Loosen your brows, unpurse your lips and do your biggest Harvey Fresh grin, because it turns out experimental music can also be cool and funny and fun sometimes. A four day festival of aural stimulation, Audible Edge emits all effects under the sun, and did you know there are multiple suns?
Every part of the festival has a high standard of artistic intent and creativity; from the bizarre websites, posters and stage design, to the custom-brewed limited-run Audible Edge wine; sour as a lemon! Organised by a very small team with no funding from the lotto or mines, I don’t know how they do it! There is a sense of adventure with every event, not only in a music-sense, but a physical sense too. To listen, your body must travel to uncouth places. One concert was held on a riverbank, another on the rooftop of the library at 6am; the most barbaric was held on a crowded party bus, driving circles around Perth at the speed of light. This event, titled ‘Here we go’ was relatively conventional in comparison, being held at the Rechabite. But actually, it was very cool:
The venue’s stage was no classic stage but an artificial bog of rollout lawn, lit all hazy by flourescent tubes shining through waves of fog. With the stage on ground level in the middle of the room, the musicians were surrounded by spectators, watching slack-jawed on three different floors. I stood up on the third where I could use my binoculars without too much attention. The whole setup looked less like a gig and more like a gambling racket in jail. Two-up or frog racing maybe.
Jess Robinson
The first musician was Jess Robinson, here from New Zealand and standing very far away behind a macbook computer. Because of the fog, I could barely see her, even with prosthetic vision, so I had to settle for closing my eyes, engaging reluctantly in the theatre of the mind. She started by playing the sound of bats: bats screeching through the night, yeah whatever, heard it all before, but something about these bats, I realised, seemed very abnormal. The bats were a little too luminous, too thin, too translucent. Then I realised: the bats were holograms! Normally I’m not so easy to trick with holography. Still, the musician kept trying and I could tell some of the audience were convinced by the way they ducked or covered their ears. After the bat holograms came some seagull holograms, and then, traffic holograms. The holograms weren’t visual of course, just aural, but imagination is nature’s holograms.
After the holograms, the musician played the sound of a can of good liquor being poured down the drain. I could tell the drunkards in the crowd hated it. Then came a strobing sound, a repetition of the word warm, as if I were in a Metroid elevator on the way to some bossfight, and Suction! Now I am in a field. The weather’s catastrophic and the birdlife’s going nuts. A willy wagtail’s shrieking djitti-djitti at 5x speed and the crickets are screaming right back at them. The hurricane is going, whipping rain into mud and trees from the ground, shattering all the eggs. Then comes the sound of a wobble board, getting faster and faster, faster and faster til the undulating soundwave condenses into a piercing straight line. Boy from bass, I scream, I banish thee, chopping him with my fist, hitting nothing. Its all a fucking hologram. The storm neither wets nor waves my hair. The matrix screensaver switches on, falling its code, a digital archipelagoical sound, turning into a cacophony when someone starts flicking buttons on their digital camera. I lose track of what’s happening. As my mum would put it, “this music is doing my head in”. When it ends I feel I have survived a minor apocalypse; one relatively un-severe, akin to the 2010 hailstorm or the Playstation Network data breach, but a relief it is over nethertheless.
Aarti Jadu
During the break I ask an acquaintance what they thought the music was about. “Synth noises.” No, I said, what did you hear? “Just synth noises”. I was deeply unsatisfied. The next act is a trio sitting crosslegged in the pit, playing harmoniums. For those who think I meant harmonica, a harmonium is an accordian that doesn’t sound French which you play sitting on the ground. It is from India, and when you squeeze it makes the long sound of treacle in sunlight. I have only ever heard it played with devotional seriousness, so I am curious to see if the improv troupe will get crazy. The musicians are Aarti Jadu, George Worthy and Emma Ovendon. Together they are all playing their harmoniums at the same time, generating what Lobel’s frog would dub a ‘good warm feeling’. While everyone is closing their eyes, I look around with my binoculars. Someone has BYO’d their own flask to the Rechabite: they have it hidden in the sleeve of their jumper and are pretending to be sucking their thumb. I can see what they’re doing. Getting liquored up for cheap. But I’m not judging, I know times are tough. We do what we can to get by. I look back at the musicians and realise Aarti Jadu is not there. She has walked over to the electric keyboard to add some new sounds. It sounds lovely. Then after a bit, George Worthy walks off and picks up a golden clarinet. It sounds heavenly.
