002

AUSTRALIAN EAI

In the back of the tiny, ground floor performance space in Adelaide, Australia’s De La Catessen Gallery sits a baby grand piano that’s slowly going out of tune. Resting on that instrument, whose 88 keys remain untouched for most all of this eight-act showcase for Matt Earle’s Breakdance The Dawn cassette label, are two mixing desks, and other associated apparatus. Operating the desks are Earle and his long-time collaborator Adam Süssmann, who slowly twist together pure tones, phase patterns, electronic glissando, and shards of feedback with unassuming grace. Their set, as Stasis Duo, winds to its end in front of an audience numbering in the low twenties.

Some would call this electroacoustic improvisation (much as that term is inherently problematic), and until recently, I’d have agreed: there is certainly aesthetic and ideological overlap between Stasis Duo, Earle and Süssmann’s local and national peers, and such ‘glocal’ scenes as the New London Silence, onkyo, and Berlin reductionism. Dive further into the endless proliferation of sub-groupings, collaborations and on-the-fly gigs and recordings from this sub-set of the Australian underground, however, and EAI doesn’t even begin to cover the breadth of exploration undertaken by Stasis Duo and a clutch of their loosely related peers - people like Anthony Guerra, Arek Gulbenkoglu, Will Guthrie and Joel Stern.

In order to get to Adelaide, Earle and Süssmann, along with Riko and James Heighway, had spent several days on the road from their base in the Blue Mountains, camping out in the country while lugging all of their gear, including multiple amps, drum kits, and countless instruments, on the back of a large ute. Three more - the Unaustralians duo of Bonnie and Nylstoch, and New Zealand filmmaker Snakebeings - had driven over from Melbourne that day. Having them in town was, by all accounts, a wild time. But hang on a second…the Blue Mountains?

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“I don’t like the Blue Mountains,” Earle confesses in our interview. “I’ve got bad bones from riding my skateboard too much, [and] the cold hurts.” That’s fair enough. While I’ve not been there in over two decades, my memories of the Blue Mountains, from various family holidays, are not particularly positive. Those living in the small towns dotted through the mountain range, which begins about 50 kilometres west of Sydney, tend to either be retirees, or escaping something – Earle once joked, in passing, that to live there you had to be “rich, or crazy.” But life in certain towns (or off the beaten track) is actually quite cheap, and given skyrocketing rental in inner suburban Sydney, plus Earle and Süssmann’s enrolment in arts at the University Of Western Sydney, roughly halfway between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, their move makes some sense.

For Süssmann, there were other reasons for the relocation. “In 2004, my son Charley was born,” he recalls, “and we moved.” “[I moved in] early 2005,” Earle continues. “I’m here because the music is good. I have had a lot more time and space to work on stuff, and the music has become more diverse.” The space and relative isolation offered by the Blue Mountains has also helped in ways that are more prosaic: “There were always complaints if we played loud [in Sydney],” Earle says. “When we moved to the Mountains, there were no more problems with noise. All of a sudden, we all had spaces where we could play loud.”

Consequently, the duo have helped foster a community of artists, and the remit of their music has expanded, taking in noise-rock, weird non-pro pop, and non-idiomatic improvisation. Akemi, a venue in “ghost town” Medlow Bath that has hosted countless gigs, along with the Tsuji Giri performance series and Winter Tragic festival, is the physical focal point for the Blue Mountains crew. “Akemi was once a fish and chips shop,” Earle laughs. “The performance space is the old shop front. There is a five-bedroom house attached at the back. It’s on top of a magnetic water table, which makes everyone crazy, so legend goes. One side is the car yard, on the other is a vacant lot, [and] next to the car yard is a series of abandoned derelict buildings that used to be an asylum. People say it’s haunted.”

This is all far removed from my first encounters with Earle and Süssmann: having Arek Gulbenkoglu insist I chase up Süssmann’s revelatory Acoustic Guitar Solo, hearing word of bracing Stasis Duo gigs in Sydney, and seeing Earle in duo with laptop provocateur Mattin at 2004’s What Is Music festival. Süssmann’s history, in particular, is fascinating: “In my ancestry there were a number of accomplished musicians,” he says, “Jews from Eastern Europe, Russia, [and] Poland. I only found out recently [that] John Zorn is my cousin; our maternal grandfathers were brothers. I used to travel to India regularly with my mother, [where] I got to hear some really amazing music. I actually did my first ever gig in India to over 5000 people at an ashram in Mount Abu in Rajasthan. I was only 11.”

