    • Shareeka Helaluddin is a sound artist, DJ, producer at FBi Radio and community facilitator working in queer mental health. Creating under the pseudonym akka, her practice is concerned with drone, dissonance, memory, ritual, generative somatics and a pursuit of deeper listening. She is currently creating on unceded Gadigal and Wangal lands.

  • Sherese Francis

    • Sherese Francis (she/they) describes themselves as an Alkymist of the I–Magination, finding expression through poetry and interdisciplinary arts (bookmaking, papermaking, collage, assemblage, performance, social arts practice). Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology, and etymology.

  • Shota

    • Shota is an artist working in Australia. He makes sound-based works for varying contexts. He has had the opportunity to collaborate with a multitude of artists from varying disciplines. Shota is currently an honours student who is associated with the Plant ecophysiology and Ecosystem processes lab at the University of Sydney.

  • Simon Charles

    • Simon Charles is a composer and performer based in Noongar Ballardong Country (Western Australia). His practice reflects an interest in the instability of compositional structures; as friction between musical notation and perception and interactions with place. He has performed at Serralvés Festival (Porto), The Wulf (Los Angeles) Studio Rotor (Berlin), Vigeland Mausoleum (Oslo), Avantwhatever Festival (Melbourne), DATA (Marseille), ANAM Quarttethaus and the Melbourne Recital Centre.

  • Snack Syndicate

    • Snack Syndicate, two rats (Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange) living on unceded Wangal land; texts, objects, events, meals, and publics.

  • Sonya Holowell

    • Sonya Holowell is a Dharawal woman, vocalist, composer and writer working across new and experimental genres. The contexts for her work, and the forms they take, are diverse and deeply questioning. Her practice comprises interdisciplinary collaboration, improvisation, multi-form writing and conceptual composition. She is also a workshop facilitator; a curator of the Now Now Festival; lecturer in experimental vocal practice; and a co-founder/editor of online arts publication ADSR Zine.

  • Sounding Together

    • Sounding Together comprise of the following performers: Rhys Butler (alto saxophone); Simon Charles (soprano saxophone, shakuhachi); Eduardo Cossio (electronics, writing); Luke Cuerel (alto saxophone); Jim Denley (flute, writing); Julia Drouhin (voice, electronics, objects, images); Jameson Feakes (mandolin); Be Gosper (voice, objects); Noemie Huttner-Koros (voice, writing); Lenny Jacobs (percussion); Annette Krebs (amplified string instrument); Annika Moses (voice, images); Josten Myburgh (clarinet, alto saxophone, editing); Dan O’Connor (mastering); Stuart Orchard (guitar, objects, editing); Daisy Sanders (voice, movement).

  • Spence Messih

    • Spence Messih is an artist living and working on Gadigal land. Their practice speaks broadly to sites of pressure, power structures, materiality, and language, and more specifically about these things in relation to their own trans experience.

  • Suvani Suri

    • Suvani Suri is an artist/researcher, working with sound, text, intermedia assemblages and actively engaged in thinking through listening. Her practice is informed by the techno-politics of sound, aural/oral histories, and critical imaginations activated by the relational and speculative capacities of voice.

  • Thembi Soddell

    • Thembi Soddell is a sound artist best known for their powerful acousmatic performances and installations in darkness. In 2019 they were awarded a PhD from RMIT University for their practice-based research titled, A Dense Mass of Indecipherable Fear: The Experiential (Non)Narration of Trauma and Madness through Acousmatic Sound. This research developed a novel approach to understanding lived experiences of anxiety, depression and trauma using a medium (abstract sound) with the unique ability to reflect the intangible nature of the inner world.

  • Thomas Ragnar

    • Thomas Ragnar is an artist based in Singapore. His work is often underpinned by collaborations, affinities and research with experiential methodologies.

  • Tiarney Miekus

    • Tiarney Miekus is a writer, editor and musician based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her writing has appeared in The Age, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow (Online), Overland, Memo Review, un Magazine, Art Guide Australia, Swampland and RealTime. She is currently editor and podcast producer at Art Guide Australia.

  • Timmah Ball

    • Timmah Ball is a writer and urban researcher of Ballardong Noongar descent. She has written for The Griffith Review, Right Now, Meanjin, Overland, Westerly, Art Guide Australia, Assemble Papers, The Big Issue, The Lifted Brow, the Victorian Writer magazine and won the Westerly Patricia Hackett Prize for writing.

  • Tina Stefanou

    • Tina Stefanou born of Sophia and Yorgios Stefanou is a first/second generation Greek-Australian. Emerging from an East Melbourne hospital on 21 November 1986. She is thirty-six years old. Now based on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri people in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches, and labours: an embodied practice that she calls, 'voice in the expanded field'.

  • Tobi Maier

    • Tobi Maier is the director of Lisbon’s Municipal Galleries, and recently presented Mattin’s Expanding Concert (2019–2023) a four year long concert distributed in time and space through different media: 5 public interventions in 5 different galleries in Lisbon, and 5 texts published within the city.

  • Tom Melick

    • Tom Melick is the co-editor of Slug and part of the Rosa Press Collective and Stolon Press.

