Fenella Kernebone.
Andrew Kettle

Fenella: And it is time now to launch ourselves into the Sound Lab on Triple J, on Artery and joining us tonight is Andrew Kettle from Brisbane, a sound artist, we are going to start off with a track of his called "The Static Laboritary" and meet Andrew in just a moment.

[Broadcast of "Static Laboritory"[

Fenella: And on Triple J a track there by Andrew Kettle, who is a Brisbane Sound Artist, it's called "The Static Laboritory" and of coarse as I have mentioned Andrew is from Brisbane, but he is currently in the SoundLab to play some of his music and talk about his work. G'day, Andrew, How are you?
Andrew: Good thanks, excellent.
Fenella: Welcome to Artery.
Andrew: Mmmm.
Fenella: Tell us about that piece called "The Static Laboritory".
Andrew: "The Static Laboritory" was a live performance that we.. that recording was from the Can of Worms festival up in Brisbane at the Powerhouse and it was exactly... conceptually what we just performed for 2002AD which is the analogue to digital music conference for the Adelaide Fringe that we are down in Adelaide for..
Fenella: How did you get started making sounds?
Andrew: A lot of the early fascination with the work that we have been doing is growing up in regional Queensland, in South East Queensland, in the Fassifern Valley area and listening to Radio National and staying with my grandparents a lot and being fascinated with the off station sounds of radio and AM specifically.
Fenella: So, basically when you where switching around on the dial looking for a radio station you went, "Nar! Stuff the radio station. Let's listen to static."?
Andrew: Yeah, and completely fascinated with what was out there that people wheren't necessarily listening to and being that naive youth and exploring the world as much on radio as I was in the landscape that I was living in.
Fenella: How did you transform those exploration where you where listening to the static on the radio to recording and making your own sounds?
Andrew: There wasn't much of a transformation at all really it was a..
Fenella: Progression?
Andrew: Progression. And trying to understand the physical laws and chemistry behind that medium and exploring more into electromagnetic radiation and understanding what radio actually was and how it can be played with and how radio can be generated. Then that lead off into a lot of chemical and physical or physics experiments and that piece just then was dry ice on sheet metal and alumimium and stainless steel and off into high voltage electricity to generate plasma, electrical plasma which is an amasing medium. There are only a few artists in Australia that are using plasma as an expressive artform or medium.
Fenella: Can you actually describe how you get the sound from plasma or how it actually works?
Andrew: Plasma is generated.. or its a state that our atmosphere is turned into when it is experiencing high voltages. The plasma that created for 2002AD and Can of Worms was 10,000 volts, so it's something that you don't really want to touch of coarse. One of the results of that is that it produces across the whole band frequency of electromagnetic radiation. So, it is effectively a radio station. So, you can play with the sound you are creating by generating high voltage electricity plasma.
Fenella: Do you get scared using these high voltages of electricity?
Andrew: Well. Every performance and be your last which can be a blow.
[laughter]
Fenella: Is that part of the attraction though?
Andrew: In a way it is, but plasma in itself is an amasing force and medium just to witness. A lot of people when they come along and they are in the audience are dumbfounded to see plasma in a raw state. It's very rare would you actually have the opportunity to see it for more than a few seconds in you life. And having it generated between to large rods using 10,000 volts is an attraction in itself for the audience.
Fenella: So, how do you actually do it? What do we actually see up on stage when you are generating this plasma?
Andrew: Up on stage what you will see, in this case, is a whole laboritory of instruments and machines that we have specifically have built for generating electricity or working with electromagnetic radiation or generating plasma in this case. You will see everything from an array of DC motors to Jacob's laders to house hold appliance like televisions and microwaves and juices and whatever we can get our hands on depending on what the performance is.
Fenella: And a pet rat.
Andrew: And a pet rat, which as part of the theme for 2002AD and the Fringe was this black Rat, named 'Rose petal' and she was part of the performance.
Fenella: And you micked her up by actually micking up the fish bowl she was sitting in.
Andrew: That's right and running around in and leaving some of the aquarium rocks to add to the tecture of the rat scullying around.
Fenella: It was a very scratchy sound.
Andrew: It was. But the nature of the sound was an organic system that consisted of a random generator of sorts that was a comparison to a lot of the other generative or genetic works that other computer musicians are doing in as far as a chaos generating is doing that a biological system has the same nature. So, a rat and a computer in a way has something in common with each other.
Fenella: Sounds like the "Flowers of Alginon" movie that was around years and years ago. On Triple J, Andrew Kettle is currently with me in the Sound Lab and we are listening to some of his sound pieces and this next piece is called or is actually form a CD that is called "With my left eye closed..." which is a very tiny CD.
Andrew: That's right, it's actually a composition in three parts that is using something that we have been talking about before with electromagnetic radiation. I had actually gone around my house and recorded all the radiation that my household appliances emit. It was a result of finding out that I have Keraticonus , which is when your eyeball turn into the tecture like fruit so you are looking through wrippled glass in effect. So, it gave me a great contemplation of if I was to lose my sense of sight what other senses could I possibly attain to. SO, we where looking at electromagnetic radiation. If we had antanae for ears to explore the world or try and traverse the world. SO, this piece is the traversing of my house as antanae for ears.