Both Süssmann and Earle had their heads turned by electronic music, Detroit techno and Krautrock in the mid 1990s. They met in the mid-late ‘90s, while Earle was working with Adam Rasheed in their duo, The Minerals. In 1998, Earle and Süssmann started working together, “making totally out there [and] abstract music with all this gear we had collected,” Earle recalls. “A lot of our friends thought we were crazy. I thought, ‘whatever…’” In 2000, they began working as the Stasis Duo, a nomenclature under which they still record and perform.

“Throughout this period I was working for the National Parks service at The Gap in Sydney,” he continues, “a cliff face that falls 30 metres to the ocean, and notorious for suicides. There was so much death around. I often thought our music sounded like what it would be like after you’re dead.” Soon after, they started broadcasting on community radio station 2SER, taking over Vicky Brown and Scott Horscroft’s Radio Alice program.

“We decided to play no pre-recorded material,” Süssmann recalls, “[we were] performing live each week, which was a real baptism of fire into composition and instrumental techniques. We had to sustain our music - one piece for a whole hour without a break. In the beginning, we would get fifteen minutes into the show and find ourselves exhausted of ideas. Each week we would compose another piece to perform on the show, and eventually became adept at stretching out ideas, with a huge repertoire of instrumental techniques.”

The combination of the peculiar demands of Radio Alice, their discovery of certain related strains of improvised music, and performing at and attending Sydney improvised music events like The NowNow and Impermanent Audio helped focus the Stasis Duo’s playing, while introducing them to a wider community of improvising and electronic music artists. Impermanent Audio, a night run by critic and university lecturer Caleb K, was particularly important, and Caleb K would eventually release Stasis Duo’s first album, Hammer and Tongs, on his Impermanent label.

Stasis Duo is the closest of all of their projects to electroacoustic improvisation. Their simple set-up, combined with a tendency toward silence, or the edge of audibility, reflects onkyo playing, though their over-riding interest is in phenomena over ‘musicality’, betraying an understanding of Alvin Lucier’s work. “We were more into acoustic phenomena than music stuff,” Earle confirms. “We had been into ideas of making music out of nothing, right here and now. Making something special. Our approach had become very conceptual, our compositions were experimental over ‘musical’. Stasis Duo has always had a distaste for the romantic nature of most music.”

This conceptual approach is also reflected in Süssmann’s solo guitar recordings, which document the outcomes of simply defined parameters, rather than providing a ‘musical experience’. His Acoustic Guitar Solo, for what he terms “electromagnetic guitar,” felt like a significant leap forward for the instrument, similar to Annette Krebs’s Guitar Solo in its almost brutal stripping of the instrument’s lexicon. “I certainly use very rigid conceptual frameworks,” he agrees. “They are like vehicles.” This also extends into his other projects: “The many bands I play in are all distinct. That is, they display particular signs which affiliate or separate themselves from different tribes, which may even be hostile to one another. It’s quite schizophrenic in some ways. Some methods I may use in one context are critiqued by another.”

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“Adam and Matt were very influential on my playing,” claims Will Guthrie. He’s writing from Nantes, France, where he’s lived for the past few years, after leaving Melbourne in 2003 and travelling through London and Paris. I’ve caught him in reflective mode, tracing the history of his musical development, from learning piano and drums as a teenager, through studying music at the Victoria College of Arts, on into professional playing in jazz groups, and then his shift into free improvisation and electronics, something concretised through his trio with Earle and Süssmann.

“I had never heard anything like what Adam and Matt were doing,” he states. “However, for me what was really interesting about [our trio] is that me, Adam and Matt were coming from very different places, we had very different approaches and aims in our music, [and] this created a tension that to me was very interesting.” Coming from a traditional jazz background, which was more about tracings of melody heads, quick shifts in tempo, stop/start dynamics and 180-degree turns, Guthrie was liberated by these new developments in improvised music: “I remember listening to this music for the first time and thinking, ‘Whoa! The music is really changing.’”

