Last year Tim Kreger and I wrote an article about Melbourne’s experimental/electronic/electroacoustic music scene for the CEC’s eContact! newsletter. The article provides some background and history, but it mainly focuses on current activity including: festivals, concert series, venues, collectives, instrument builders, musicians, sound designers and institutions in and around Melbourne. It’s impossible for something like this to be exhaustive, but we tried our best to make a snapshot of the current situation. If you’re planning to visit Melbourne and are interested in knowing what’s going in these areas I think it’s worth a read (if I do say so myself).
Don’t be too put off by “Electroacoustic” in the title. We made an effort to to be inclusive. One of the great things about Melbourne is the diversity of artistic activity that happens here. I’m not sure whether there’s really a group in Melbourne who would label themselves as “the EA crowd”, but there sure is a lot of related activity going on. We wrote:
We have decided to avoid the term and give an overview of practitioners who use or have used electronic devices in the production of works which ostensibly lie outside of the popular and dance domains. Even this demarcation still causes problems and concerns for us as there are many who traverse these boundaries with ease and fluency. The range of titles include but are not limited to; computer musician, instrument builder, software developer, hardware hacker, sound designer, sound artist, composer, improviser, synthesist, performer, academic, installation artist, non-academic, theorist, activist etc…
Click here to read the full eContact! article
One thing we failed to mention in the article is the Experimental Melbourne Blog. It lists a lot of the gigs that happen in Melbourne (in genres related to this post at least). It’s worth knowing about.