The music has a solemn grace, like a moonlit mist blowing through the village at 3am, settling on the sleepers, making them sleep forever. It is a beautiful, dignified sound I wouldn’t have ever expected to hear in the city of Perth. Our national music is ad breaks. I’m enjoying feeling some peace in my mind when suddenly the clarinet is swapped for a bassoon. For those who think I meant babboon, a bassoon looks like a Civil War bazooka which you blow into from the side. It makes the sound of pure dread; a long low rumble signalling the imminent arrival of a preternatural terror. My arms grow stiff and my ears fold back. I shake and whimper like an old dog in a thunderstorm. This bassoon is scary, so scary, really scary. But then Aarti Jaadu breaks me out of the terror by croaking into the mic, a computer-mangled Klasky Csupo style aaaAAaaeergghERRaaaaerrrAAAaaa. The music stops being scary and starts being Cool. The sonic progression of this set is nuts. What began as Kirtan meditation ended up sounding like something from Soundtracks for the Blind. This Aarti Jadu group goes beyond the realm of the interesting into the fabled realm of the really really good.
Michael Terren
The next performer Michael Terren is probably the sole reason for the venue’s designated low-stim zone. This set was fucked. For forty minutes the Rechabite was turned into a virtual warzone of crushingly loud gunfire, explosions, and grinding metal. I felt like a bowling ball getting sent through a meatgrinder. Crushed, bashed, burned, scraped and smashed; the audial abuse was neverending. Bottles of champagne shattered over my head again and again, my body swallowed with the glass through a long chain of terrible zoo animals, bursting out urethra after urethra. This is the soundscape of the JB-HI FI I work at in Hell. I have a mouth but I’m not allowed to scream; all of my customers are mystery shoppers.
The only good bit was when it ended and the festival co-director stepped up through the silence to say “Thank you Mike. That was bonza.” Sorry Mike. That was too bonza for me.
Scratching
The name of the next act is Scratching and I am not enthused: if I have to hear any more scratching, I will jump off this balcony, injuring my legs in the bog. Thankfully the music of Scratching is more like Stroking, a gentle hand through my nerve-frazzled hair. The group is normally a duo of Grace Sanders and Ezekiel Padmanabham, but tonight they are joined by brother Josiah Padmanabham, and a drummer who I don’t know. They are all incredibly skilled musicians, playing normal instruments in a normal way without any funny business; but they play them so good! Josiah plays the piano as good as any of the best. Until now I thought being good at the piano was merely a matter of pressing the right buttons in the right order at the right time; but Jos don’t play the piano. He makes it talk. Furthermore, he makes it sing.
Yira (DJ) caretakes the space between live sets
Live music, most of the time, upholds a puppeteer-marionette relationship. The musician is the puppeteer and the instrument is the marionette. But the Padman brothers say, “haha nah man, we are the marionettes. In fact, we’re the muppets.” Jos plays pounds his piano like the Rowlf the Big Dog and Ezekiel plays bass like… I dunno, the salesman who says ‘wanna buy an eight’. He plays with pure fuck. Zeke plays with so much fuck, the cap on his head has spun permanently backwards. And the drummer! The drummer is no Animal. There’s no thrashing or pounding, but the golden virtues of freshness and restraint, of knowing when to sprinkle the garnish and how much and what sort. The Swedish Chef could learn something from this drummer.
And last, I have to talk about the singer Grace Sanders. What a voice! As my mum would say, she’d have a good shot on Australian Idol. But she’d probably have to ditch the nightcore pitch shifting. The judges, as you know, are philistines. Grace is wearing a long white nightfrock. I have no idea what words she is singing. Sometimes when the singings so good, you don’t need words. The best songbirds are the ones you can’t transcribe. There was also a secret fifth member: a poet who read an affirmational poem that was, to use a drumming term, not my tempo. My tempo is poems about animals, but the poetry was other people’s tempo. A person next to me was clicking their fingers, whispering ‘yasss’, which was also not my tempo. But what was my tempo, to use the drumming term, was they played a country song! Just for me!!! ‘Country music keeps my boots tapping’ the adage goes, and, its true! I was tapping so hard I dropped my pencil off the balcony. It landed in a bald guy’s drink and he took a big gulp and swallowed it whole. There goes the rest of my review, I could write nothing more.