release date: 30 november 2021
Forced Audience, The Dialectic Process of Change, Another Transport to Sleep, Lament of the LionKillers, Today the World, Pace of Erosion… titles of cassette recorded sound works I made in the 1970s and 80s.
This episode is an ethereal visitation from that time, airing a small selection of sonic explorations I made then using cassette tape recorders, working alone in share-house bedrooms and with collaborators in lounge rooms, practice rooms, galleries, abandoned buildings and the street.
We begin with a recording made in 1981 with artist John Nixon, after-hours in Brisbane’s Institute of Modern Art. John was the new director, up from Melbourne where he’d established his legendary Art Projects gallery. He invited me to work as a gallery assistant, as technical assistant for his various film, tape and photography projects, and as one of many collaborators in his utopian AntiMusic project.
The track is titled ‘Across a Distance’. John sings his lyrics adapted from Russian Futurist poetry, I play the saxophone and other instruments are by John and percussionist Clare Mackenna.
For these night sessions, John would bring prepared cassette tapes he’d recorded sounds onto, we’d set them playing, then play live along with the playback, recording the maelstrom of sound with another cassette recorder, live in one take.
We named our group The Black Spots and John published this track in his AntiMusic Sampler on London-based Bill Furlonger’s Audio Arts series of cassette releases. They can be listened to online at the Tate London’s website.
Following this are excerpts from my one-off cassette tape sound works. Someone I spent time exploring sound with was Brisbane digital media wiz Adam Wolter. We started using cassette recording while in high school together in the mid-70s - track two is a sample of this youthful anarchy. Having studied computer programming at the University of Queensland he became adept at coaxing unusual creative possibilities from Amiga computers. Various tracks here include samples of Adam’s early computer music experiments overlaid with my early play with text-to-speech synthesis.
Another longtime collaborator heard on various tracks is Brisbane artist Eugene Carchesio, a fellow sonic explorer who continues to make and release beautifully enigmatic offerings of minimal means.
There is plenty to say about each of these tracks but it’s perhaps better to offer them up without too much prefiguring, other than to note, on re-listening to the recordings after many decades it strikes me that the kinds of sounds I found of interest then remain much the same 40 years on, as listeners to this podcast may also recognise…
