In celebration of Liquid Architecture's tenth year, the Melbourne program featured something slightly uncharacteristic of past LA festivals in the city: a bar event. At Horse Bazaar, host of the regular Stutter sound nights curated by Annalee Koernig, performances were given by Joel Stern, Martin Kay with Nick van Cuylenburg, Vijay Thillaimuthu and a DJ set by bags. Rather than existing as a space for total focussed listening, the bar can provide a contact site of engagement; its informal nature welcoming experimentation and risk in performances, as well as providing a physical environment for the meeting and sharing of a dialogue amongst the audiences. It is an element in the development of underground music in Australia that cannot be (and is not) overlooked.
Martin Kay and Nick van Cuylenburg demonstrated the compositional intelligence and psycho-acoustic richness that the artists often employ in their work as sound designers for theatre and film. With ambiguous but densely connotative washes of sound, the duo took the audience into an imaginative psychological mood of deep listening.
Vijay Thillaimuthu presented his ongoing audio-visual project. By feeding an audio signal of analogue noise, no-input mixing and distorted drum-loop grooves into an old television's video input signal, Thillaimuthu's TV created hypnotic flashes and patterns of light that synched with his highly performative sound improvisation. Creating full, warm yet bone grindingly physical sonic blasts, Thillaimuthu's performance was an engaging composition that spanned trance inducing rhythms to bombastic noise.
Image above: Vijay Thillaimuthu