“I wanted to be able to do more with less,” he continues, “and also to be able to work with long sounds as opposed to percussive attack sounds. Playing with Adam and Matt really helped me change in this direction, to not change the sound too quickly, to stay with one idea for a long time, [and] let the music breathe. This is when I started using microphones, engines and motors, electronics etc, in an effort to get away from what I had been doing before, with the main incentive being working with long sounds.”

This development has been documented on a small but potent set of recordings: two trio discs with Earle and Süssmann, Guthrie’s solo discs, Spear and body and limbs still look to light, and La Respiration du Saintes, a 3” CD-R released by Charlie Charlie, his duo with partner Erell Latimier. Spear is particularly powerful: it’s an eight minute coruscation, where musique concrete techniques meet grating percussive noise and brutal editing techniques. When Guthrie performed in Adelaide a few years back, his percussion and electronics set-up, with contact mics, strings and springs, bowed cymbals, and chattering noisemakers, blasted forth an audio outcome closer to tape music, or the cracked everyday electronics of Voice_Crack. Like that duo, or The New Blockaders, you can hear the singe of wires and the burn and blister of scraped metal or broken equipment in Guthrie’s music.

When I suggest that Guthrie’s recent recordings have privileged editing, he’s slightly doubtful: “Hmm, yes and no… I think my work with editing had been an attempt to express a music that has been in my head for a long time, a music that is impossible to do live (there are too many notes!) and therefore is done by way of editing. In the same way that working with Adam and Matt allowed me to play things I couldn’t play with other musicians, editing allows me to make another kind of music different to what could be done live.”

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In our email interview, Melbourne guitarist Arek Gulbenkoglu’s responses are short and to the point. Though a gregarious character, he’s not inclined to reflect too much on his music, and when I ask him to explain his aesthetic, he simply replies, “this is a hard one.” His unassuming, unpretentious near-silence perhaps is reflected in the slim body of work he has released in the past half decade: only one solo album, Points Alone, on Impermanent, and an untitled CD-R on Süssmann’s Document imprint. But he’s unequivocal about one thing: “I think the Earle, Süssmann and Guthrie trio, playing just prior to Will going overseas, was some of the best music I have witnessed in my life.”

Gulbenkoglu’s history is interesting. He played French horn in orchestras as a teenager, before going through what he describes as a “pretty usual” indie rock phase. His subsequent encounters with AMM, No Neck Blues Band, and New Zealand’s free noise scene were crucial, and in 1997, he co-formed Dworzec, with Louise Conroy, Henry Krips and Antony Eagle. They self-released the “Shore” 7”, “Kairow” 10” and a self-titled CD, before NZ label Metonymic picked up their second album, Wednesday. But early this decade, they went into hiatus, only reforming in late 2007, when all members were back in the same city.

Dworzec’s extended break proved timely for Gulbenkoglu, as his interests were changing. He saw Stasis Duo in 2002 - “another critical moment,” he confesses - and started playing with Earle, Guerra, Guthrie and Süssmann in 2003. One performance I caught, with Guerra and Gulbenkoglu improvising with Japanese players Takefumi Naoshima and Toshihiro Koike, was remarkable for its restraint, continually hovering close to absolute silence.

Gulbenkoglu’s playing in these contexts tends toward the minimal, his instrumental trademark being his near-surgical precision, and preternatural capacity for apposite note placement, coupled with a natural ear for the right sound at just the right time. He admits an interest the ‘historical turn’ toward silence and minimalism in improvising, musing, “I think I inherited any of these influences second hand through playing with locals. It made a lot of sense to me at the time and was a way of dealing with some of the problems and issues I had with the more routine improv stuff.”

Gulbenkoglu characterises his relationship to his instrument with one word: “Uneasy.” He continues, “I like exploring basic sound producing qualities - steel and wood. Preparations are a means to activate these materials.” This, combined with an austere take on construction, has Gulbenkoglu’s recorded output, particularly Points Alone, feeling ‘reduced’, yet not generically reductionist. He’s searching for essence: “I’m interested in the basic qualities of experiencing sound - texture, time, volume. These are building blocks. I like abstraction.”

