Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

A Liquid Architecture, Grainger Museum and VCA & MCM project presented for Nite Art 2017

Eric Demetriou & Herbert Jercher
Antonia Sellbach with Julie Burleigh & Alison Bolger
Is There A Hotline?
Anthony Lyons and Paul Fletcher
Rebecca Readhead
Mark Pollard
Mitch Catterall
Curated by Mino Peric

‘Freedom’ is to choose without the choice to not choose.

Fundamentally, freedom is the condition of being free. It may be seen as a duality between oppression and the oppressed. Here, freedom is observable as curtailment, limit, restriction; a matter of presence and absence.

Freedom may also be possessed through acts of self-agency. At times there are triumphant moments when it appears the oppressor has become the suppressed. Uncovered, the mouth speaks, revealing that it was there all along. Now, freedom begins to appear obtainable through assertion, interference, deviation.

Yet these variances of freedom become confused in the face of one’s own freedom. How do we separate an act of freedom from an act of self-interest? From Wentworth to know-your-worth: desires are indulged through our freedoms, but how enjoyable, or emancipated, is a freedom that is always already dictated?

Musically, freedom may be observed in multiple ways; through the relationship between conductor and performer, the act of free improvisation as self-expression, and the agency of performance transformed into musical forms of self-interest.

This program takes as its point of departure the music and ideas of autodidactic Australian composer and polymath Percy Grainger, specifically his sense of ‘freedom’ expressed in the works and experiments that he called free music. In a series of specially commissioned performances utilising Grainger’s recently rebuilt free music ‘machines’  a group of artists and musicians offer their own multifaceted readings of Grainger’s ‘freedom’, inviting the audience to consider what the term might signify today.

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

Featured artists

• Performance/sound art by Eric Demetriou
• Performance/sound art by Herb Jercher
• Performance/sound art by Mark Pollard
• Performance/sound art by Anthony Lyons