[This article was published in Art Monthly Australia, Issue 225 November 2009, a special issue dedicated to 'Sound'. It was commissioned by guest editor Douglas Kahn. This is the original version of the text, as the version that appeared in the magazine ended up with some odd punctuation around the quotes. The quotes are all from the AF list. They are not credited in the text itself, but are meant to represent the collective voice of the list, in a vaguely representative manner. There is, however, a full list of who said what and when below the text]

The Audio Foundation was founded by Zoe Drayton in 2004 to enhance connection and community for New Zealand experimental music and sound art practitioners. It supports musicians through a website, a mailing list, the 'Altmusic' tours of international artists, a range of preservation projects including oral history and archiving, and promotions such as a compilation cd distributed with the February 2009 issue of The Wire magazine. The Audio Foundation website acts as a promotional portal and networking space for artists, hosting user-created profiles with discographies, gig listings, audio clips, and connections to other artists related by mutual projects. The mailing list, however, is the thread that connects these broader strategies of support, preservation and promotion; the site where community is most visibly created and affirmed. Where the other projects are complex logistical combinations of funding, people, and time, the list, as a mechanism for connection and community, is open, unmoderated and ideally self generating.

The Af List was launched on 28 April 2005, with previous recipients of AF newsletters automatically subscribed. Its first substantive posts were expressions of pleasure at the sudden sense of connection it enacted ( [af_list] Delighted, [af_list] hello there, [af_list] can we post gig announcements here?). The AF site already enabled a degree of passive connectivity, but as Andrew Clifford observed in its early hours, the list itself was “surprisingly exciting. Like a great big information tap was just turned on. Yay”, a sense shared by the other first posters (“what a buzz. such a simple idea and presto, community!”). The new forum was immediately activated as a space for gig announcements (“Wellington people should head on down to the City Gallery... for the Late Night Sessions: live electronica and Bridget Riley paintings for $5”), and information requests (“Does anybody have any thoughts about good pressing options?”, “can anyone reccomend a real-time granular synthsis program by any chance?”). Its membership and focus was always defined as the NZ 'experimental audio' community, but those first few posts demonstrated the more expansive geographical distribution of that community (“i am in paris at the moment.... i just woke up and checked out the mailing group and got so excited!”, “Well it's great to have a discussion forum for "experimental" audio artists in New Zealand (even if I'm actually in South Korea at present!)”, “I'm currently over in Melbourne.... I bought myself a banjo so that's taking my sound in a new direction”). From the beginning many of the subscribers were friends and / or fans of each other, a pre-existing community that was activated by the simplicity and directness of email, and pleasure at seeing so many familiar names materialise in inboxes.

The list quickly became a space for the articulation of practices, an information service, an expression of allegiances, arguments, and reminiscences. Some contested terrain became immediately apparent (“What is Noise?... What is Music?”), along with perennial philosophical issues (“fuck 'stage presence', why the hell is everyone worried about 'looking good' on stage? Lie down!”), and practical problems (“i dont suppose anyone out there knows were i can get 2 bulbs for a 'singer insta-load 16' film projector?”). Much of the list traffic is general musical information (“May be of interest to some... free compilations to download of contemporary music from across the ditch, curated by one of the DJs from Sydney radio station FBI”, “The awesome Tom Tom Magazine has just published their interview with Stella [Corkery] here...”, “UbuWeb has an interesting page on John Cage's "A Dip in the Lake", and a realization by Robert Pleshar.”), in a gesture that acknowledges a mutual interest in listening, reading, and researching widely around a shared musical environment. Most posts however are simply announcements of gigs and other events, promoting the offlist realworld practice of the participants (“In a rare show of intense public-ness, Eye will be performing live THREE times in the next three weeks!”, “this week aucklanders get to see the Aesthetics play twice and if you never have you better should”, “Pimmon (AUS) + Cathedrals. A night of some sweet sweet drones and beautiful computer music! Come along for a nice old wine cellar show!”). On many lists the reduction of postings to event announcements is a signifier of communicative loss, but the flow of performance and release posts on AF reinforces the sense that it represents an active national community. Gig listings give everyone a general understanding of the activity of others, and an overall map of the community in terms of who is playing where, when, and with whom.

AF is about New Zealand experimental audio, but it is also, or more specifically, about where New Zealand practice sits in the world. The list connects people here, but it also witnesses musical exchanges between here and elsewhere – Japan, the UK, the US, and most regularly, Australia. Announcements trace regular movements across the Tasman (“at scapa at 7pm there will be some biorama-ing some rejuvenating loops and some botborg wondering from australia, bring an extra brain for this one”, “I am moving to Sydney in a week or so, and am not able to take my Mellotron. With sadness, I have listed it on an auction site”, “The CD is entirely made up of samples of the city of Melbourne”, “I operated an anechoic chamber in Sydney for many years with a Bruel and Kjaer microphone and associated equipment”, “Joel Stern, Brisbane based practitioner, curator, writer... has published a review of December's Trans Acoustic festival in the latest issue of Real Time, a print/online bi-monthly from Sydney”). Accounts of gigs and travels around the world further extend the parameters of the community, and the conceptual reach of its music (“The other is a record (mainly) of cover versions of Peruvian pop songs that I recorded over the 5 days I spent travelling down the Amazon River on a cargo ship... Perhaps the funnest part of this project for me was building up the latin rhythm tracks using buckets and mugs and whatever other bits and bobs were at hand in our miniscule mosquito infected cabin”, “a small piece of New Zealand territory is ephemerally created, existed within and past on every time we perform... if you happen to be anywhere near LA, San Francisco or New York please let me extend a warm invitation to you or your friends to any of the following shows”, “just back from Japan. Golly. Its an incredible place for music.... Played with Merzbow, Keiji Haino, Astro (ex- C.C.C.C), Pain Jerk, Guilty Connector and a bunch of other brain-melting Japanoisy king cobras”). Travelogues and discussion of activities in other places affirm for everyone – the original posters and their readers alike – that the music made here has international currency.

