andrew garton

The NOTHINGKNOWN prototype was launched as part of the CPU series at ESC, Graz, on Saturday, 4 October. The opening was part of an organised day trip of various galleries coinciding with the start of the city wide festival, Steirischer Herbst.

The soundscape was generatively created from a piece that ran for 9 days. It consists of field recordings made from Iban longhouse communities in 1999.

For more information, exhibition details and aknowledgements:
http://agarton.org/wiki/index.php?title=Nothing_Known

Note: this piece is frequently updated as changes are made in response to feedback and discussion with other participating artists and visitors to the gallery.

The ESC tech support person, Peter, helped to ensure my pieces were complete in the hour before people arrived by sharing the rendering and compressing load… we also managed to get a Toy Satellite showreel completed for another space at ESC. It become a popular spot for visitors to the gallery who found the soundscapes comforting, as someone described…

The NOTHINGKNOWN prototype turned out just as I had intended… I was moved by how it well it was received and that people have taken an interest in the Sarawak land rights issues the piece is largely drawn from.

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Tags: installation, sarawak, video

Arrived in Vienna this morning stiff and achy. There’s far too little leg room in Austria Airlines flights. I’d promised myself I’d not fly with them any more, but hard to tell who’s flying who with all the carrier deals going. I thought I’d be on Thai Air, but they took me from Melbourne to Bangkok only.

I’ll be based in Graz for at least a couple of months with plans for a white Christmas, the first ever, with family here. It’s been a long while since I’ve worked on a gallery piece. The ESC Gallery is giving me that opportunity with my new installation, Nothing Known. When I think about it, I’ve had more invitations like this from Austria than any other country and certainly far more than at home.

Kenyah elder, Sarawak

I want to put the faces of indigenous Sarawak on large screens, the larger the better. At very slow frame rates one will see the faces shown in detail, in close up with the camera tracking over contours of skin, facial outlines, eyes…

I’d learnt in Sarawak that archiving cultural knowledge, indigenous cultural knowledge does little to protect it. It becomes remembered in research, coffee table chatter, gossip… the deepest transmission occurs through presence… physical, immediate presence. The songs, the dances, hunting, farming, the stuff of life, accumulated generational knowledge, wisdom… from what I’d seen, from the interviews we had with the eldest people in one of the Bidayuh Kampongs, one generation is all it takes to lose their story-tellers and musicians.

The story was the same in South Africa. Meeting the anthropologist Barbera Tyrrell (on her 94th birthday!) it was clear her attempt to record traditional and ceremonial garments from many African tribes was but a drop in the proverbial ocean. She’d told me that there were few people in the various Diaspora on the continent that could remember what their own people had worn let alone danced in at least one to two generations past.

More when I’m less tired and a charged laptop…

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Tags: Austria, sarawak

Today Secession Records is 10 years old. The 22nd of September 1998 Secession launch was a lively event hosted by Toy Satellite on Smith Street, Fitzroy with a cast of firsts under that hood.

Founder of Synesthesia Records, Mark Harwood, played his first gig there and John Power lit up the venue with his first projected, live video mix.

The launch was video streamed to an international audience of enthusiasts and I was engrossed in a generative Lost Time Accident performance that kicked off our first release, a series of generatively composed works titled, Age to Wonder At.

From 1999 to 2000 Secession ran the ESC experimental sound and music series and produced the Unseen / Unheard interactive audio visual sessions in Melbourne.

We co-produced the Return to Timor millennium eve concert in Aliu, East Timor and contributed to the formative years of the This Is Not Art Festival.

In 2001 Secession artists performed Undercurrents at the opening of the Taipei International Arts Festival. Undercurrents was also performed at the Fringe Fashion Awards, Melbourne International Film Festival, Multimedia Asia Pacific Festival and This is Not Art.

We believe we may have even published the first podcast out of Australia. In November 2004 we commenced Sound Information with the release of Some Rights Reserved works destined for use by podcast producers the world over. We had also been a Creative Commons early adopter.

In 2004 Ollie Olsen and Steve Law joined me at the helm… we released some works online, but joint releases are yet to come - personal stuff, 21st century stuff… the stuff of life hindered and expanded us.

Secession has consistently applied itself to music and sound works that extend the capabilities of our artists, that challenges and excites, that inspires and reflects the common attributes of diversity in a world suffering the dynamics of economies that deplete natural resources and enclose creative and cultural endeavour in protections that stifle innovation, breeding sameness and a dangerously dull, careless society.

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Tags: secession

On the eighth day of the eighth month of two thousand and eight I performed an entirely new solo set to mark the launch of my new album, Son of Science.

At 11 pm I stepped into one of the simplest set up’s I’ve used in years, tipping into the unknown at Soup, the undisputed underground venue for Tokyo’s noise and ambient scene. The ideas for the piece were first formulated in Brisbane when working on the recent Terminal Quartet piece, Licht Drift.

The delivery was more in keeping with my former Fierce Throat pieces and was an entirely enjoyable, if but intense experience to realise! I was to play some acoustic guitar treatments, but couldn’t stop the PA from feeding back… I was perched just above the sub! Guitar will have to wait!

Listen to Tokyo Lagoon.

The entire evening was a splendid, reverberant evening of new, fresh and solid sound works from the crew at Soup, including the delightful Paul(ie) Dunphy (aka Evil Penguin).

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Tags: son of science, sos, soup

One of 2 remaining elders

Eighty three year old elder, one of two remaining in Kampong Danu, under an hours drive west of Kuching… regrettably, many of the Kampongs have lost their last generation of story tellers and musicians. He could recall only one folk tale, that of a village that had entirely vanished leaving only a stone that is said to be a woman that had turned to stone.

He could, however, remember, as a very young man, seeing deer eat flower buds from his house of an evening… shine a torch out the door and animals would be every where… The land was abundant then. He had also worked for the Japanese, building an airstrip for a few cents a day.

He also remembered playing in the caves as a child. There are large caves in that area, within an hours walk or so from Kampong Danu, some of which take one from one side of the mountain, visible from the Kampong, to the other.

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Tags: oral history, sarawak, storytellers, video