Name: Peter Blamey

Nationality: Australia
Title: Esker
Artist: Peter Blamey
Year: 2004
Duration: 00:08:03

Biography: Peter Blamey is a Sydney-based artist working with sound, experimental music, improvisation and simple electrical systems. In 2004/5 he appeared at What is Music, Liquid Architecture, impermanent.audio, the NOWnow and Electrofringe, along with numerous local performances. Sound works have been included in exhibitions such as Variable Resistance (SFMOMA), and h.phone.

Synopsis: This work revolves around a practice of probing the innards of aging audio equipment with their own self-generated feedback signals. This tends to fill the components to saturation point, where sounds leak out, flooding the otherwise orderly signal paths with puddles of random activity. The intended straight lines of audio throughput become replaced by ponds of sound. Yet, for all the water metaphors, the sound itself is dry and desiccated, the energy and heat involved in these electrical processes vaporising the circuitry as the signals rise. The interplay between the internality of the processes and the resulting overflow of sound lends the work an idiosyncratic kind of spatiality albeit a condensed and constricted one, spitting from the speakers, but frying in the air.

Name: Ben Byrne

Nationality: Australia
Title: Drawing a Blank
Artist: Ben Byrne
Year: 2005
Duration: 00:09:43

Biography: Ben Byrne is a Sydney based sound and media artist and is currently completing his Honours in Media Arts at the University of Technology Sydney. He works extensively in radio as well as performing live, solo and with others, predominantly using laptop based processing. Working with very limited sound sources, his work is very fractured and uses a 'cut-up' approach. Ben has concentrated on attempting to develop a 'live' way of performing using the laptop as an instrument, while also attempting to avoid the all too common clichés of laptop based sound work instead focusing on the possibilities of the digital and computer-based processes.

Synopsis: Drawing a Blank is an edit of material Ben was developing in the first couple of months in2005, culminating in a solo performance at impermanent.audio in Sydney. The piece is an excellent example of Ben's recent work, using a very select and limited sound world and concentrating on structural issues in the work. This piece represents Ben's first attempt to re-introduce some sense of tonal sound into his work while retaining the fractured, cut-up approach he has utilised in the past. Also, for this piece Ben has attempted to break the whole into different sections, developing a structure that leads the listener through different permutations of the material.

Name: Charlie Charlie

Nationality: Australia / France
Title: La Respiration des Saintes
Artist: Charlie Charlie
Year: 2005

Biography: Charlie Charlie's work is based around an idea that is related to the deformation of the reality of sound. Both artists use very basic materials to make the primary reality of the sound become something else, to create a sound that defies the origins of the materials they use.

A big part of their music is to work and deal with the thoroughly gritty and dirty sound oftheir chosen materials, as well as working with repetition and the miniature details of the sounds.

Synopsis: La Respiration des Saintes is a studio composition that uses walkmans, speakers, dictaphones, radio, objects, microphones and cheap concrete sound.

Name: Cat Hope

Nationality: Australia
Title: Women in Transit
Artist: Cat Hope
Year: 2004
Duration: 00:06:00

Biography: Cat Hope is a sound and performance artist whose practise can also involve video. Her work with sound investigates the lower end of the sound spectrum and more recently the use of communication technologies. She has toured Japan, the USA and Europe as a solo noise artist and has attended the International Symposium of Electronic Art in Japan 2001 and Estonia 2003 and both the LEM and MEM Festivals in Spain in 2002. Recent projects have included new sound works for Liquid Architecture, BEAPworks, The Totally Huge New Music Festival Sound Culture exhibition and the Phone Book Ltd's Awesome Festival project. Cat is currently Lecturer in Composition at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University.

Synopsis: This is a collection of three short pieces taken from a sound-scape originally written for a dance production of the same name at the Performance Space in Sydney. The music was constructed around three artists in the piece - Rakini, DeeDee Dorviller and Yumi Umimare - with each of the performers portraying different characters in the work. The sound-scape was made using live recordings of antenna's, music boxes, bass guitars and a drum kit, often cut up or effected. Much of the work is focused around low frequencies, which can only be heard through headphones or a large PA, the latter allowing the low frequency vibrations to be felt by audience and performers alike. The idea of listening to these works on a portable player maintains the integrity of its purpose as a soundtrack to physical activity, and acousma tic associative process' inherent in that.

