The second day of Boorloo’s experimental christmas reads like a choose your own adventure, where three writers from Magazine 6000 took off on different trajectories on what turned out to be a lively saturday night in all directions. Our story begins with Rainy Colbert heading into the home of our city’s indie music scene.
It’s a beautiful Saturday arvo at the Bird. I’m here trying to be cool, sensible and nice because I’m here on a date, but also, I’m here to review AE’s third event of the day, All the clouds go to school which features three different bands on the experimental music spectrum: Ben and Luka Buchanan, Anaxios, and The Definitives.
The Buchanan siblings’ spoken word and cello performance conjures up the same psychic energy as the boat scene from Willy Wonka. Ben starts by walking his fingers on the cello strings like a huntsman spider. “There’s soup on the table for us both” Luka announces, “Should we drink our soup? With our bandaged hands?” I’m iffy on the lore, but from Luka’s frequent shhhhhh-ing and overbearing hospitality, I get the sense something menacing is happening. Adding to the unease, Luka keeps bobbing a small accordion up and down like a yo-yo, repeating a soft honking noise that is forever out of time. Ben changes playing style with the oscillating intensity of the dialogue. Sometimes the music is similar to the throbbing rumble that plays whenever you shoot a lawman in Red Dead. Sometimes he plays the cello entirely percussively, drumming his fingers on the frame while slapping the strings with the bow. It is captivating to both listen and watch, but my attention is sometimes disrupted by the bartender who keeps rummaging through the icebox like he’s trying to find the head of his lego man. Maybe Luka’s shushing is there to serve a functional purpose.
All the clouds go to school. Photography by Josh Wells.
The second performance is from an ambient duo Anaxios who play without moving anything more than the tips of their fingers. They are a band for listening, not watching. Pressing some knobs and dials on some machines, they magic up a 10 minute noise that sounds like a cigarette lighter rattling round in the washing machine. Everyone is closing their eyes or sitting straight in concentration, but I cannot afford to space out. Being a reviewer is like being an ATAR exam supervisor or prison guard – you need to pay utmost attention to everything around you. So I am looking around trying to notice new things. I have been to The Bird a thousand times, but I never noticed the rip of paint dangling from the ceiling or the giant mural of Pickle Rick. I also notice that a third member has been standing on the stage this whole time, who I didn’t see before. He is holding a small fiddle but not playing it. I’m waiting to hear some music from my favourite instrument, but he keeps standing there. At some point while I‘m looking around the room again, he disappears. I also suffer from stage fright, so I understand.
The two guys push some more buttons and now a big synthesizer washes in over the rattling. I’m still waiting for a beat or some guitar or some lyrics, getting pretty restless. I just wanna dance, sick of sitting here still on this stool. I look over to my friend to see if she wants to go outside– the brick walls at least offer a little back support, but she’s closing her eyes and smiling to the music. Damn. Then at twenty minutes the guy with strawberry blonde hair pulls out an electric guitar. Yes! Except he just plays three notes very slowly and lays the guitar back down. What! I wish they’d put a TV on the stage so I’d have something to look at.
See, there are multiple sensual intelligences. Some people have listening intelligence– that’s everyone here. Some people have oral intelligence, and like to eat the finest cuisines (but me, I’m chill with gruel). And some people have touching intelligence and some people have sniffing intelligence. But as for me, I have looking intelligence. I like to look at things, more or less, but this band ain’t giving me much to look at. It’s not even that what I’m looking at is boring. If you sat me in front of the world’s craziest picture and said ‘yo look at this for fifteen minutes’ I’d try to barter them down to five. It’s all about the movement. The synth player on stage should take some tricks from Liberace. Now that was showmanship!
I look around again for something to look at, and notice something very cool. From the courtyard, the sun is sending a big cartoon beam of light into the Bird, bright gold and writhing with cigarette smoke. It looks like the word of god. I try to get a photo but my camera refuses to see it. I give up and then notice the music has finally decided to become interesting. They are playing a sound that sounds like a jet thruster. The rumbling is growing so loud it is shaking everything in the room. The bartender is scrambling around, trying to steady all the glassware. The roar keeps building and building. It feels like we are about to blast off into space. I start rubbing my arms in nervousness. But the Bird never gets off the ground. The music transitions back to soothing sensations. Damn. But then, they start working up an actual beat, which is great because now I can nod my head and slap a rhythm on my knees- I’m practicing working in some scuffs and slides to my routine, but I am trying to keep it quiet. I notice that whenever the song starts being enjoyable, everyone crosses their arms, but when it goes back to being boring, they put their hands back on their knees and lift their chins receptively. Am I still on planet earth or did we actually crash land on bizarro world?
