The Vine have reviewed the compilation of Australian electronic and experimental music that I was recently featured on, New Weird Australia Vol. 6.

“It’s Kynan Tan’s contribution to NWA Vol. 6, however, that arrives as the first standout track on the compilation. Tan is a pending WAAPA graduate and steadily flourishing sound artist. Listening to the silvery tones and haunting vocals on his track ‘Melt’, it’s easy to recognise why.”

Find the full article on The Vine

Get the compilation for FREE from New Weird Australia

In completely unrelated news, I just got an amazing package delivered from Subvalent in Japan. Tetragrammaton are my new favorite electronic free jazz band. Elegy for Native Tongues.

Chroma – audio / visual concert event
by Granular Synthesis Composers Collective

details
Callaway Auditorium  //  University of Western Australia
Wednesday  //  11 08 2010  //  doors 7:30 – start 8:00
$10 / $5 conc

descripton

CHROMA is the second concert curated by composers collective Granular Synthesis. The theme for the night is AUDIO/VISUAL. Expect to see conspiracy films, abstract imagery and video art combined with electro-acoustic explorations, skittering free improv and laptop cacophony. Granular Synthesis goes multi-disciplinary with spoken text and absurdist theatre pieces where the musicians’ acting abilities are put to the test. The result: definitely challenging and always entertaining.

Granular Synthesis first demonstrated a knack for combining unusual and individual musical elements in their concert ‘Libertas’. The composers explored solo and ensemble improvisation in a semi-structured concert environment.

The collective formed to try and push the boundaries of group composition and help develop each others’ artistic practice through concerts, workshops and commissions. Core members include WAAPA and UWA composition graduates Ben Hamblin, Tiffany Ha, Tim Beahan, Kelly Curran and Kynan Tan who have all been active in bands, concerts and sound installations in recent years.

For CHROMA, Granular Synthesis welcome contributions from other Perth musicians; including works by Brett Murray, Obscotch, David Boring, The Boost Hero Man and Sam Gillies; and performances by Jess Currie and Liz Lofthouse.

presented by the UWA Music Students Society

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Yet again the year reaches that time where the local and independent radio needs our help. But to get this help they put on some pretty fantastic shows and with Adam Trainer at the music director helm now, there’s a new dash of experimental concoctions being added to the party vibe.

Chilling in the upstairs cinema is Craig McElhinney, Gilbert Fawn, Mystic Eyes and Rabbit Island, and I will be handling the live visuals. The screen and projections up there look AMAZING so this is definitely one to catch, if you are into hypnotic abstract and mystifying visuals to accompany your favourite live experimental artists. That’s not to mention the many, many other fun bands, DJs and presenters that will be inhabiting the cinema, and it’s all for the best cause. Keep the local and experimental radio kicking.

Difficult Listening Radio show on RTR FM 92.1.
Last night’s show, laptop swarms, dynamic noise and live close-to-home.

As always streaming from the RTR Website.

My track Melt has made it on to the New Weird Australia Vol Six! These are free downloads that feature the new, weird, obtuse and amazing facets of Australian Music as it lives and breaths this moment. This edition features a fantastic track listing, as all of them have. I implore everyone to get to the site and have a listen and download some new free music, who knows what you may find. This edition also features artwork by the one and only David Egan.

The release is available now from New Weird Australia
Or go straight to the music

New Weird Australia Volume Six, June 2010, NWA006
DOWNLOAD FREE at newweirdaustralia.bandcamp.com

1. AMBROSE CHAPEL, Black Lava (7:47) previously unreleased
2. JONNY TELAFONE, Stardate 2012.1221 (3:33) from ‘Rainbow Genesis’ (self-released)
3. CHROME DOME, She Said (1:13) from ‘Chrome Dome’ (Lexicon Devil)
4. WIGWAM, Ancient Path (3:31) from ‘Sweat Lodge’ (Badminton Bandit)
5. J NEWMAN & R SQUIRES, The Church Of Our Lady Of Pompeii (Excerpt) (3:50) from ‘Our Lady Of Pompeii’ (Gift Project Audio)
6. KYNAN TAN, Melt (4:44) from ‘Two Clouds’ (self-released)
7. TRJAEU, Hull (4:56) from ‘Home EP’ (self-released)
8. EASTERN GREY, 24-5 (9:23) previously unreleased
9. PANEYE, Staircases Under the Sea (3:20) from ‘Lying Under Moribund Waves’ (Secret Station Records / Butter People Records)
10. ISLE ADORE, Keep A Lid On (4:53) from ‘Perfect Dust’ (OWLS)
11. UNDERLAPPER, Elephant Shoe (2:51) previously unreleased, from forthcoming album ‘ Softly Harboured’
12. DANGER BEACH, Milky Way (2:02) previously unreleased
13. PHILIP SULIDAE, Dead Horse Gap (6:07) from ‘An High Land’ (dontcaresulidae)
14. ANNA CHASE, Lines (3:42) previously unreleased

Compiled by Stuart Buchanan.
Artwork by David Egan, www.badmintonbandit.com
Click artist title for background information and links.
All music licenced via Creative Commons (Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives), except track 9, all rights reserved.

Sleeve Notes, June 2010:

Curating and sequencing the New Weird Australia compilation series is a difficult business – underpinning each track-listing is a desire to present both a sense of cohesion and one of contrast. They might at first seem at polar opposites, but in fact it is the latter that provides the aural glue for the former – as we believe this latest volume clearly proves.