  • Tom Smith

    • Tom Smith is an artist, musician, writer and researcher. Narrative 001: The Things We Like was created by Tom Smith, with music by Utility/Austin Benjamin.

    His work is concerned with the tyranny and poetics of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities, planetary futures and music as a mode of critical inquiry. He has worked across speculative fiction, video, curatorial projects, live performance, websites, critical writing and electronic music. Thomas produces music as T.Morimoto, is one half of production duo Utility, and runs independent label Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.
    Thomas’ works have been exhibited and/or performed at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Unsound Festival (Poland), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Fondation Fiminco (Paris), Cashmere Radio (Berlin), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), Floating Projects (Hong Kong), Goldsmiths College (London), Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney), Queensland University Art Museum (Brisbane), Alaska Projects (Sydney) and Blindside Gallery (Melbourne). Thomas’ writing has been published in Realtime Magazine, Runway Journal, Un Magazine and Plates Journal.

  • Tricky Walsh

    • Tricky Walsh is a non-binary artist working in New Norfolk, Tasmania, who works both collaboratively and in a solo capacity. Their projects focus on both spatial and communication concerns in an increasingly speculative manner and while they use a diversity of media (architecture, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, sound, film, comics, radio) it is foremost the concept at hand that determines which form of material experimentation occurs within these broader themes.

  • Trisha Low

    • Trisha Low is a writer living in the East Bay. She is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions, 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books/Coffee House Press, 2019).

  • Uzma Falak

    • Uzma Falak is a DAAD doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg where her work focuses on the intersection of sound, time and violence. Her poetry, essays, and reportage have appeared in publications like Guernica, The Baffler, Adi Magazine, Al Jazeera English, Warscapes, The Caravan and several edited volumes and anthologies. She won an honourable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award (2017). Her film, Till Then The Roads Carry Her, exploring Kashmir women’s repertories of resistance, has been screened at the Art Gallery of Guelph (Guelph), University of Copenhagen, University of Warsaw, Karlstorkino (Heidelberg), Tate Modern, and others.

  • V Barratt

    • V Barratt is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer, and performer living on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide.

  • Victoria Pham

    • Victoria Pham is an Australian installation artist, composer, archaeologist and evolutionary biologist. She is a PhD Candidate in Biological Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, holding the Cambridge Trust’s International Scholarship. As a composer she has studied with Carl Vine, Richard Gill, Liza Lim and Thierry Escaich. She is represented by the Australian Music Centre as an Associate Artist.

  • Winnie Dunn

    • Winnie Dunn is a Tongan-Australian writer and arts worker from Mt Druitt. She is the general manager of Sweatshop: Western Sydney Literacy Movement and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Sydney University. Winnie’s work has been published in the HuffPost Australia, The Saturday Paper, Griffith Review, Meanjin Quarterly, SBS Voices and Cordite. She is the editor of several anthologies including Sweatshop Women, The Big Black Thing and Bent Not Broken. Winnie is currently completing her debut novel as the recipient of a 2019 CAL Ignite Grant.

  • Xen Nhà

    • Xen Nhà is a documentary maker and artist with a background in creating intimate dialogues and storytelling across sound, film, and texts. Their work explores the confluence between personal and collective narratives and the cultural politics and responsibility of listening. They are currently living in Melbourne on unceded Wurundjeri Country.

  • Yan Jun

    • Yan Jun, a musician based in Beijing uses a wide range of materials such as field recording, body, noise and concept. Yan Jun: “I wish I was a piece of field recording.”

  • Zoe Scoglio

    • Zoe Scoglio’s (often collaborative) practice explores the space of art as a site of study and sociality to engage the radical imagination towards alternative ways of being, knowing and relating. Current research takes critical and collective somatic approaches towards response-ability in these times of ecological collapse, within settler colonial conditions. Past projects have taken place within varied contexts, on top of mountains and under full moons, as large collective choreographies and intimate encounters.

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Liquid Architecture

Dale Gorfinkel :
Listening as a Way of Knowing
by Jen Callaway
Audio by Allanah Stewart

<p>Dale playing 'Switches and Hose' in a Sounds Like Movement performance for MoreArt<br> Merlynston Community Hall, Narrm/Melbourne, 2018. Photo: Lana Nyugen. </p>

Dale playing ‘Switches and Hose’ in a Sounds Like Movement performance for MoreArt
Merlynston Community Hall, Narrm/Melbourne, 2018. Photo: Lana Nyugen.

‘The documentation of Australian music has been and is relatively poor when measured against other artforms such as the visual arts or literature. The documentation that does exist is mostly of an ephemeral or transitory nature, and the discussion of musical issues is by and large not a mainstream activity. There is a view that music must speak for itself and needs no additional explanation. Yet for a community of composers and musicians involved in experimental activity, as well as for the audiences of this work, the opportunity for discourse can be a motivating force.’ 1
— Rainer Linz

I first noticed Dale Gorfinkel and his work at the National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition of The Instrument Builders Project in 2014, featuring Australian and Indonesian artists. Dale contributed collaborative pieces featuring bird cages and swaying shells, in addition to an interactive version of his foot-pump powered synthesiser constructed from garden irrigation materials and balloons: the ‘Lotek Exercise Machine’.

