BOOTLEG: DOLPHINS INTO THE FUTURE / MONOPOLY CHILD STAR SEARCHERS. OLD MUSEUM, 3 DEC ’10
The Old Museum was built in 1891, it’s just up the road from Fortitude Valley train station. Over the course of the day a number of local artists have filled Studio 1 with a piece each responding to Spencer Clark & Lieven Martens’ work, including Rohan (Kitten Party), Ross Manning, Leif Gifford, Sarah Byrne, Nicola Morton, Tess Mauder and more under the ‘Spamicide’ hivemind.
Sun of the Seventh Sister is a band with rotating roster of underground musicians primarily found in the Blue Mountains, or Akemi, and largely featuring the Venting Gallery and Breakdance the Dawn stables but also bringing in anyone & everyone from Trapdoor Tapes, Pulled Out, Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland… If you’ve got any idea who they are then you probably know what they sound like when get together as SSS: An eternal jam under the red moon w/ burnt-out/sticky-taped electronics, bellowed screams, celebratory & percussive meltdown.
Venting Gallery is an archive/label/laboratory/agent provocateur based in Victoria and it’s amassed an incredible amount of works from artists working across the avant spectrum. Their series ‘Rituals of the Captured Moment‘ is an ambitious project where they’re producing 1000 short films about experimental music from over 400 hours of footage – DVDs are being released in installments and I think they’re up to volume #5 now. VG features Bonnie and Nylstoch both from The UnAustralians, Tactile Response Group, Knicker Onasis, and a couple dozen collaborations everywhere.
Breakdance the Dawn is a cassette/CDR label originating from the Blue Mountains, founded in early 2004 by Matt Earle (xNoBBQx, Stasis Duo, Muura, Antipan) and now I guess up in Brisbane — featuring recycled tapes and a $4 studio, it’s a largely word-of-mouth outfit with a heavy punk, ‘dirt under the fingernails‘ approach and ethos.
Decidedly more pensive than the last time I saw them, Nylstoch at the front with a drum & woodwind scattershot, confused outbursts with a dark, somnolent back-line though keeping the tension to piano wire tight around the arrested necks. Late-night noise courtesy of the coven behind the walls.
Sun of the Seventh Sister – Live at the Old Museum, Brisbane Australia – 3rd December 2010 (54.34mb, .mp3 256kbit/s, 29.40mins)
Nicola Morton is an inspired globe trotting-but-locally-based artist with, lately, an interest in time travel, hypnosis, physics, AI, memories, happiness (really hard to pin-point here) and an obsessive streak easily confused with an encounter with the Pink Light… Focusing on her live shows however, they (and like her installations/rituals) are entirely inviting & unpretentious with equal parts of injected confusion & humor, the complex undercurrent of truly inventive ideas set up against a celebratory, near-jubilant backdrop of manic-enthusiasm and the audience being as big of part of the performance as herself through mandatory group participation. From a writing & musical background too, mind, of very selected note a band back in the Euro states, journals and a daedalian arrangement & composition set against a multi-tiered set of rules, a la Cobra, in Life Is A Rubik’s Cube.
Impossible to capture with just a microphone, I’ll have to explain this one: Nicola’s presenting ‘Love Hypnosis Exchange’ – a group activity performance involving several hundred stickers, rules, a/v, breath, hypnosis, your heart. Although this performance was done last week at the Judith Wright Centre tonight’s the authoritative as she skipped a few segments last time: Nicola asks the audience to synchronize our heart beats and breathing so that we are all as one here, we yell ‘crack’ each time our heart beats whilst she does a short, quiet improvised piece with a bowed guitar. The third segment sees her request the audience take a handful of stickers each, about a hundred I think, and to listen to her instructions: She’s going to count to eight whilst you spin around toward people and then a loud beep will sound signifying that you have to swap stickers onto the closest person. There’s going to be a hundred eight-second spins, one taking one second to complete a revolution so yes as it was pointed out eight hundred revolutions. On the ceiling there’s projected visuals and a timer, noise too but I’m focused on the exchanges on the floor. Nicola spins around and through the audience with a keyboard & microphone until the end.
The thing I took from this performance is happiness; I couldn’t stop smiling. The manipulation: Breathing, your heart beat in synchronicity with the people around you there’s a sense of belonging (who doesn’t want that?) and swapping stickers, or anything, coupled with the confusion of the show itself (bonding together trying to figure it out) you’re bound to the room’s collective effervescence forcing you to realize that there’s really nothing between us at all – any barriers once created by our stupid preconceptions, opinions of one another can be quashed by simply exchanging a smile & a silly little sticker. I don’t know what you thought of it or was though.
From the U.S., Monopoly Child Star Searchers is Spencer Clark of The Skaters fame, also Vodka Soap, Charles Berlitz, Black Joker.
Dolphins Into The Future is Lieven Martens from Belgium, of the Cetacean Nation Communications & Taped Sounds labels and aka Duncan Cameron, Family Thinkers.
Hard to focus on in a live context as I need something to hold in my hand, something to distract me – perhaps paraphrasing Satie here would be apt – so of course I prefer the recordings I’ve got here as it really is music best suited to be played in the next room as you’re reading a book or laying down out on the balcony with a beer & the occasional gust of hot summer wind blowin’ over the pages.
Monopoly Child Star Searchers – Live at the Old Museum, Brisbane Australia – 3rd December 2010 (48.28mb, .mp3 256kbit/s, 26.22mins)
Dolphins Into The Future – Live at the Old Museum, Brisbane Australia – 3rd December 2010 (47.56mb, .mp3 256kbit/s, 25.59mins)
Botski is Rob from Yout Dem – a local casio dub & grime duo – collaboration mode and tonight he’s joined by Alex of Gravel Samwidge fame. I can’t say too much other than everybody loves Botski/Yout Dem, a perfect party-closer outfit that gets your arse off the ground and feet moving undfro to the clipped, disjointed beats and has for a couple of years now.
Botski – Live at the Old Museum, Brisbane Australia – 3rd December 2010 (40.99mb, .mp3 256kbit/s, 22.23mins)
