There will be a live broadcast on Hope St Radio on November 12 at Rooftop Bar, Melbourne featuring DJ sets from Bayu, Corin, Fia Fell, Mousse, Nico Niquo, Sanpo Disco and Sui Zhen. Full details here.
Midday Moon is a survey of ambient and experimental music that emerged from Australia and New Zealand between 1980 and 1995. These recordings are sourced from micro-labels, private pressings, theatre soundtracks and artists’ unreleased archives.
Pairing the words Australia and ambient in my browser returned images of vignetted rainforest photography and stock photo CDs found in therapeutic gift shops. Ambient often gets lumped together with new-age records, that typically view natural landscapes through a sentimental touristic lens. Such albums are filled with crystalline sounds evoking a calming simplicity, placid and placeless. But as I scrolled deeper a richer and more diverse ambient genre began to form. I found music that crafts a unique cultural geography of landscapes and atmospheres: real and imagined, natural and man-made. Some artists turned their attention to the singular acoustic ecologies of overlooked spaces around the country. Others fostered interests in non-Western music cultures and instruments. The common thread that binds them is their use of new technologies to conjure interior and exterior regions, through acoustic and synthesised sounds.
Many of the artists included here found stable incomes producing musical pieces for art exhibitions, films and theatre productions. Examples include Blair Greenberg’s compositions for Dance North in Townsville, Beyond the Fringe’s Guitar Fantasia originally produced for dance-theatre production The Dove and Sam Mallet’s ongoing work for Anthill Theatre. However, without such opportunities, nor a clearly defined home or unifying scene, numerous artists worked like outsiders, contented to create music for a relatively small community of listeners on private and independent labels.
I would like to express my gratitude to the artists who contributed to Midday Moon for agreeing to share their music, and I hope the compilation enables them to reach a new audience. Ironically, though I spent many hours glued to a computer screen in an attempt finish this, I hope the compilation itself offers listeners a chance to move away from their screens. I hope that while listening you can connect to the present, quiet your mind and soothe your senses – and take a journey to a place, real or imagined.
– Rowan Mason aka Sanpo Disco
Purchase / Stream Midday Moon – https://middaymoon.lnk.to/
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