Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

apotropaic | the power to ward off evil or harmful spirits

Chloë Sobek is a composer-performer based in Naarm, Australia. Her work is currently centred on the development of a post-anthropocentric sonic practice that encompasses a diversity of enquiry from acoustemology through to noise music. Chloë’s practice is built around the Renaissance precursor to the double bass, the violone. Her creative process couples maximalist and musique concrète sensibilities such as audio-montage and electronic processing, with a handling of sound as a senate object, unlinked and undefined by its source. Chloë’s New North performance will feature selections from her 2023 album release on Nice Music, ‘Apotropaic’. chloesobek.com

Clinton Green and Barnaby Oliver are long-standing multi-instrumentalists, composers and performers who have been active in exploratory music events in Narrm/Melbourne for a number of years. For their New North performance, Green and Oliver will be performing works for strings and bowed metal bowls. These explorations are minimal in nature, avoiding obvious development. Rather, the work focuses on stasis and allows the subtle uncontrolled elements of their unique instrumentation – the variable pitch and intensity of the bowls, and the restrictive techniques on the strings – to instead dictate the work’s subtle shifts. The result is a meditative, focused, and an increasingly captivating listening experience.

Raised in Yorta Yorta country in northern Victoria, Aditya Ryan Bhat is an inquisitive musician based in Narrm/Melbourne, currently studying percussion at ANAM. Aditya’s work explores political and ecological themes with a fusion of improvisation and compositional approaches. He communicates compositional ideas with fragmentary text, images, electronics and field-recordings that provoke dialogue with performers. Aditya on his commission: “The starting point of this new work was my longstanding preoccupation with rivers. Some thoughts that have informed the compositional process are: the adverse ecological effects wrought on river-systems by (settler-)colonial policies, notably right here with the Birrarung (Yarra); the case being made to endow rivers with legal status as persons, which also raises questions about the ethics of using hydrophone-recordings as compositional material; the idea that rivers have been used as boundaries between groups of people; the mythic power often attributed to rivers; and how these things change the way we think about, and interact with, these remarkable fleeting, flowing entities.”

Aditya’s guest performer, Justinn Lu, is a Filipino-Australian saxophonist in his honours year at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. About New North New North is a platform for Narrm/Melbourne-based musicians who push boundaries in their areas of practice. We empower artists and audiences to try the untried, experience the new, and expand conceptions of the possibilities of sound. New North is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts and the City of Merri-bek. New North is presented in partnership with Next Wave at Brunswick Mechanics Institute, a centre for performing arts situated on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation.

We pay our respect to all First Nations people and their Elders, past, present and emerging. We offer complimentary tickets to those who can't afford entry. To arrange a complimentary ticket, please send an email with your name and the phrase 'COMP' to info@newnorthmusic.online.

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by email to info@newnorthmusic.online

Featured artists

• New work by Clinton Green
• New work by Barnaby Oliver