Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Chris Mann (born 1949) is an Australian composer, poet and performer specializing in the emerging field of compositional linguistics,, coined by Kenneth Gaburo and described by Mann as 'the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do.' He is currently based in New York City.

Mann's unique style of reading incredibly dense, parenthetical texts at a high speed has brought him recognition as a unique performer and recording artist. He has had a variety of recording projects over the years, including the ensemble Machine For Making Sense with Amanda Stewart, Chris Mann and the Impediments (with two backup singers and Mann reading a text simultaneously while only being able to hear one another), and Chris Mann and The Use. His piece The Plato Songs, a collaboration with Holland Hopson and R. Luke DuBois, features realtime spectral analysis and parsing of the voice into multiple channels based on phonemes.

Amanda Stewart s a contemporary Australian poet and sound/performance artist.
She began writing and performing poetry in the '70s and has since produce a wide array of sound, video and multimedia work. In 1989 she co-founded the performance ensemble Machine for Making Sense with Chris Mann, Rik Rue, Jim Denley and Stevie Wishart . She has toured in Europe, the United States and Japan. She co-wrote and directed the 1990 film Eclipse of the Man-Made Sun about of nuclear weapons in popular culture.

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website

Featured artists

• Music of Chris Mann
• Music of Amanda Stewart
• Performer Splinter Orchestra