Points Alone was received by some as an improvised work, largely due to Gulbenkoglu’s history. It’s actually a fastidiously edited document, “constructed and composed from various stock recordings,” he confirms, “involving different preparations and mic recordings. It was a careful process of reduction.” Recalling a conversation we once had, where we marvelled over the editing found on certain Schimpfluch Gruppe albums, he explains further, “[with] Runzelstirn and Gurgelstock, I like the form of narrative (bleak and confounding), and the efficiency of this approach - nothing is extraneous. This is hard to achieve via improvisation.”

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While I had been a fan of Dworzec for some time, one of the first clues that something was brewing on a wider scale in Australia was encountering Joel Stern and Anthony Guerra’s Stitch, another disc released on Impermanent. Reviewing it for Dusted back in 2003, I marvelled at Stern and Guerra’s ability to fold field recordings, electronics, and Guerra’s melodic guitar together in a way that, in retrospect, suggested an alternate route out of improvisation’s inclination toward absolutes.

Like Gulbenkoglu, Guerra and Stern came from indie rock backgrounds. They moved to London at similar times, Guerra in mid-1999 and Stern in 2000, and studied in Eddie Prevost’s improv workshops, where they met characters like Mattin, Michael Rodgers, and Matthew Nidek. For both, the connections made through the workshop proved fruitful: Guerra co-founded the TwoThousandAnd label with Rodgers and started a duo with Nidek, and Stern organised shows with Mattin.

“Eddie’s workshops were very educational and put me in contact with lots of interesting people,” Stern remembers. “The London scene, music and film-art, affected me indelibly. From Mattin, I learned to appreciate how important conceptual clarity and delivery is to your art. He is a real master of manipulation - of sound, of expectations, of people, of the art world. That is very inspiring and I think an appropriate and smart way to navigate and critique the experimental art scene, which is what he does.”

Stern and Guerra spent several years in London, both returning to Australia in 2003 - Guerra to Sydney, and Stern, eventually, to Brisbane. “I was sick of certain aspects of my London life,” Guerra groans, “shit housing, high costs of living, working in jobs with absolute fuckwits.” After meeting Earle, Süssmann and Peter Blamey through Caleb K, who had programmed them all to play one night of What Is Music, they started collaborating, joined soon after by Inge Olmheim, James Heighway, Chris Nylstoch, and Nick Dan. “Me, Matt, Peter, Adam, Inge, we loved rock music,” Guerra says, “and always talked about doing some more rock music together. We all had rock histories.”

Guerra may be best known for his improvising, or his more abstract compositions, but the way he tells it, the rock music he was playing with Earle, Süssmann, Blamey and co sustained him once he returned to Sydney. Players broke off into different groupings - Antipan formed with Guerra, Dan, Earle and Sumu Sivanesan; Mos Eisley featured Earle, Süssmann and Olmheim; Earle and Dan joined forces as xNoBBQx, whose first cassette (and recording session) was recently reissued by American label Siltbreeze as Sunshine of Your Love, while Guerra also formed a duo with Blamey.

“Suddenly, there were all these groupings of us that were using more rock elements,” Guerra reports. “Your Intestines [Blamey, Earle, Guerra and Süssmann] was the main one for me. We though it would be good before we played a note, and we were fuckin’ right! We were doing these gigs alongside our ‘harder-listening’ improv stuff. To me, the concept and ideas behind each were exactly the same, just the tools were different. I remember when I said ‘we are playing rock music’, a few people said after the shows, ‘well, it’s not rock music, it sounds just like your other stuff’.”

This was a particularly fruitful time for these musicians, recording on an almost weekly basis, and starting up their own labels to document their music. Earle churned out cassettes, and later CD-Rs, on his Breakdance The Dawn imprint. “I found a massive stash of tapes from the Royal Blind Society,” he chuckles, “it made more sense to recycle and make something that lasts rather than consume and make something disposable. I have since started doing CD-Rs too, on misprint CD-Rs. I still like to recycle.” Soon after, Nick Dan started Pulled Out Records, releasing LPs from Antipan, xNoBBQx, Unaustralians, and Heighway’s solo outfit Spiders, and a 3LP lathe by Sun Of The Seventh Sister, their all-in-one, everyone-plays, ‘no members’ outfit.