We open with a track that could only placed at the start – a statement of intent that clearly signals that all bets are indeed in the off position. Ambrose Chapel’s patient slice of epic drone metal takes nearly five minutes to introduce any percussive elements, by which point a growing sense of disorientation has already dislodged any preconceptions about what might follow. If you’re not already feeling paranoid by the end of track one, Jonny Telafone will certainly drive you there – signalling the end of the world in track two (happening sometime next year, apparently). However, his apocalyptic vision is tempered with an electro clarion call, insisting that we take a moment of heady refuge and get it on with whoever might be closest.

The contrasts and cohesion continues throughout the volume: Chrome Dome’s furious, motorik rant against needy members of the opposite sex is juxtaposed with Wigwam’s sweaty, stumbling percussion and mid-tempo tribal shuffle; Eastern Grey’s lengthy, freeform piece pitches analogue machine against analogue machine in a squealing and unsettling battle for aural domination, whereas Isle Adore calms us all down with a perfect drop of experimental pop, culled from a sadly neglected album that richly deserves wider acclaim.

Nowhere is the yin / yang more obvious than in the closing couplet. Philip Sulidae’s dense slab of black tar drone falls into Anna Chase’s tempered closing shot of sparse vocals, guitar and accordion – all of which belies a fitting moment of quiet defiance, with Chase insisting that we’re simply “not going to take it any more”.

This line in the sand is an appropriate finale to Volume Six, and indeed to both Year One of New Weird Australia and our process to date. Our next releases will see a change in direction – with guest curators, thematic and genre-specific compilations and a new series of artist EPs, released free with limited CDs available on the side. A contrast to what has gone before, but nonetheless a cohesive and natural evolution to our new, weird, Australian story.

New Weird Australia is a not-for-profit initiative designed to promote and support new eclectic and experimental Australian music. Our current projects include a free download compilation series, a weekly show on Sydney’s FBi Radio and an irregular program of live events. Contributions from Australian artists are welcomed and encouraged.

This week part of the show will be dedicated to a special feature on Spectral Music.
Also have some MIMEO, more local noise and of course rounded out with plenty of Frikkelig Musik.

RTRFM 92.1
rtrfm.com.au

9 – 11pm, Sunday, 06/06/2010

I recently composed a section of music for the work Memorial by Michael Whaites, for the LINK Dance Company of WAAPA. The work involves the memories of great world events contrasted with the important memories of individuals in an immersive, confronting work. My section was heavily influenced by a few particular glitch artists and contains a load of sound synthesis and processing.

Also composing for this work was Bec Smith and Bob White. On the same bill there was a work by Deborah Robertson, with a fantastic brooding electronic score by Ben Hamblin.

For anyone who is in Spain or Wisconsin, “The work has an exciting international future and will go on to be performed at the Re ACT Festival in Bilbao, Spain in June and then in Madison, Wisconsin in July”. Check it.

Memorial – Clicks by Kynan Tan

Memorial_Clicks by Kynan Tan (8:55)

I will be performing on Wednesday the 26/05/2010 at the Fremantle Arts Centre with local cello legend Tristen Parr for the opening of a new exhibition by French artist Pierre Bismuth, co-writer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!

I am a huge fan of this film and this style of art, Bismuth is bringing some exhibitions and installations that have been created with Michel Gondry of which I am personally a bit too excited about.

Tristen and I recently did an extended cello set at the Granular Synthesis concert Libertas and we will be bringing that plus lots more for this very special occassion.

Exhibition Opening
6:30pm Wednesday 26 May

Exhibition runs until Sunday 18 July

For more information about the exhibitions check the FAC website.

Pierre Bismuth has been exhibiting his work for the past twenty years. Prominent monographic exhibitions have been held at the British Film Institute, the Kunsthalle in Basel, Nice’s Villa Arson, Rotterdam’s Witte de With, at MAMCO in Geneva, and at the Kunsthalle in Vienna. He has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, the ICA in London, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Frankfurt’s Museum für Moderne Kunst, the Kunsthalle Bern; the Ludwig Museum in Köln, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and numerous others. His work was included in the 2001 Venice Biennale and in Manifesta 4. Bismuth has had solo shows at galleries in such cities as London, Paris, Brussels, Turin, Tel Aviv and Antwerp. Pierre Bismuth is the only visual artist to have ever won an Academy Award — in 2005 for Best Original Screenplay with Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman for the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Sunday the 16/05, 21.00-23.00. Check it out on RTR FM 92.1, or on here web. I have grabbed some new CD’s and have a whole host of amazing tunes to play.

As always local noise, digital cacophony and post-electroacoustic aventures.

This coming Tuesday the 19/05, I will be performing alongside Tom Hall (QLD), Chris De Groot and Stina, as part of the Sound Unbound Festival at ECU. The event will be held in the Kurongkurl Katitjin gallery on the ECU Mt Lawley Campus, which is a really cool gallery space being used for sound experiments for this fortnight.

Should be a fantastic concert all around, Tom Hall does some great things with digital sound and has recently released some music on the Overlap.org San Franciscan music community.

I will be doing live vocal / guitar / maxMsp performance, bringing the set I played on my Japan tour back to Perth. I’ll also be lending some digital processing to Chris De Groot’s Novelty Instrument set.

Sound Unbound Festival presents: Club Zho with Tom Hall (QLD) and WAAPA students Kynan Tan, Chris De Groot and Stina.

For more information about visiting artist Tom Hall, please visit: http://www.tomhall.com.au/Tom_Hall.html

Club Zho will take place at ECU Mount Lawley Campus in the Kurongkurl Katitjin gallery.

Entry is $15 / $10 concession
Student rush $5

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