These interactive and automated instruments have impressive sound-making capabilities, but they are also visually delightful, suggestive of their maker’s unshackled imagination. A sense of effortless and relaxed yet thoughtful ingenuity consistently seems to pervade Dale’s work. I find this positively stimulating.

I felt compelled to take a bunch of photos at that exhibition. This was the beginning of my photographing everything that turns my head. Dale’s work continues to have that effect.

Dale seemed very approachable upon this first meeting, but also somewhat impenetrable, or at least a slow revealer of his inner workings. I had no clue at that time that we’d eventually become collaborators and good friends.

  1. Rainer Linz, ‘Publishing the Debate’ ↩

1 / 2Snacks (Dale Gorfinkel, Jen Callaway, Allanah Stewart)
'Quiet Noise', Footscray, Narrm/Melbourne, 2018. Photo: Clinton Green.
2 / 2Recording with Dale Gorfinkel and Allanah Stewart
Merri Creek, Thornbury, Narrm/Melbourne, 2019. Photo: Jen Callaway.

For me, the word ‘engaging’ doesn’t feel quite right as a descriptor of Dale’s work. I’m wowed yet daunted by much of what he produces; intrigued but confounded; pushed and pulled. How can Dale consistently create such unexpectedly fitting, effective, exquisite sounds as spontaneous play? How can the instruments and props he builds in an unconventional, improvised, DIY fashion be so visually spectacular, unusual, and playful, yet also function brilliantly in a technical sense?

I still can’t fathom the level of insight and skill which facilitates all of this. Sometimes the ineffability overloads me to the point of disengagement — just for a while — then I’m drawn right back in once again.

One long term collaborator of Dale’s, Jim Denley, recently shared his impressions:

‘Thinking back … The Frequency Lab, a small artist run space Sydney, early 2000s. I loved the solo vibraphony that night, but was plunged into a deep worry state. I’d always thought of the Conservatorium of Music as ‘death to music’, and here was a con artist, stuffing around, who I found inspiring — had I lost my edge? Hanging with Dale Gorfinkel I realised his education went way beyond what an institution like the Con supplied, he was an amazingly intelligent sponge. At a cellular level he demanded new ways of thinking about music. Maybe he is a sponge? Or an octopus? (There’s something octopus-like about Switches and Hose). Something deeply alien; the way sound works with him. I never totally get it (whatever ‘getting’ is?), which keeps me totally interested.’

When forming our band Snacks, along with Allanah Stewart, in 2017, Dale’s generous spirit also became evident. He encouraged an organic work ethic, which included spending hours becoming acquainted with us, while sharing our sounds and home-made snacks (a welcomed allusion to our future name). And Dale also facilitated jams with potential new collaborators. On occasion, we now perform with some of these additional allies as Snacks Orchestra.

Dale’s solo release Switches and Hose (2014, Splitrec) features four radically diverse and joyous tracks, evoking for me the rhythms and sensations of the natural world. The title pun refers to the garden irrigation materials used to build the instrument featured in the first track. The album was widely welcomed and as such reviewed. In a review for the Sydney Morning Herald, John Shand wrote that Dale: ‘…will open your ears to an improbable array of sound-as-music possibilities…’ Shand also noted ‘the Dadaist nature’ of Dale’s practice and how this provides ‘a clue to a keen sense of humour being at work amid the elements of surprise.’1

Aside from creating improvised music of many different styles and instruments, sound art, performance art, and installations, Dale is also an arts facilitator and educator. Dale has a long history of working collectively, including with the masked troupe Prophets; the Ethiopian band Music Yared with Haftu Reda, Anbessa Gebrehiwot and Evelyn Morris; Sounds Like Movement with Peter Fraser; Snacks with Allanah Stewart and Jen Callaway; BBGG with Peter Farrar, Splinter Orchestra; installation partnership with Ross Manning and Caitlin Franzmann; West Head Project with Monica Brooks, Jim Denley and Anthony Magen; Appiah Annan’s Asanti Dance Theatre; extreme vibraphone duo with Robbie Avenaim; and the jazz/improvisation band Farfinkel Pugowski. Dale has been deeply engaged with many other experimental and improvised music communities around Australia as well as internationally, including: Aviva Endean, Amanda Stewart, Peter Blamey, Cor Fuhler, Laura Altman, Rod Cooper, Ernie Althoff, Shani Mohini-Holmes, Mike Majkowski, Henry Mills, Tim Green, Clinton Green, Matt Earle, Nicola Morton, Adam Sussman, Rory Brown, Fina Po, Jon Rose, Clare Cooper, Gerard Crewdson (New Zealand), Heddy Boubaker (France), Andeas Siagian and Life Patch Collective, and Jompet Kuswidanato (Indonesia).

As a subjective collaborator, onlooker, and ‘non-writer’, I posed the following questions to Dale to allow him to speak for himself and reveal more about what makes him tick, both as a person and within his artistic practices. The audio segments throughout this piece were extracted from initial interview material recorded as a Snacks project, and edited by Allanah Stewart.