[Broadcast of "With my left eye closed.."]

Fenella: On triple J, part two of one of Andrew Kettle's works, "With my left eye closed.." in the Sound Lab, a half an hour or an hour where we explore different sounds. Andrew Kettle is my guest at the moment and that piece, "With my left eye closed.." could you describe again about the sounds that you have recorded in there?
Andrew: What you where listening to was the electromagnetic radiation of all my household white goods, so are listening to fridges and microwaves and televisions and stoves and remote controls and anything that emits radiation in my house that was recorded using inductive microphones and just listening to the electromagnetic radiation and using that as a sound source as a composition that was inspired by myself being diagnosed.. I've got Keraticonus which is an eye mulfunction so I can't see properly anymore or can't rely on sight and being a sound artist it's somewhat apt in a way that one sense would be deteriorated at the expensive of another in a way. But, it is purely electromagnetic radiation that people are living in and we are using at the moment using a radio station that you can't hear. You have no sense to actually pick them up except for the use of technology.
Fenella: The environment is a very strong theme in your work. Isn't it?
Andrew: Definiately. Awareness of the environment and a fascination with the world around us is something that drives my work to no end. Becoming aware of not only things that we can't hear or things that we aren't aware off that we are having an impact on in a large scale. The Australian identity and how we base a lot of our identity on the landscape and associate with the landscape. Traveling from Brisbane to Adelaide for this festival you realise on the plane flight how much damage has been done to the environment. The agriculture..
Fenella: Salinity problems.
Andrew: Definity, traveling over the Murray, looking down at it and thinking that it doesn't look that healthy. And being an artist that creates soundscapes that bases a lot of it's influences on the Australian landscape I think that it is a better way as a creative medium to communicate and have a relationship with the landscape through sound. I mean there isn't any great need to cut anything down or transform the landscape physically. The association can be on a purely creative artwork.
Fenella: How do you use sound as a way of getting a political message across? The pieces that we have heard so far are simply soundscape but there are other pieces that are spoken word.
Andrew: Yes. My work which has over the last ten years, which is quite scary, has diversified. I think to some extent that it is like the conference that we have just had that Australia is very diversified as artists and one of the interviews that we where giving earlier on the weekend was asking, "Isn't sound very limiting?" And I said, "No. With sound you can do everything. You can do sound installations in galleries. You can do soundtracks and compositions." and a lot of the other work I have been doing is looking at non-verbal communication through our voice and that leads of to a lot of performance poetry and spoken word. Two of the most successful peices we have composed so far is of coarse "Public Space" which was released through Tim Richie's "Sound Quality" CD last year and that was quite a political cmment for Queensland arts week wher we had the opportunity to perform in the Queen Street Mall and compose this performance poetry piece that was quite confrontational as far as adressing current issues that are facing Brisbane as a community for the use of public psace and the most recent one was "The Australian National Anthem" which was a 15 minute cathartic drone, vocal piece where I had sung the Australian National Anthem very slowly, very loudly, very cathartically over fifteen minutes.
Fenella: We might try and have a listen to a little bit of that. Not the entire fifteen minutes.
Andrew: Perhaps, But you do get an idea of it pretty quickly.
Fenella: Pretty quickly. It must be very interesting, you where talking before must how they where saying that sound can be very limiting and you where saying that you have many places where you can actually play are listen to sound but is it something that you see is important that you try to change or help people consume sound in a different way? And how do you go about doing that?
Andrew: Underlining most of it is making people aware of their perceptions, any artform tries to achive that, not only in the way that they are consuming the artform, but what the artform is trying to bring to them as an awareness if through the composition that was just broadcast then, "With my left eye closed", if people hadn't considered the electromagnetic radiation that surrounds them, through that awareness that their perceptions are somewhat limited that they hadn't been aware of then that is a fantastic thing to encourage people to consider.
Fenella: On Triple J, Andrew Kettle is with me and he is a Brisbane sound artist. We are playing some of his work at the moment. The next one is track one from "Artificial Thought". I should mention that all of the CDs that Andrew release are the small ones.
Andrew: The 8 centimentre, they are actually the Japanese single, but there doesn't seem to be any prevellenge of it hear in Australia.
Fenella: That's because they get lost behind the skirting boards. They are just too small. Tell us about this piece.
Andrew: The "Artificial Thought" was another environmental work where I had been doing a lot of compositions using the geographic information of an area. So what you are going to be listening to is the geographic detail of an earthworks scultpure that I created six years ago, where we had actually drawn the landscape into a music program that creates envelopes so you can actually draw the envelopes of the frequencies and the volumes, but the envelope that you are actually drawing is specifically the landscape of a previous piece. So, you are listening to the landscape as a drawing in a way. So if you can comprehend that..
Fenella: Maybe we should have a listen.
Andrew: Then you will be deeper.

