Sound and Performance Lecture:
Mattin
Wednesday 8 May 12.30pm
The Basque anarchist artist Mattin has spent the last decade establishing a highly distinctive practice in noise and 'free' improvisational music. His work pays homage to the histories of these genres, while simultaneously undertaking a provocative and often humorous interrogation of the rules and standards to which they adhere—the proposed anti-sociality of noise, the implicit 'freedom' in improvisation. Mattin considers this testing to be a process of 'distributing vulnerability' across the core assumptions made by audiences and performers alike. Recent performances include at dOCUMENTA (13), Oberhausen Film Festival and Arika Glasgow.
Disembraining, a Brisbane-based artists' collective, are bringing Mattin to Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane in May, to stage a series of non-concerts, concerts, silences, conversations, and other activities in response to the question 'What isn't music?' This question nods to Australia's long-running experimental festival What Is Music? This festival answered its own question by embracing John Cage's maxim 'everything we do is music', philosophically assimilating all sound (and action) into the 'project' of music. This radical opening up of 'music' to sound plays out overtly in the 'noise' tradition, but abates discerning experimental sound's 'non-musical' possibilities. In a context of Cageian consensus, it becomes crucial to reframe the question as a negation: What sounds remain impossible to assimilate? What isn't music?
At the VCA, Mattin will present an improvised work incorporating his key practices; performance, participatory experiment, theory, and noise.
Venue: Founders
Gallery, Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd, Southbank
Free admission and all welcome
Bring a sandwich
(forwarded from Joel Stern)
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