Six Aussie Classics with Josten Myburgh
Editor note
Shortly after our first issue on Audible Edge, the festival's co-director Josten Myburgh led a series of classes at ____.g.s. called "Experimental music on this continent: a primer".
Outside the university system, it is easy to find classes on craft and skill, but rarer to find classes on Knowledge. I was inspired by this DIY approach. Who needs to wait for tenure or short-term contracts? You can just book a room, make a reading-list, get up the computer and invite some people to listen to some real weird stuff - the class was scholarly too, but mostly it was cool and funny.
I asked Josten if they wanted to share some of their top picks from the Listening Room Archive. They instead proposed a more general list of Six Aussie Classics. Awh yea, I said, that sounds boonta. Take it away, Jozz:
Gregory Whitehead - Pressures of the Unspeakable (1991)
Listen here
A remnant of a brighter era of the ABC, where Gregory Whitehead established an Institute for Scream Studies whereby members of the public could call in and submit a scream. A nonsensical usurpation of national radio’s modalities with great results.
SOS (Inventions of Engagement 1) (1978)
Listen on Bandcamp
Broadcast in 1991 on the ABC’s The Listening Room, Barry Bermange is a BBC Radiophonic Workshop alumnus and collaborator of Delia Darbyshire. This amazing work of early radio art about distress signals is well worth the fully focussed 41-minute listen you need to get anything out of it.
Tolley & Dara - You Know You Know (1981)
Listen on Youtube
This avant-punk record from David Tolley & Dur-é Dara is seemingly lesser known than compatriots Essendon Airport and → ↑ →, yet this example of the farthest-out end of Clifton Hill Community Music Centre is weirder than these peers and sometimes even more compelling.
See also: listeningtothearchive.com
Machine for Making Sense - Consciousness (1998)
Listen on Bandcamp
An easy pick from the back-catalogue of 37-year-old record label SplitRec - one of the first Australian avant-garde improvising collectives to really have a distinct local voice. This expanded Machine extends its gender-equal, inter-disciplinary line-up. The Necks’ Tony Buck, unsung Tasmanian out-guitar genius Greg Kingston, and the theatrical, underdocumented extended vocalist Carolyn Connors, are added to the quintet’s existing lineup of two sound poets, a medieval hurdy-gurdy, live tape collages & wind instruments.
Anthea Caddy & Thembi Soddell - Iland (2006)
Listen Here
This record of location-recorded cello re-cast into dramatic, gestural concréte composition is just one example of the flourishing, incisive brilliance of Naarm’s experimental scene in the early 2000s.
Equalizer24K - BDTD200 - E24K Live (2015)
Listen on Bandcamp
The output of exceptionally cryptic and increasingly fragmented netlabel Breakdance the Dawn is worth the bafflement of attempting to engage with it. Nicola Morton, partner of the label’s operator Matt Earle and one part of their duo Club Sound Witches, exudes soft “DIY lifer” energy and is an icon of Meanjin’s uniquely cooked underground.
Thanks Josten! For non-Jostens, go check out Josten's many musical collaborations at jostenmyburgh.com and the wonderful label Tone List