Reviews

BOX #26 - 27 July 2003 - Camilla Hannan - resi-quat - Machina aux Rock

Review by Keith Gallasch

This review copyright RealTime; www.realtimearts.net

SERIOUS LISTENING
Small Black Box
IMA, Screening Room
Judith Wright Centre
July 27

It?s Sunday night, eyes shut and heads down in the packed, tiny screening theatrette at the IMA?time for some serious ?evensong? listening, minus the hymning along. At the International Critics? Symposium the week before a disgruntled music critic quizzed my celebration of the multimedia skills of contemporary artists, asking "But with all these screens and installations, is anyone actually listening anymore?" I wish she could have been at Small Black Box. She would not have liked it but she would have seen listening.

The audience is young and responsive. Greg Jenkins and Andrew Kettle are amiable hosts. There?s a sense of occasion and community. Small Black Box is an important part of the Australian sound culture scene, promoting local artists in the context of a national big picture. Tonight Camilla Hannan from Melbourne opens with a dense, surround sound composition for 6 speakers, a spatial journey built from sounds the artist has collected from various environments. This is not sound heard from a distance: it?s loud and you are in it and only occasionally do you think you recognise what you?re hearing. Huge rushes, machine rachetings, profound jack-hammering, high static deepening into an invasion of cicadas, a scary heavy shuffle, an escalating beat, huge hollow resonances and eery glissandi follow one another until the work becomes quite musical, a high whistle winding over a recurrent thump building to an apocalyptic ?Age of the Machines? movie soundtrack which dissolves into the reassuring banality of the clack of a passing train.

Local artist resi-quat (aka Adam Park) presents a cassette tape collage, his fingers darting across an assemblage of old tape decks in a lo-tech venture with the impact of the radio-dial-twiddling variety of sound art. It?s like being stuck in a time loop, a nostalgic, muddy archive with chunks of advertisements and hawaian guitar?the incantation of ?high seven cholesterol? and ?you?re feeling good and you?re feeling tense? providing a faintly ironic thematic anchor. Later this detritus almost totally transforms into a more articulated sound field, noise with a kind of cosmic feel in tune with the endlessly repeated sci-fi ?ish animations projected throughout (eyes shut for me).

The seats are cleared for Melbourne?s Machina aux Rock and a few coloured lights begin to pulse. Nat Bates on electronics and Stephen Masterson on drums facing each other across the space whip up an acoustic-electronic exchange ("Stephen plays drums that trigger Nat?s noise gates, which in turn pass bursts of electric guitar and bass textures, the overall sound being processed and shaped live by Nat." Program note). Earplugs have been handed out in the intermission. The piece moves from minimal to orchestral in character and density with the performers becoming physically more vigorous. Bells and gongs and gritty organ sounds manifest out of nowhere. After the final visceral assault (Bates pogoing and the drummer slowing to a near halt in visual and aural counterpoint) the sounds swoops and dives into silence.

It?s been a night of engaging performances of very different kinds, from the contemplative to the performative, and all offering rich imaginative spaces to the alert listener. It was a good move on the part of QBFM to include Small Black Box and Liquid Architecture 4 in its program?there are links with other parts of the festival and certainly shared soundworlds with Heiner Goebbels? symphonic Surrogate Cites.

You can hear Camilla Hannan and Machina aux Rock on the Liquid Architecture 4 CD (www.liquidarchitecture.org.au; info@liquidarchitecture.org.au).

Keith Gallasch