Artists

Zane Trow

Zane Trow, Artistic Director, Composer/Performer, Sound Artist.

Trow was born in London in 1956. He left school to be an artist, but dropped out of fine art-school to study experimental music composition. Trow has since been professionally involved in the contemporary live and sound arts since the mid-1970s. His work spans creative development, performance art, sound installation and musical composition for dance, theatre, visual arts and film, contemporary performance direction, community arts, critical writing, arts consultancy, project and curatorial management services, arts organisation, festival and event artistic direction, arts management training and cultural policy activism. He has studied Kathakali dance/drama percussion in India and toured multi-media art to Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and India.

He works with improvisation and sound art treatments thru pure frequency modulation synthesis, complex digital delay systems and with Ross Bencina's Audiomulch sound software.

Recent electronic sound and music includes installations for the Centre for Contemporary Photography and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, synthesizers, devices & delays for George Telek (an ARIA award winning CD), sound art for the ABC "Listening Room" and voice compositions for experimental theatre. Recent performances in Brisbane include ambient raga/sound improvisations at dawn for the Powerhouse Turbine Hall space. He is currently working on a long-term series of large scale sound installation/performance projects with David Toop, Richard Barrett, Scanner and I/O at South Bank Parklands.

His work as a curator in live art and new media in Australia has involved major projects with the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Victorian Arts Centre, QUT, RMIT University, Scienceworks and the Sydney City Council. Published writing includes RealTime, Artworks, Dance Life, Westspace "Dialogue" and "Artists Talk" and Australasian Performance Studies Journal.

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Some notes

I have been working as a solo performer with various kinds of echo units, delay systems and repeating loops for the last 30 years or so, not because working with them is ?innovative? or ?groundbreaking? in any way, simply because I like them.

The passage of my life is measured out in shirts. While I work with recordings for installation, film, video and contemporary performance companies, I enjoy the vulnerability in the live performance of the work, and my art builds towards and away from these kinds of brief live moments. Ms Pauline Oliveros, who has been working with echo systems for far longer than I have, says that they ?make the past available in the present?. I like that way of twisting time and I think that, at its? best, an echo shifts our perception of the vast physiological space in our lives that time occupies.

When I started the work (in 1972, with a Moog, a Revox A77 and some Wem Copycats) I would spend hours trying to get rid of ?wow & flutter?, now (with FM synthesis, Audiomulch software and some digital delay units) I spend hours trying to put it back.

This evening?s performance is called ?for those who Hear Actual Voices? and  includes recordings of some men; all of whom are dead.

Antonin Artaud ? from pour finir avec le jugement de dieu (to have done with the judgement of god) Recorded in Paris, 1947

Marcel Duchamp - from A l'infinitif (With Infinitive) Recorded in New York, 1967

Herbert Marcuse ? from a speech for the Symposium on the Dialectics of Liberation and the Demystification of Violence organized by R.D.Laing Recorded in London, 1967

Joseph Beuys ? from Ja Ja Ja Ne Ne Ne (Yes Yes Yes No No No) Recorded in Milan, 1970

Mr Robert Wyatt has said that mistakes are a marker of sincerity. So please take any mistakes this evening in that spirit and thank you very much for taking the time to come along and listen.

Zane.