  1. John Shand, ‘Album reviews: Faith No More, Miami Horror, Brandon Flowers, Dale Gorfinkel, Anne McCue,’ Sydney Morning Herald, May 29, 2015 ↩

<p>Music Yared (from left to right: Dale Gorfinkel, Haftu Reda, Anbessa Gebrehiwot, Evelyn Morris)<br>Bar Oussou, Narrm/Melbourne, 2017. Photo: Eric Jensen.</p>

Music Yared (from left to right: Dale Gorfinkel, Haftu Reda, Anbessa Gebrehiwot, Evelyn Morris)
Bar Oussou, Narrm/Melbourne, 2017. Photo: Eric Jensen.

Jen Callaway

For someone who might wish to start from the very beginning, what instrument(s) did you first learn to play, and when?

 Dale Gorfinkel

When I was young, we had a piano at home, so I would tinker on that when I could reach the keys and got some lessons with a neighbour later on. My mum likes to retell a story about when she went to take a few beginner clarinet lessons: she was struggling to get a sound out of it and put it down in frustration. According to her, I then picked it up and blew a note straight away. I was probably four at the time. Now, while that’s a proud mum story, I do still enjoy figuring out how to play instruments. I began playing trumpet when I was eight, and when I was in my teens I began playing the vibraphone. I called myself a vibraphone player until about 25. I also played a bit of saxophone as a kid, and more recently I’ve been playing drums, too. I can’t imagine not having instruments around me.

 JC

I’m very taken with your built instruments, having seen them lying around your shed, and also venturing out for performances and exhibitions. When did you first begin instrument building?

 DG

My instrument building was initially mainly related to the vibraphone. I made a portable xylophone with a milk-crate frame which I could take busking. I started making small versions of experimental things that I was doing with the vibraphone. I was using whatever materials were on hand, for example, frames made with a meccano set or with coat hanger wire. Other than learning how to solder wires onto little motors, it was all pretty lo-fi technically. Considering that the vibraphone is heavy and requires a car to transport, my instrument building was primarily concerned with making things that were portable. I wanted to be able to take my instruments with me on a bush walk. This desire for ‘portability’ resulted in the creation of a family of small automated instruments which later opened up possibilities for me to make spatialised performances and sound installations. I also rediscovered my trumpet that I had as a kid, added a few extra tubes, and sawed off the bell so that it would fit in a backpack.

Over some years, my trumpet modifications has led to my Switches and Hose setup which is constructed using items from the garden irrigation section at Bunnings Warehouse. Given the absurdity of Aussie DIY home renovation culture, and Bunnings’ monopoly over it, I reckon the Sunday punters might enjoy their sausage sizzle with an in-store experimental music gig.

 JC

Have you had any formal training in either music or technical production, or have you been more inclined to research skills and knowledge informally as required?

 DG

I have always enjoyed discovering things myself, but I’ve also had various kinds of formal and informal music education. In high school there was an extra-curriculum jazz program which inspired me and a bunch of friends to pursue music more seriously. I completed a bachelor’s degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Jazz Performance. During this time, I played vibraphone. The library at uni had a pretty amazing collection of recordings of all sorts of music. I was particularly interested in the jazz, ‘world music’, and 20th century avant-garde. Actually, even when I was in high school, I had a membership to the Conservatorium library, and I would borrow 20 CDs at a time to take home (and perhaps dub onto cassette or CD-R). I learnt a lot through listening and trying to figure out what the musicians were doing. One of the best things about my time at uni was having the opportunity to play and practise for hours on end with fellow musicians. I had a couple of inspiring teachers (especially the ever-passionate Mike Nock) but I found that the course itself didn’t cater too well to my curiosity. I was disappointed that particular histories of jazz were hardly mentioned, for example artists such as Sun Ra, AACM, and Ornette Coleman. I also felt frustrated that the pedagogical approaches weren’t conducive to encouraging the development of artists who could become creative contributors to a living music. Perhaps the real issue though, was that the course wasn’t guiding curious young Australian musicians to important cultural questions such as: why are you spending years learning to imitate predominantly African American avant-garde expressions from 50-plus years ago?

I felt very fortunate to have a great informal education through the Sydney experimental and improvised music community, especially artists like Clayton Thomas, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley, Jon Rose, Robbie Avenaim, Matt Earle, Clare Cooper, Monika Brooks, Peter Blamey, and Ben Byrne. I became more aware that the social and community side of music was a rich space for learning: not just about music, but about the ethics of it, too. Through activities such as The now NOW’s regular event series and annual festival, and particularly the Splinter Orchestra, I was introduced to artists who had very different musical backgrounds and approaches to my own. The opportunities to meet, and sometimes collaborate with, experimental sound artists and musicians from other parts of Australia and overseas, helped to foster a sense that my creative contributions were also valued within a broader community.

 JC

For many years you’ve worked as an arts facilitator with people who have varying experiences to your own, such as people seeking asylum, people with different abilities, and children. Are there particular learnings you’ve taken from these experiences?

 DG

It’s not just work. As you open up to being with people, it alters your perceptions of the world. I’m wary of lumping cross-cultural collaborations and inclusive arts collaborations into the same answer, but the thing that connects them all is that music is an incredible tool for listening and connecting deeply with people. This can be especially true for those who may not share much spoken language.