When they finish, I ask some people what they were thinking about during the set. They said they were imagining movies in their minds. My friend Hazel’s movie was about a group of astronauts lost in space, floating about, the lack of oxygen making their heads get bigger and bigger and causing hallucinations. I can see it. My friend Scott’s movie was about him driving to the northern suburbs to pick up an oar from facebook marketplace, and then when he exits the seller’s garage, he realizes he is in a completely different suburb and can’t find his car. For me, I didn’t have a movie because I was too busy looking around. Now I realise this was the wrong approach for appreciating live ambient music.
BUT. I will add that I am listening to this band’s recorded music on bandcamp right now and am finding it to be beautiful focus music for writing! If all you have for study is lo-fi hip-hop, upgrade considerably to Anaxios!
The last band is a punk group from Midland called The Definitives. The six people on stage play their instruments out of sync and chant exciting lyrics which are projected on the screen:
The lotto leaves your wallet in a mess
Some people like to bless
I confess
Everybody has a glass of hurt and pain
In the rain
Sonically they are a bit like The Shaggs– music stripped to raw ingredients and recobbled together with vision and charm. It’s a good way to end the afternoon before I have to go to my housemate’s 30th, which will inevitably end with me and the boys putting the leftover cake under the wheels of parked cars.
All Clouds Go To Heaven was a true statement and a good gig of intriguing music, and a reminder that there is great weird music coming out of Perth in our time.
While Rainy was collecting his final thoughts at The Bird, barely a block away there was another orbit of activity around the festival. Here sprouted the opinions of your friendly neighbourhood extrovert Jay, who you might remember from such articles as the review of Friday’s events at this festival, or the current journalistic masterpiece you’re reading.
As the sun set on the second day of the festival, I found myself at Astral Weeks for Betweens. It was another one of those liminal events that somehow also held its own credence. As I walked into the intimate listening bar, I recognised some faces from Body the Body the previous night. Including the bartender, whose face I recognised on the dancefloor and couldn’t remember why they were familiar until I saw them in situ. This overlap of the same people in different places for similar occasions is another example of the natural flow of how Audible Edge effortlessly caters to the curious people that follow these sounds. Even though I walked into this bar alone, I felt instantly welcome as I slipped into conversations with other festival goers while waiting to order a drink at the bar. In every conversation you could feel this buzz around the whole festival. I was looking forward to wandering to Three Flutters with everyone else eventually and getting a ticket at the door, but was met with sad news by Josten when they mentioned it was sold out. As Izzy was already scheduled to review this show, I was given a tip to check out the Bird for another experimental show that was happening that night. The scene in Boorloo is alive and well, which feels weird to say for something that’s characterised by extraneousness.
As I was finishing off my last drink at Astral Weeks before making a pit stop at the Bird on my way home, Izzy was holding the notepad and repping Magazine 6000 for the next event for Audible Edge. The final event on Saturday night was personally my most highly-anticipated. Her thoughts below put me right in the room with her when I read them.
Three Flutters. Photography by Josh Wells.
Three Flutters was the send off of the second night of Audible Edge, and what a masterful selection of local and interstate talent who flutter at the edges of the experimental scene. The event was held within the tastefully decorated walls and cement floor of Mt Lawley café Local & Aesthetic, fitted with a quadraphonic speaker setup, three stations for each of the sets, and artistically placed lights by Adelaide Harney.
The duo of Sophia Hansen-Knarhoi and Liam Downey started the night off with an improvisation based around overstimulation – a feeling somewhat accentuated by the sold out crowd. Their sounds were anxious and meticulous, otherworldly yet familiar – predominantly pushed by Downey’s use of hyperpop elements and Knarhoi’s physicality with the instrument.
Nick Ashwood followed, utilising the quadraphonic speaker setup to its fullest. Weaponising his Buchla 200e and the full extent of three dimensional sound, Ashwood transported the audience into a world of spiritual reflection and contextualisation, evident by half of the audience closing their eyes and losing themselves in the warm, analog synth waves and distant crashing of waves.
The final set – a duo of Alex Reid and Sivakumar Balakrishan on drums and tabla respectively – was highly anticipated, and rightly so. Unlike the previous sets who revelled in the metaphorical and abstract, this performance was fairly literal and grounded, because that’s all it needed to be. The dynamic and chemistry between the two percussion players was so electric; they fed off each other, mimicked and joked with each other – all with an elite understanding of their instruments and an utmost respect for each other’s culture. It was fun and invigorating: the perfect book-end for a Saturday night.
Keep up to date with Audible Edge here.