Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Robbie Avenaim  

For the past thirty years, Robbie Avenaim has been a legend of the Australian experimental music scene. It has been a daunting and thrilling process to attempt to represent the many octopus' arms of Robbie's prolific percussion practice. From his beginnings in free jazz and improvisation, to having formed avant-garde punk outfit Phlegm with Oren Ambarchi and Nik Kamvissis in the 1990s, to his more recent collaborations with Ambarchi and Chris Abrahams in the trio AAA, and the development of his kinetic percussion installations within exhibition contexts, Robbie's career has been diverse and multifaceted. Parallel to this long-standing artistic practice is Avenaim's crucial role as an organiser, having founded, with Oren Ambarchi, What is Music? Festival in the 1990s. Staged annually, and then itinerantly, from 1994-2012, What is Music? Festival more than any other festival of that era helped generate an Australian context for radical music; be it noise, punk, improvisation, performance, or unclassifiable outsider art. Their programs were chaotic, irreverent, confounding, intellectual, rarefied, and lowbrow, sometimes all at once, and regularly featured experimental artists from around the world that Avenaim and Ambarchi had enticed to Australia for the first time. At the height of the festival's success it drew audiences in the many hundreds, and featured on stages at the Big Day Out, acting as a lightning rod for audiences and artists. Crucial to the festival ethos was the question articulated in its name. What even is music? What are it's thresholds, limits, and breaking points?

Although in no way exhaustive, we present four accounts from close peers and collaborators (all of them important artists in their own right): Oren Ambarchi, Ernie Althoff, Clare Cooper, and Robin Fox. We hope this will provide a means to come a little closer to, as Clare Cooper describes the 'complex and warm force,' that is the artistic practice of Robbie Avenaim.

'What is Music? Festival: Absolute Fandom', Oren Ambarchi

'An Entry into Sound Sculpture', Ernie Althoff

'What is Robbie?', Clare Cooper

'Kinetic Play', Robin Fox

Editor: Liang Luscombe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
'Robbie Avenaim: A Complex Warmth' presents four accounts from close peers and collaborators Oren Ambarchi, Ernie Althoff, Clare Cooper, and Robin Fox of the artistic practice of experimental percussionist Robbie Avenaim. This profile has been co-published with Liquid Architecture's Disclaimer journal and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts. The editor would like to thank the writers for their contributions, Robbie Avenaim for access to his extensive archive, and Joel Stern for editorial support.