I think everyone senses and perceives the world differently, and my engagement with other people continues to expand my own understandings and values. As a facilitator, I’m always learning about patience, developing relationships over time, and being open to emerging possibilities. It’s essential to try to be aware of any power imbalances, privileges, and personal agendas. But I reckon there’s also a simplicity in listening to and valuing each individual and the specific interpersonal relationships that arise. I suppose some people worry about saying or doing something inappropriate (particularly in politicised spaces) and that can stop them from engaging at all. I feel very enriched by the friendships and the challenges I’ve encountered. Particularly in the context of working with artists with disabilities, I’m often totally blown away by people’s unique and surprising artistic expressions.

I think non-idiomatic and multi-idiomatic improvising skills are very useful in these contexts. In fact, I feel that experimental practice can have a really broad value in encouraging inclusivity, and the open mindset required to value that which is different, and perhaps unconventionally awesome. It can help bring into question any idea of social or cultural norm. Non-classist, inclusive, and community-focused attitudes have been at the root of work by influential experimental sound artists such as Cornelius Cardew, but of course we can do a lot better to make creative environments that feel accessible and welcoming to everyone (it’s not just the stairs at Make It Up Club).

 JC

You have many long-term collaborators; are there some that you’d like to mention or elaborate on? What draws you to particular collaborative projects?

 DG

Yes. I feel fortunate to have many long-term collaborators who I really respect. I feel like I’m learning all the time, so I’m continuously grateful for those collaborators who share that understanding. These are people who don’t seem to mind playing with me, even though I’m sure I’ve stuffed up many times! I try to listen deeply in the hope that something of their essence rubs off on me. I suppose I’m not too singular in my approach to music, so I think I would feel lost if I wasn’t making stuff with others. My creative identity is very much entwined with the artists around me and even when I’m experimenting by myself, I’m often thinking about creating instruments and sound worlds that could be used in specific collaborations.

I first met Peter Farrar when I was around sixteen or seventeen-year-old. We were in a small jazz band in Sydney made up of kids from different schools. Later, we were at the Sydney Conservatorium together (a year a part) and we became very close friends through our obsession with music. I have always deeply respected Peter and his musical integrity and I think most musicians who meet him feel similarly. We would play and practice for hours, go to gigs, talk about music and associated philosophies. We were kind of inseparable for a long period of time and shared the journey through our formative years in Sydney’s jazz and experimental music communities. To be honest, I was nervous when moving to Melbourne in 2008, as I wasn’t sure what artistic sense of my own I had away from Peter! (I’m still not sure?!). Again, I’m so grateful that our friendship and collaboration continues with our duo BBGG and in the collective, Prophets.

Jim Denley is another long-term collaborator. I really appreciate the way Jim continues to value and validate younger generation improvisers. His influence is kind of immeasurable! He’s really been a crucial figure in encouraging a culture of creative, critical, social, and ethical thinking. Through Jim, I feel like I’ve learnt a lot about how to be a person! He also introduced me to Amanda Stewart many years ago now, and we used to play and hang out regularly when I lived in Sydney. Conversations with Amanda are always illuminating.

My duo Sounds Like Movement with Peter Fraser started around 2009, and it’s been one of my favourite artistic partnerships. Peter’s curiosity and eagerness to play is continuously inspiring.

 JC

‘Stylefree’ is a concept/movement/planet introduced to the world in 2007 via Prophets, a collective of around 15 masked performers based in both Melbourne and Sydney. Your Prophet colleague BirdBrain once defined Stylefree’s philosophy as: ‘Music and art without constraints on style, genre and medium, [its] perspective is to value and respect all music and all cultures, without a notion of “this music is superior to that music”’. When considering BirdBrain’s continued explanation that ‘a Stylefree philosophy could be applied to many issues we find in the world outside of music’, this philosophy seems very much aligned with your earlier mentioned preference for non-idiomatic and multi-idiomatic approaches to improvisation, as a way to foster inclusivity and ‘unconventional awesomeness’. I’m very taken with this idea so please feel free to further elaborate!

 DG

Stylefree embraces ambiguity. With regards to the Prophets, the masks help with that. It’s serious and playful. When asked ‘what kind of music do you play?’, the answer ‘Stylefree’ helps to avoid putting myself in a box. The questioner might say ‘ah ok’ as if it were a genre that they’ve heard of before. Other times they again ask ‘what’s Stylefree?’ and that opens up a conversation. Identity is often formed via exclusion and any scene risks deeming certain creative expressions to be ‘uncool’. There’s a challenge in being idiosyncratic, discerning, but also not closed off to creative possibilities. Particularly in a large collective interested in improvisation, such as Prophets, it may not be beneficial to be making judgements on what is beautiful, ugly, old, new, bad, good, relevant, irrelevant, raw, or amateurish. It’s best just to try to come up with something more than the sum of its parts. Stylefree is kind of an anti-dogmatic dogma, suitable for a bunch of dubious masked characters who call themselves Prophets. I think Prophets are still figuring out what their message is, but they reckon it might be a really important one!