The Breakdance The Dawn catalogue is, shall we say, daunting. Rudely packaged with black and white photocopy sleeves and hand-scrawled artwork, my first response to their music was a mix of surprise, confusion and wonder: tapes from the likes of Moss Eisley, Antipan and Your Intestines spewed primitive rock grunt that was monomaniacal in its intensity. The label’s groups had also started performing in Sydney’s few sympathetic venues, Frequency Lab and Yvonne Ruve. The latter was started by noise-rock six piece Castings, most of whom had moved from Newcastle, a small city north of Sydney. “I was running a removal business and I got a call for a job,” Earle reminisces. “There was a NowNow sticker on the back of the truck, [and] the guys I was moving for asked if I was into music. It turned out they were the Castings mob moving into town!” “The Castings guys were doing a lot of gigs and they invited me to play a lot,” Guerra smiles. “That was a good situation to be in, and I was really inspired by what they were doing, too.”

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Blamey, Earle, Guerra and Süssmann were also still playing improvised music in various spaces, from joints like Yvonne Ruve through to the What Is Music and NowNow festivals, and newly opened gallery spaces, like Blamey and Caleb K’s Pelt. Stern sees this ideological mobility as one of the key characteristics of these players. “Perhaps the uniquely Australian thing about these artists is the extent to which they have been able to move freely between ‘high art’ modes of practice,” he argues, “[like] serious galleries, intellectual and conceptual discourses, fine art and radical art interpretations of their music, and underground DIY modes - cassettes, lo-fi obscurism, rock and noise mangling, total DIY processes of dissemination, getting wasted. I think maybe in Europe and the USA, artists tend to see that divide as more permanent and less navigable.”

As we speak, Stern is readying his new solo album, Objects Masks Props, for release on the Nature Strip label. “I’ve been labouring, revising, deleting, recovering, forgetting and remembering it for a few years,” he smiles. “It’s a culmination of all my approaches to music up to now, and is densely layered with sounds sourced from machines, computers, instruments, environments and detritus of all those things. It also has some consciously sentimental and expressive sections which I think will divide opinions.”

Based in Brisbane, which has been going through significant cultural regeneration over the past few years, Stern has found himself in a particularly good place to develop his own projects, and act as mentor for other artists. He’s done more than most anyone in this loosely-knit scene to build relationships between high art and DIY culture, from his co-curation of the Audiopollen Social Club in Brisbane, which takes place ‘illegally’ behind a fruit and veg shop, to the OtherFilm Festival he runs with Danni Zuvela and Sally Golding. He performs audio-visual improvisations with Golding in Abject Leader, teaches electronic music at the Queensland University of Technology, and is on the programming committee for the Melbourne International Film Festival.

Stern is very conscious of the way art forms inter-relate: “OtherFilm and Audiopollen are both basically ‘intermedia’ organisations and this means we have the freedom to work with artists that we can relate to in whatever field.” That freedom is inherent in their festival programmes - when I attended 2007’s OtherFilm Festival, I was surprised by the breadth of avant-garde and experimental works on display, and pleased by the non-dogmatic attitude fostered by Stern, Golding and Zuvela. Stern also plays free music in Brisbane, as a member of No Guru, Gyanism, Sunshine Has Blown and Impromptulons. “I enjoy playing in large freeform groups, even though it’s frequently chaotic and frustrating,” he states. “When the dynamics and awareness are right, the power of those large ensembles is exhilarating, and causes people to behave and play in unhinged, uninhibited ways.”

