Bio

Black Harlequin, Cement Box Theatre, Brisbane, 1993

Hello… I’m a musician and film-maker with a history in community media, beginning with radio and open access video in the 1970s, television in the 1980s and the internet from the 1990s.

I’ve been writing and playing music since the late 1970s and was an inaugural student of the Academy of Sound Recording Engineers and the Sydney Conservatorium’s Jazz Composition course (circa 1979). I’d not completed the course having been unable to make a connection between the music I so wanted to play and the meter rhythms being clapped out in the first formal classes.

The most notable bands I’d played with between 1977 and 1989 included Monsterio Delicio, S10-45, Private Lives, Kling Klang, The Astrobeatniks, Lingo Babel and Back from Nowhere. I’d the good fortune to play side-saddle with a few others including Sardine V, The Tension Nuts and Red Crayons. My main instruments at the time were piano and keyboards, saxophone and a variety of exotic flutes.

Private Lives opened the first Live at the Wireless album from 2JJJ and released a sell-out EP in 1983. It was a heady period of gigs, rehearsals, trucks and lots of music. But I grew to loath the industry the band was drawn to and left to pursue my own music and other interests.

By the end of the 1980s I’d begun to write and perform installation works such as Triangle Over Triumph and Black Harlequin. I’d always played guitar and returned to it vigorously in the late 80s after hearing James Blood Ulmer and formed Back From Nowhere, a kind of jazz-punk trio. It was to be ten years before I played in anything resembling a band again. Fast-track to the late 1990s and the Electro Pathological Consort, formed in Vienna, was, in my humble opinion, legendary in concept and delivery.

Fast track once more to the 21st century and I found myself behind a computer making electronic music, from generative soundscapes (Lost Time Accident), to my personal take on techno (Headlock) culminating in a dedication to progressive rock, Son of Science. After more than 20 years of music and sound making with computers I picked up the guitar again, determined to return to a more intimate form of writing and performance.

If you’re interested in what I do, seeking to commission one of my works or wish to contribute to them please contact me with your ideas or proposal(s). And if you’re curious, and keen to support an independent artist, please do consider purchasing one of my CDs, or individual tracks… and now for something a little more formal:

Biography

Fierce Throat, Where are the Silences, 1994

Andrew Garton was born in Guildford, an outer western suburb of Sydney, in 1962, to immigrant parents from Europe. He began producing and performing music in the late 70s as synthesist, saxophonist and spoken word performer. Bands of note that Andrew performed with include the punk/soul group Private Lives (1979 – 1983) and fusion/impro outfit Lingo Babel (1985-1987). In the late 80s he formed the acoustic based White Punks on Hope and the jazz-punk trio, Return from Nowhere.

Andrew has composed numerous documentary soundtracks, conceived and produced interactive installations, both on and offline; published articles on independent media, generative music and radio art; and worked with pioneer community internet provider, Pegasus Networks.

In the mid-80s Andrew began composing for film and stage. He completed scores for numerous documentaries produced by UK’s Channel 4 and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), most notably, the award winning Anyone Can be A Genius and In Grave Danger of Falling Food, a three part series investigating the life-time work of Permaculture founder, Bill Mollison.

Andrew’s music for theatre is largely focused on his own solo works (Black Harlequin, Auslaender und Staatenlose), with commissions for Queensland’s Omniscient Gallery and the Debacle Theater Company, most notably their landmark interpretation of Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1994).

He has contributed to several international and Australian collaborations with artists such as Stelarc, Ludwig Zeininger, Kazayuki Null, Hank Bull, Ollie Olsen, Brian Eno, Tetsuo Kogawa, Martin Breindl and Jimi Chen. Andrew has performed with the International Theremin Orchestra and continues to be commissioned to produce sound works for both radio and Internet.

He produced perhaps the first generative sound piece for Australian radio and internet in 1997, a collaboration with Stelarc, for The Listening Room (now off-air) and co-produced a series of live audio-video collaborations commencing in Melbourne in 1998 and culminating in a series of works for the the opening of the Taipei International Arts Festival in 2001.

From 1997 – 1999 he co-founded, wrote, produced and performed with the Austrian based Electro-Pathological Consort and in 2005 Garton curated the innovative generative sound series, Frequency Post, for the Vienna based, KunstRadio.

In 1999, Andrew was awarded the John Bird Award for Excellence in an Online Multimedia Production for his piece, Ausländer Micro, a virtual opera exploring the plight of Eastern European political refugees.

Mid-2000, his far-reaching nine-day, generative composition and installation, Tat Fat Size Temple, was released internationally by ORF/KunstRadio (Austria) as CD and Booklet of their collaborative netcast, Sound Drifting.

Other works include sound design for Bodyssey, an interactive CD-ROM by Gary Zebbington; STREET (e)SCAPE, a 24 hour generative soundscape commissioned by Alien Productions, KunstRadio and Polycollege Stobergasse, Austria; Sinawe, a performance produced in collaboration with video artist Kim Bounds, depicting numerous forms of traditional and contemporary Korean music for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Works of note include sound design for the award winning interactives, MEMO, by Matt Riley and Mud Map, by Sam Fermo.

Mid-2003 Andrew completed a major work commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image – a video installation (From Drift to Derive) and prototype stop-motion narrative engine, D3, taking inspiration from Situationist theory.

Andrew has given papers on networking and new media initiatives at the United Nations World Conference on Environment and Development, Fifth International Conference in Central Europe on Computer Graphics and Visualization, University of West Bohemia, the First Asia Internet Rights and 4th Labour Media Conferences, Seoul. In recent years he has presented at the Asia Communication Rights Forum (Manila), IPR and Communication in the Asia Pacific (Brisbane) and Pactok 1, Telecentres for the Pacific Islands (Brisbane).

His published works include articles in Journal of New Musique Australia, Fibreculture Reader, RealTime, 21C and he co-authored the Pan Asia Networking Report (1994) – a comprehensive report on early Internet usage in the Asia region commissioned and published by the International Development and Research Centre, Singapore. His most recent works have been published in At a Distance (MIT Press), the online journal Sleepy Brain and Filter (Australian Network for Art and Technology).

Andrew ran the new media arts collective Toy Satellite for 10 years and was interactive media consultant and an informal artist in residence at the Australian Centre of the Moving Image during its formative years. From 2005 – 2007 he was OPEN CHANNEL’s inaugural Program Director where he continued to develop his long interest and passion for public screen culture.

Andrew graduated with a Master of New Media Arts from RMIT University, Australia, and is serving a second term on the Board of the Association for Progressive Communications. His music is released through Secession Records.