 JC

You established Out Hear in 2011 to facilitate immersive outdoor events. These outdoor performances and sound walks tend to further enrich the acoustic environment, adding sensory ambience and a sense of expansiveness. Can you tell us about Out Hear and what other aspects of experiencing sound outdoors appeal to you?

 DG

I started Out Hear as a way of contributing to the culture of listening and making music outdoors. Jim Denley had started West Head Project — a flexible line up, but mainly with Jim, Monica Brooks, and myself. We had some remarkable opportunities, including playing at the top of Mt Wellington as part of MONA FOMA, and a residency on Maria Island (the documentation was released on CD). That group also began collaborating with Anthony Magen from the Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology, who had led my first — and quite profound — experience of a sound walk at a now NOW Festival around 2006. A couple of years later, when I moved to Melbourne, Anthony and I became good friend and his influence helped to shape my listening attitudes.

For a while with Out Hear, I was organising almost fortnightly events, finding spaces to take audiences into, and engaging a number of artists as performers. Most of the events involved a sound walk with performers embedded along the route. One of my favourite events was a ‘soundpaddle’ in which Alice Hui-Sheng Chang led a participatory performance up the Yarra, with everyone in row boats. I also curated and co-produced the Out Hear Festival with Footscray Community Arts, which featured some amazing artists including Joyce Hinterding, Ernie Althoff, and Ross Manning. It was also during that time that I met Uncle Larry Walsh and we later put on a couple of events in which his storytelling was a powerful part of the experience. These activities can be a strong reminder that people have walked, listened to, and created culture on this land for thousands of years. In the last couple of years, I haven’t been putting on many events, but it does remain present in my mind as a very important task to figure out how to create culture that is inclusive of the non-human world.

 JC

You seem to enjoy cooking; do you see a link between cooking and sound making?

 DG

Yes! I like just getting in the zone and improvising with the materials at hand. I’m not great at following rules. Over the years, my home has been a place where artists meet, jam and rehearse. Our group, Snacks, has obviously bonded over snacks and tea. The informal conversations over food (and around the music making) are really valuable in sharing ideas and values, building trust and community, and developing collectively made art forms.

 JC

Do you see yourself as being part of an experimental music/sound lineage?

 DG

Yes, I do. I’m not making work in a naïve bubble. I suppose jazz is a tradition in which each successive generation or instrumentalist was expected to make a unique contribution to the music. So that’s an attitude that I probably absorbed as did so many in the history of experimental and avant-garde music outside of the African American tradition. For example, I understood from Thelonious Monk that if I was to be truly influenced by him, I couldn’t sound like him, despite the impossibility! In developing an idiosyncratic approach to the vibraphone, I was conscious of the way it had already been played, and I was influenced by contemporary and historical artists who had expanded the idea of what music could be and how sound could be made. These included European and American free jazz and free improvisation artists such as Cecil Tayler, Anthony Braxton, Derek Bailey, Jim Denley and Axel Dorner. As well as John Cage and the prepared piano, including versions by Anthony Pateras, Cor Fuhler and Magda Mayas. And also electronic noise artists Merzbow, Sachiko M, Stasis Duo, Peter Blamey, David Tudor, and Alvin Lucier and his approach to acoustic phenomena. But, importantly, I was wanting to contribute to the local Australian community of experimentalists who I regarded as unique contributors to music internationally. Having said that, I also see experimentation and improvisation with sound and materials as something that humans have always done and so it’s good to remind ourselves that creative histories and lineages shouldn’t intimidate our ability to play.

 JC

Does making art feel in any way spiritual to you, for example, making use of or connecting with an altered or ‘higher’ consciousness?

 DG

I feel that something fulfilling may be found in the space between meaningfulness and meaninglessness. If I try too seriously to feel ‘spiritual’, then I think I might miss ‘it’ completely. Sage Pbbbt’s playful and somewhat agnostic approach to spirituality is something that resonated with me recently. I thought her entity of the Spirit of Plastic was cool and maybe it’s been present in some of my work which features polystyrene cups and PVC tubing.

I’m definitely attracted to spiritual music and certain listening experiences powerfully move me. But to be deeply moved by recordings of 1960’s Albert Ayler free jazz, or Marvin Gaye or Moroccan Sufi music also raises a lot of interesting and confusing questions. What am I responding to in this music if I’m not personally connected to the culture from which the music originates? How does my cultural upbringing and the culture around me today — mostly secular capitalism — play a role in shaping me, and how do my ideals, romantic or otherwise, negotiate that? Mostly for good reason, those thought processes over the years have made it very difficult to trust intuition. I suppose I’m now trying to find an intuition that feels right in today’s world.

I feel that some collaborations more easily drop into a deeper shared spirit than others. Perhaps that’s got to do with how people experience time. Or maybe how much we’re willing to let ourselves be guided by a collective spirit. There’s some music that I don’t like, and when I’m trying to figure out why I don’t like it I think maybe it’s because it’s got an agenda that doesn’t allow space for the unknown.