[Broadcast of "Artifical thought"]

Fenella: On triple J in the Sound Lab you are currently listening to a piece by Andrew Kettle, it's called "Artificial Thought" and Andrew we are going to go to a piece that we where talking about a little bit earlier which was your rendishion of the Australian National Anthem can you remind us of the context of where you performed this piece?
Andrew: The context behind it is a direct result of hearing news that Australia was tear gassing children in the concentration camps that we had built for them it was a live performance for a Sydney artist that was touring called Pimmon if you know his work at all, I'm sure your listeners do. It was a support for his Brisbane performance and we had this work that we where going to perform at it and two days before the actual performance there was all the news about what was actually happening in Detention Centres and it had a great impact on myself at the time and it was the first time I had ever considered any other option that I wasn't happy being an Australian or associating with the Australian image. Which was for myself quite a fundamental in my identity of associating with the place that I was born in. Actually making me question..
Fenella: Who you where?
Andrew: And to be an Australian, in many ways.
Fenella: And this piece is Andrew Kettle performing the Australian National Anthem. We'll hear just a little bit of this before we say goodbye to Andrew and It's very cathartic.
Andrew: It is.
Fenella: So check it out.

[Broadcast of "The Australian National Anthem"]

Fenella: And on Triple J a sample of the Australian Nation Anthem as cathartically performed by Andrew Kettle who is my guest. I like that word, Cathartic. It's a good word.
Andrew: It's very cathartic.
Fenella: And it's a good performance too. That's your rendishion of the Australian National Anthem and your responses to the refugee and their treatment.
Andrew: Thanks right.
Fenella: Andrew Kettle has been my guest here in the Sound Lab. It was been a pleasure to met you, Andrew, finally.
Andrew: It has been.
Fenella: Playing some tunes of your own in the Sound Lab and this last track is one of your most popular tracks as well, it's about Public space.
Andrew: That's right.
Fenella: You can actually go and check out some of your gigs in Brisbane. GIve us some details.
Andrew: Yes, there is the monthly space that I curate at Metro Arts. It's the last Sunday of the eveyr month, called 'Small Black Box', which is an opportunity for local and interstate artists in the experimental and sound art medium to present their work each month which is very cathartic for the culture, in a way.
[laughter]
Fenella: And you have a really comprehensive website as well. What is that website?
Andrew: It's http://listen.to/kettle
Fenella: So that's www.?
Andrew: No.
Fenella: You don't even have to do that anymore?
Andrew: No. It's a direct link.
Fenella: Oh, my God. You ARE modern.
Andrew: There you go.
Fenella: Andrew Kettle thanks for your time.
Andrew: Pleasure!
Fenella:This is a track form Andrew and it is called "Public Space", on triple J.

[Broadcast of "Public Space"]