Artists

Man with a Laptop: Jenkins & Woods

greg jenkins composes directly with the inherent musicality of sounds, making harmony, melody and rhythm subservient to sonic texture and spatiality. He will often extrapolate sonic minutiae into whole compositions for example by ?zooming in? on a tiny fragment of recorded voice then using this as the basis of a droning musical weft.
greg also likes to hit things; things such as suspended arrays of inverted flower pots; things such as beer kegs; and things such as midi percussion controllers which allow him to subversively remap non-percussive sound objects to percussive performance gestures. He frequently makes use of ?micro-gestures? - subtle physical manipulations of computer hardware which control software synthesis engines allowing him to perform directly on the software in real time. greg is also known as "cactusman" due to his penchant for using a cactus as an amplified acoustic instrument.
Recently greg has worked on a number of collaborative performance projects, including the Hutt River Space Agency and The Arcimboldo Project. In these he employed a number of bio-lectro musical devices - namely a cactus, a carrot, a watermelon and a cabbage. These objects were contact mic?ed and amplified as greg alternately plucked, masticated and smashed them.
endoPHONIC is greg?s main musical vehicle and is a collaboration with like minded composer richard wilding. Using elements like electronic transformations of acoustic sound sources and real-time software synthesis, endoPHONIC use the vocabulary of musique concrete? to navigate a course through contemporary non-dance oriented electronica.
greg lectures in sound media at the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology and has also been artistic director of the performance ensemble Simulation. He curated the concert programme of the Australasian Computer Music Association?s 2000 conference and has also worked on a number of film score projects. Most notable of these was co-writing the score for the short film STOP which gained international recognition at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival.
greg's first mode of artistic expression was with fellow music students in the composer?s collective Trojan Theatre. Trojan Theatre performed at events such as the Brisbane Festival Fringe, Shock of the New and the Wild Front Ear. These performances established an interesting precedent - the band brought their own mixing console which was invariably bigger than the front of house PA. At the time this was considered extremely subversive and a few front of house engineers were more that a little disturbed by this (you?ve got HOW MANY keyboards?) And then there were the multiple computers on stage? These performances helped establish the language of musical discourse greg continues to develop today - appreciating and composing with the subtleties inherent within sounds.