Lobule

Microgestures

Cochlea

Helix

Ricardo Villalobos - Dexter

I was invited to the wonderful Dunedin Public Art Gallery to create and install a new work for Sound Full: Sound in Contemporary Australian and New Zealand Art. Curated by Caleb Kelly and Aaron Kreisler, this was a superb showcase of inventive thinking, making and sounding, as was the night that this performance was recorded on: I shared the evening's bill with Marco Fusinato, Robin Fox and vjRex/Eugene Hansen.

The week leading up to this performance consisted of that energizing mix of creative urgency and practical impossibility. Aside from setting up my installation and composing a four-channel sound work in the exhibition space, I spent days driving around picking up record players and loudspeakers from willing donors, but the numbers were still too few to create a complex and changing performance. 

So started the op shopping, alas with little success. Only with the generous and much-appreciated help of Sally McIntyre and Campbell Walker was I able to finally assemble a collection of Dunedin's finest discarded record players and loudspeakers for this performance. We spent days of op-shopping with barely a yield (what stereos there were stratospherically priced), until in the final hour before the weekend's closing time (and the day before the performance) the Habitat for Humanity ReStore lent me a complete carload (in fact, the wonderful curator Aaron Kreisler's car now stacked bottom to top) for a most reasonable $50 loan fee. Together with additional turntables from 

The performance was now saved, I had gear to play with, and the nervous buzz of potential failure (the failure of not having an instrument to play on) slowly gave way to the nervous buzz of potential failure of improvised performance. 

I remember thoroughly enjoying giving this performance, and this through-the desk recording captures much of what I created across eight metres of turntables, now for you, in vivid stereo. My record player orchestra was miked up with overheads by Forbes Williams, a little as if it was a looooong drum kit.

Credits go to Campbell Walker for recording, and the Dunedin Public Art Gallery for the permission to use this material. Thanks for your crucial turntable loans: Sally McIntyre, Richard Scowen, None Gallery, Brendan Jon Philip, and Tony from Too Tone Records (and anyone I forgot).

Enjoy.

Live at Sound Full, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 7th July 2012

Marko Nastic Live at Mothership D.Edge Brazil

Live at Sound Full, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 7th July 2012

Michael Graeve

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