New North Concert 9: Apotropaic May 11 @ Brunswick Mechanics Institute

 

apotropaic | the power to ward off evil or harmful spirits Join us for three sets of original and exploratory music from Chloë Sobek, Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver, and the recipient of New North’s 2022 Emerging Artist Commission, Aditya Ryan Bhat. ​​Chloë Sobek Chloë Sobek is a composer-performer based in Naarm, Australia. Her work is currently centred on the development of a post-anthropocentric sonic practice that encompasses a diversity of enquiry from acoustemology through to noise music. Chloë’s practice is built around the Renaissance precursor to the double bass, the violone. Her creative process couples maximalist and musique concrète sensibilities such as audio-montage and electronic processing, with a handling of sound as a senate object, unlinked and undefined by its source. Chloë’s New North performance will feature selections from her 2023 album release on Nice Music, ‘Apotropaic’. chloesobek.com Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver Clinton Green & Barnaby Oliver are long-standing multi-instrumentalists, composers and performers who have been active in exploratory music events in Melbourne for a number of years. For their New North performance, Green and Oliver will be performing works for strings and bowed metal bowls. These explorations are minimal in nature, avoiding obvious development. Rather, the work focuses on stasis and allows the subtle uncontrolled elements of their unique instrumentation – the variable pitch and intensity of the bowls, and the restrictive techniques on the strings – to instead dictate the work’s subtle shifts. The result is a meditative, focused, and an increasingly captivating listening experience. New North 2022 Emerging Artist Commission recipient: Aditya Ryan Bhat (with Justinn Lu) Raised in Yorta Yorta country in northern Victoria, Aditya Ryan Bhat is an inquisitive musician based in Narrm/Melbourne, currently studying percussion at ANAM. Aditya’s work explores political and ecological themes with a fusion of improvisation and compositional approaches. He communicates compositional ideas with fragmentary text, images, electronics and field-recordings that provoke dialogue with performers. Aditya on his commission: “The starting point of this new work was my longstanding preoccupation with rivers. Some thoughts that have informed the compositional process are: the adverse ecological effects wrought on river-systems by (settler-)colonial policies, notably right here with the Birrarung (Yarra); the case being made to endow rivers with legal status as persons, which also raises questions about the ethics of using hydrophone-recordings as compositional material; the idea that rivers have been used as boundaries between groups of people; the mythic power often attributed to rivers; and how these things change the way we think about, and interact with, these remarkable fleeting, flowing entities.” Aditya’s guest performer, Justinn Lu, is a Filipino-Australian saxophonist in his honours year at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music.

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