Name: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang

Nationality: Taiwan, R.O.C.
Title: There she is, no more tubes or pump attached
Artist: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang
Year: 2005
Duration: 00:08:22

Biography: Alice Hui-Sheng Chang is a Taiwanese born sound, video and installation artist. She is interested in searching through little moments in our every-day life, to express them with voice and body performance in a digital medium. By exploring textures and patterns, she draws tension and dynamic through extended vocal technique. Alice is one of the founding members of dotmov experimental screen collective. She is currently completing her final year of BA in Media Arts at RMIT Melbourne. Her most recent work was as a collaborator in Strangers and Intimacy,

an international performance/exhibition with residency at Westspace Gallery, Melbourne and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow in the beginning of 2005.

Synopsis: This piece is dedicated to my Grandma, Chang Wang A-Mei. She died the morning after a family gathering in the mid-autumn moon festival 2004, finally free from five years fighting cancer at the age of 74. Exploring mimicry and sonic opposition, the voice becomes a characterisation of my family, my Grandmother and myself. Through the experience of repetitive gestures in a traditional Buddhist/Taoist funeral, the sorrow goes deeper into the centre of struggle. There she is, no more tubes or pump attached depicts our resistance to disease and death, against the unsure future in afterlife.

Name: Emily Morandini

Nationality: Australia
Title: Untitled
Artist: Emily Morandini
Year: 2005
Duration: 00:08:37

Biography: Currently Emily Morandini performs in various experimental electro-acoustic groups including übercube and the Splinter Orchestra, and is a key member of art collective Dysfunctional Feed. Emily's practise as a sound, video and (occasionally) installation artist adopts a free-fall process methodology combined with strict compositional outcome. Resulting works are often carefully structured products of play, improvisation, experimentation, and mishap.

Synopsis: The entirety of this piece is built from a single string sample, striped back to its primary digital qualities and then re-established in its recognisable form. By adding and subtracting dense layers of altered audio with regard to composition, intensities arise through the disparity in digital alias and natural harmonics.

Name: Christian Toonk

Nationality: Netherlands
Title: Room Mirror
Artist: Christian Toonk
Year: 2004-ongoing
Duration: 00:09:30

Biography: Christian Toonk is an audio and image artist with a background in home recording and video. His recent work can be separated in two main directions, music and installation. Christian's installations are the product of collaborations with an emphasis on the work process. Point of interest in these installations is a shift of perception. Elements emphasized include surrounding sounds, extreme frequencies, projections, light and smoke to transform the perception of the physical and daily environment. His recent music concentrates on controlling complex behaviour of audible systems. These systems consist of feedback loops, real-time synthesis and sound processing; by layering these audio streams, minimal compositions emerge that explore acoustic and tonal behaviour.

Synopsis: Room Mirror reflects is based on feedback processes. By using microphones as input, picked up sounds, like noise, hiss and murmur are gained, filtered and transformed before they are delivered back. This results in an ongoing dataflow that can be altered with both the ingoing (environment) and the outgoing (computer) signals. The actual measurement and material of the recorded space, the objects inside it and the present audio, form the building blocks for an (audio) interface. With spatial sound as input and the conditions how they appear controlled with the computer, feedback becomes a highly playable sound source.

Name: Nathan Thompson

Nationality: New Zealand
Title: Particle Death pt. 1
Artist: Nathan Thompson
Year: 2005
Duration: 00:08:26

Biography: Nathan Thompson is an artist and musician from New Zealand who has been working nationally and internationally for the past 14 years. He has mounted several solo shows and released numerous CDs, solo and with a variety of experimental sound based ensembles including performances with Richard Crow, Battery Operated, and Michael Morley. Nathan's most recent solo exhibition entitled twilight

was hosted by the The Physics Room contemporary art space in Christchurch NZ in 2003 and last year he performed a solo set at impermanent.audio in Sydney. He is currently completing a Master of Fine Arts in Time Based Media at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW.

Synopsis: Particle Death uses found sound and archive recordings reprocessed into a piece illustrating the slow decomposition of radioactive particles. It exists as a parallel to an earlier body of work entitled The Extinction Suite that investigated Dinosaur extinction.