The context for music and art also plays a role, whatever spiritual qualities are present in it. In the ‘experimental music scene’ it’s common to see spectacle or showcase type gigs that expect a performer to turn it on for a waiting audience and then stop after 20 to 30 minutes. But this scenario doesn’t encourage a whole range of other kinds of expressions and experiences, such as an all-night session of the Master Musicians of Joujouka in Morocco, an afternoon into evening unfolding of Indonesian Jaranan, or jamming through an afternoon with Snacks.

 JC

Have you taken part in performing already composed works much?

 DG

No, not really, but I also wouldn’t say that what I do is completely improvised because there are a lot of considerations involved in developing an improvised language. For example, I see instrument building as being a form of composition, as I’m making some decisions in the building process about the parameters for the music. Peter Blamey is a huge inspiration in this regard. I love the poetry of the indeterminate systems that he creates.

I also regard some of my recording work as being compositional. For example, in ‘I’m walking in a room with two vibraphones’ (Switches and Hose) I set clear parameters but left some elements indeterminate.

I’ve also really enjoyed the occasions when I’ve composed music for another function, such as the soundtrack to a dance performance. For example, with Asanti Dance Theatre and Tess De Quincey Company, or on video such as Caitlin Franzmann’s Foundry, which uses recordings of improvisations by Ross Manning and myself.

 JC

Some of your work includes a theatrical element, and you’ve also made some videos. Tell us more about that…

 DG

I think these theatrical elements have mostly come about through challenging the contexts in which music is made and experienced. A cultural or sub-cultural group may have particular conventions at a gig or concert and these things can have a big impact on how the sounds are received by the audience. A formality or normality might make one listener or performer comfortable, but it might make another really uncomfortable. At times I’ve felt unable to present my work with the spirit that I’ve intended, as I have felt overcome (or stifled?) by the atmosphere of a context — too stifled, too serious, too whimsical, too something! You could reduce these things to personal anxieties, but I think it’s often more than that. I’ve tried to see experimentalism with music (as distinct from ‘experimental music’ — the genre or scene) as a forum for playing around with these kinds of contexts. I have tried various things over the years including performances with audience participation, playing in the presence of food and tea (Snacks), playing outdoors (Out Hear), house gigs, and performing in masks and costumes (Prophets, Sounds Like Movement) or combinations of these things (I’m thinking of one soundwalk with Jim Denley and I dressed in ghillie suits).

My own performance and installation setups can be visually or kinetically engaging [modified trumpet, tubes and balloons, styrofoam, spinning stuff, etcetera] and I’m very aware of the theatre of these things. However, the sound is what I foreground, and the sculptural elements are generally a result of my improvised interactions with materials. People have perceived my work in their own way — as sculpture, visual art, performance art, live art and so on — and that has also helped me to see my work outside of the prism of experimental music. The theatre of using visually familiar materials may be an accessible path for some audiences into an otherwise uncompromising music.

My duo Sounds Like Movement with Peter Fraser explores how bodies, objects, vibrations and sounds are intimately connected. We work together to break the distinction between dancer and musician. Our last few performances have been hour long theatre shows, but I think there is also room to read our performances as a music gig. For example, in one segment of the show, there’s the absurdity of us playing a miniature drum kit with seven-metre-long wobbly drumsticks. We don’t shy away from the theatre of it; but we are mainly interested in the improvised and indeterminate nature of playing without full control and creating something which sounds good to us. A recording of this may sound like some weird free jazz band, but the experience of our live audience is completely different to being at a free jazz gig.

Of course, the other theatrical thing is Prophets! The masks and costumes change the way the music is played and received but it has also opened up worlds of creative possibility including video and animation. We’re currently developing ideas for a kids TV show.

 JC

You mentioned recently that you find audio recordings of live performance unsatisfying as documents; why is this?

 DG

There were a couple of years a while back when I didn’t really want to listen to recorded music. I was a bit bored of the stereo format. It’s such a specific way of diffusing sound — either in headphones or through speakers. The illusion of a band or a saxophone (or whatever) was lost on me — I just knew that magnets were causing a couple of bits of cardboard to flap back and forth. I was similarly bored at gigs in which each band or artist played through the same sound system. There are some who use the ‘PA-instrument’ well and many who don’t consider it at all. Imagine if visual art were only made on a canvas or on a TV screen? I’ve since rekindled my friendship with recorded and speaker-based music, but I see it as just one of many sound experiences. Actually, I think that documentation of a gig can be a satisfying artefact (I think that’s paraphrasing Derek Bailey via Jim Denley) but it can be complicated to judge a live performance based on a recording. Some music simply doesn’t translate well on a recording as it takes badly to sonic and spatial compression.

Having expressed that, I also feel that recording can be a valuable educational tool. There’s a feedback loop of listening to recordings of an improvisation, and then bringing those awarenesses to future improvisations. Perhaps upon listening back, I might recognise a missed opportunity or a particular section that has potential for further exploration. I also love certain music in which the whole way of playing is entwined with unique recording processes. Matt Earle is a great example.

 JC

I have to ask, what does it feel like having a ‘profile’ written about you and your work?