There’s a strong collective approach to all of this music, improvising from certain structures or foundations, an approach that has taken off particularly strongly in Brisbane. Why is that so? After thinking for a moment, Stern ventures it’s down to a combination of knowledgeable musicians, “a really healthy assimilation of the most positive ideological tenets of hippydom and punk, and a very healthy dose of noise-thirst. Perhaps this is all a reaction to the over-determined repressiveness of the reductionist stuff…”

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In every interview with these artists, I asked about both reductionism and EAI, any personal allegiance to these genres (or otherwise), and any relationship between the ‘Australian strain’ and its predecessors. Most replied with responses that floated somewhere between dismissive and critical acceptance, acknowledging some kind of parallel practice while musing over the shortcomings of this form of improvisation. “There were definitely common ideological and practical approaches which became pervasive from 2000 to 2003,” Stern confirms, “based around the reductionist approach. I think that for non-instrumentalists like myself, it was very attractive because the total rejection of any conventional notion of virtuosity evened things up for us. The whole experimental scene, including jazz and rock musicians seemed to become more aware of processes of ‘close listening’ and more open to that less interventionist, slowly evolving textural style.”

“I guess the common ground was that many of us were interested in a certain path of development,” Guerra continues, “to get to some kind of essence or core, strip away useless gestures and bullshit, [and] think about structure and texture.” Indeed, many of the players have released albums that focus with particular intent on the ‘essence’ of one instrument, one gesture, or one conceptual approach. Witness Süssmann’s Acoustic Guitar Solo, mentioned earlier, or Earle’s untitled double disc set of no-input mixing board, which proffered twenty short but hefty chunks of white noise, mutating from track to track in incredibly small increments.

When I ask Earle for his thoughts on the fixed nature of movements like onkyo or reductionism, the way they appear to be borne of particular city, he argues, “Those things were site specific. We couldn’t be attached to that. I thought of it as the new global music; something that could belong to everyone, free from the old restraints, [and] based on a mutual appreciation of each other’s company, communication in new ways that were cross cultural, without linguistic limitation. [It was] something positive to come out of globalisation, it was punk, but it quickly became territorial. Now we are working in a less territorialized field for this moment.

“I think there are a lot of people out there that can’t find a way into new improv or reductionism because of its exclusive nature,” he continues. “Something that was essentially punk, with no rules, began to take on these creepy bourgeois, fascist undertones.” And, in much the same way Guerra sees his rock music as a continuation of his improvisations and electronics work, Earle conceptualises the noise-rock elements of the Breakdance The Dawn artists within the same continuum: “All of our current work is a continuation of this stuff, not an apostasy. No one has really been making the connections between Breakdance The Dawn and reductionism or new improv, but it’s all there.”

“It’s new improv in a rock idiom rather than a classical or jazz idiom. New improv is meant to be non idiomatic?” he asks. “It rarely is.”

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These are busy times for all of the aforementioned players: Guerra is releasing music on his Black Petal label, and recording solo, and with The Green Blossoms (with Aiko Koga), Shining Rice (with Junichiro Tanaka and Sei), New Zealand ex-pat Mark Sadgrove, and Hisato Higuchi. Earle and Süssmann are busy with various projects, including their new 2779 trio, the Ora(Ra) quartet, and Earle’s solo pop nom de plume Muura. Stern’s new solo album is out soon, and he continues to play in various improv outfits in Brisbane. Gulbenkoglu is working with Dale Gorfinkel, and looking toward certain site-specific recordings, and Guthrie is working on various groups and projects, and a solo LP – “just trying to get more and more into my sound, with my own personality,” he says.

“There is something definitely Australian going on,” Guerra proclaims, after I ask him whether he feels the music he’s been working on for the past half decade, alongside the other players mentioned above, has any essentially Australian qualities. Guerra should know – having lived in Tokyo for over two years, he’s had enough distance from the ‘home country’ to be able to abstract from immediate experience. “I think of a certain rawness or honesty, and a less studied, more direct approach to things. I think Australian people generally speak quite directly and honestly, and that translates into the music. And definitely there is a lack of pretension, at least in the people I know and I love. There is also a certain amount of naivety and isolation.”

“I remember I put on a gig one day,” Guerra concludes, “and at the end of it, over a beer on the street, Adam happily proclaimed ‘fuckin’ Sydney music, man’. I guess that sums it up best for me.”

Originally published in Signal To Noise #50, Summer 2008.