In association with Jacques Soddell's Cajid Media and Punctum, the first regional Liquid Architecture concert was held at ICU in Castlemaine.
Recovering from earlier technical issues to what was to become an event highlight, Anthea Caddy and Thembi Soddell burst into their performance with a richly textured and detailed wall of noise. Caddy performed cello in unconventional means and Soddell operated samples, however the artists' deliberate situation behind the audience and more so the musical cooperation and understanding of the duo meant a division between the artists' playing was indistinguishable. The performance demonstrated extraordinary dynamics and deeply considered timing. Caddy and Soddell took listeners through enormously spacious atmospheres; dense, textural noise climaxes; beautifully glistening granular sounds from Soddell and the incredibly rich creaks and wails of Caddy's disembodied cello. Upholding a delicate pace, Caddy and Soddell's sounds unfurled and revealed themselves over time, both through steady sonic shifts and as well as the subjective psychological shifts of extended listening.Jason Kahn performed with a tom tom drum; a microphone placed above it and a contact microphone attached to the underside of its skin. Kahn's mics captured the resonance of the drum, following which these sounds were instantaneously processed by a synthesiser and returned to the performance space through loudspeakers. Upon (re)entering the space, the sound resonated further with the room and fed back through the microphones again in a loop. What ensued were thick and varied feedback drones, slowly changing in form and texture. As the room and drum's resonance were continually cycled through Kahn's electronics, a sense of the space's physicality became heavily present; the slightest touch or gesture from the artist could affect the resonance of the drum and in turn the feedback loops that enveloped the room. Kahn transformed the ICU site into a large sound sculpture in which the physical interconnectivity of sound and resonance, whilst always present, became inescapably apparent.
Image above: Anthea Caddy and Thembi Soddell