 DG

I feel honoured, embarrassed, vulnerable. I’m not in this position very often, so I’m trying to fight the pressure of it being a definitive biography! I think about all the things I’m not saying and I worry about accidentally leaving out people who have been dear collaborators and very influential figures. I’m often changing my mind about things, so documenting thoughts especially in written format can make it seem like I have a definitive view on things. This activity has also made me think about some of the things that I thought about years ago but I’m not sure if it’s good to be reminded about the reasons for doing the things that I do now.

 JC

What new things are you currently drawn to exploring?

 DG

I love that music is a never-ending path of psychological, spiritual and perspective-altering learnings. I hope that I’ll always be drawn to the beauty and simplicity of playing music with others. I’ve always had a sense of urgency around creating music or art. If I have an idea, I want to start working on it now, or tomorrow at the latest. I think that attitude and work ethic has been very valuable but I’m also starting to consider longer periods of time in art/life and that some ideas require many years of work. For example, with Prophets I’m currently exploring making video art and abstract narratives with plans to make a kids a TV show, and I think learning about business and organisational things might help with realising those artistic visions. That kind of longer-term and ambitious thinking is a bit of a departure, which provokes both excitement and trepidation.
<p>Dale Gorfinkel with Aviva Endean and Heddy Boubaker (not pictured), Pli Festival, France, 2016. Photo: TBC.</p>

Dale Gorfinkel with Aviva Endean and Heddy Boubaker (not pictured), Pli Festival, France, 2016. Photo: TBC.

Contributor/s

Jen Callaway is a Melbourne musician, sound and performance artist, photographer, and community services worker raised in various parts of Tasmania. Current projects include bands Is There a Hotline?, Propolis, Snacks and Hi God People; and upcoming film Here at the End, by Campbell Walker, as actor/co-writer.

Dale Gorfinkel is a musician-artist whose stylefree improvisational approach informs his performances, instrument-building, and kinetic sound installations. Aiming to reflect an awareness of the dynamic nature of culture and the value of listening as a mode of knowing people and places, Dale is interested in bringing creative communities together and shifting perceived boundaries. Current projects include Prophets, Sounds Like Movement, and Music Yared as well as facilitating Art Day South, an inclusive arts studio with Arts Access Victoria.

Allanah Stewart is an artist from Aotearoa/New Zealand, currently living in Melbourne, Australia. As well as her work in various experimental music projects, she is the presenter of a monthly podcast radio programme called Enquiring Minds, hosted by Noods radio, which explores old and new, lesser known and well known sounds that loosely fit under the banner of experimental music.

Notes

    Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture • Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture •

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    Snack Syndicate, Tom Melick, Kynan Tan,
    Spence Messih, Jason De Santolo, Trisha Low

    Teiji Ito: Music for Film
    Michiko Ogawa

    Passage To Nirvana

    The Spectacle-Rave
    Bridget Chappell

    ‘Nothing is more alien to a strike than its end’

    No Comment (Coda)
    Thomas Ragnar

    On Bridget Chappell and Others

    Sean Baxter
    Let’s do Pure Fucking Armageddon!

    What do you want us to do? Like long song or short song or punk rock or grindcore or breakcore or disco?
    Motherfucker! Brutal! Let’s do Pure Fucking Armageddon!

    Unsettling Scores
    Sovereignty, Resistance, and Futurity

    Megan Cope, Dylan Robinson, Candice Hopkins and Raven Chacon, Rob Thorne, Nick Ashwood, Johnny Chang, Megan Alice Clune, Andrew Fedorovitch, Sonya Holowell, MP Hopkins, Shota Matsumura, and Alexandra Spence


    Edited by Joel Stern and Debris Facility

    Inhuman Intelligence:
    Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst
    in conversation with Sean Dockray

    Introduction by Emile Frankel, author of Hearing the Cloud
    Score: Lisa Lerkenfeldt. ‘Collagen’, 2020
    Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture • Disclaimer is a journal for new thinking and writing on listening and sound. Published by Liquid Architecture •

    The Scroll Begins Unfolding:
    Lin Chi-Wei in conversation with
    Alessandro Bosetti

    ‘No one wants the scroll to end’

    GIRLISONFIRE:
    Dedicating to the sick and blooming

    written about by Holly Childs

    ta
    Amanda Stuart

    For Chris Mann

    Echoes

    Poetry by Neil Morris
    Track
    Herbal Gemini, 33EMYBW

    2 Know Mercy / Ribcage

    Poetry by Kt Spit
    Score: Eric Avery. ‘Ancestory Play Ancestry’, 2019

    Regardless
    of Recognition

    Brian Hioe
    on the Aurality of the Sunflower Movement
    Composition
    Double Path Illumination, James Rushford

    New
    Sonic Territory

    Harmony Holiday on Fugitive Listening

    5𝐰𝟒𝐫𝐦𝟏𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐡@𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝟑𝐫𝐬
    𝖎𝖓 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖜𝖔𝖗𝖑𝖉 𝖜𝖎𝖉𝖊 𝖜𝖊𝖇

    Natasha Tontey in conversation with Bianca Winataputri

    ‘Baby Smiles After
    Hearing Azan For First Time’

    Chi Tran and Arben Dzika

    If Something is Asleep
    You Can Always Wake it Up

    Mandy Nicholson
    in conversation with Danni Zuvela

    Podcasts