Within New Zealand, the Audio Foundation's establishment coincided with, and to a degree has aided, the development of new spaces and audiences for experimental music. Venues and festivals are promoted through the list's gig announcements, and members of the community participate in both the ongoing thread of the list and the shifting, shortlived dynamic of gigs. Crucial venues when the list began – The Wine Cellar in Auckland, Happy in Wellington, and Arc in Dunedin – have been expanded, or, sadly, replaced in Arc's case, by spaces like Cross St, Sky Bear's Cuddle Den, and The High Seas (Auckland), Space Thing and Fred's (Wellington), and None Gallery and Chick's Hotel in Dunedin. The relationship between list space and performance space has been most clearly demonstrated by the resolution of Christchurch's relative lack of performance opportunities in 2007. This became the subject of particular list activity in March that year, in an intervention that prompted a significant revival in the city's music scene. Discussion of spaces in Christchurch started when, following the NZ tour by Blue Mountains improv group Sun of the Seven Sisters, Sam Hamilton in Auckland speculated about compiling a guide to contacts and venues around the country to enable others to emulate the extensiveness of that group's travels. Various posters then remarked on previous difficulties in organising gigs in Christchurch (“CHCH in my opinion has ALWAYS been a difficult place to try and organise shows, to gather enthusiasm from audiences”). Like the other centres, Christchurch has long had an active underground music scene and a number of significant performers, but the lack of a particular accommodating bar like The Wine Cellar or Happy was becoming increasingly apparent. It was observed that while The Physics Room gallery and Lyttelton's Wunderbar had been supportive of musicians, they didn't seem able to draw enough audience to make performance worthwhile, and it was difficult for outsiders to know who to contact to organise gigs.

This lead first to some discussion about an apparent lull in regional scenes that have been active in the past, and some general theorising about the cause (“Christchurch... suffers from an excess of middle-class complacency, and the shopping malls... are largely to blame.”, “Palmerston North is another city that had an amazing music scene in the 90s...Heaps of shit going on.... I think some general social change has lead to this happening in a number of mid size New Zealand towns, and I'm damned if I know what it is. Is it harder to live on no money?”, “i was going to say a similar thing about auckland.... i know a good few people who have left auckland on similar grounds to the christchurch exodus. as far as i can tell though this is a NZ wide dilemma, i nearly moved to melbourne last year hoping it would be better, but on visiting there i realised auckland, a city i didnt have much good to say about, was actually really good.”). Within a day of the first posting on this subject a meeting was proposed to explore new kinds of performance possibilities in Christchurch. The resulting 'Borderline Ballroom' series catalysed the local scene, revealing a new audience assembled in part through the list itself (“One of the many pleasant realisations I had on the night was that quite a few people present - many of whom I had never seen before - had heard about it via the AF list”). Since those first Borderline Ballroom gigs, Christchurch's scene has flourished in underused real estate, in basements, churches, warehouses, and the High St Project's gallery space. The new energy of the city's performers, organisers, and audiences can be traced to that crisis discussion, and the extension of the community through physical performance spaces and the discursive space of the list.

As a means of disseminating information and forging connections and allegiances the closest analogue to the AF list is perhaps the community radio station, particularly in its role as an extension of music practice. New Zealand's student radio stations have long been the primary, if reluctant and sporadic, point of aural connection between practitioners, each other, and their audiences. A recurring thread of discussion on the list has been the dwindling of support for experimental and challenging music by student radio, signified by the cancellation in 2003 of Auckland station bFM's Solar Furnace Hour, and rdu's Rotate Your State in Christchurch. (“I used to really love the program ' I even recorded shows and would listen to them for the remainder of the week”, “I used to very much enjoy the Solar Furnace Hour during my months working in customer support at Cisco Systems in Amsterdam back in '01. I could manage router orders while listening to a stream of Solar Furnace at 11am, on a wednesday”). Both were longstanding sites for the dissemination of weird music and creative radio, and their loss was felt to mark another stage in the process of student radio stations 'selling out' and abandoning their communities. In truth, of course, student radio has never had much space for music quite as weird as many would like to think, and is always never as 'good as it used to be'. More recently some community and low power radio stations have provided experimental space at reasonable times, most notably on Volcano Radio Lyttelton (“Fusing radio broadcast and live performance, the Borderline Ballroom #17 incorporates three live solo artists and the radio programmes Borderline Radio and A'Sides for Betaville...”), and Auckland's Fleet FM (“...has been holding stubborn ever since in it's late night slot of 11pm sunday... lo-fi, home-made scuzz, junk and drone, local and international, experimental and arcane, aurally gorgeous or assaulting sounds into the ether”). In comparison with these short, scheduled, and geographically bounded spaces, the af list enables an accessible-yet-targeted means of disseminating understandings about experimental music. Indeed the announcement posts that maintain the list's flow are a form of broadcast, and the performative nature of many postings figure the lurking majority as audience. However, while the content of practice could be guessed at from the way people write themselves onlist, it is fundamentally a forum in which the performer and their music are functionally separated. On the radio a listener knows someone through the sound of their music, but on the list the reader only knows them by what they write, or what others write about them. As Bruce Russell has observed, “Radio and magazines are actually more 'about the work' than the af list is, imo. You don't learn about the content of practice from the af list, though you might from sound files posted on the site itself, which i hardly ever visit.” Unlike radio the list creates a space where people can encounter each other without their actual music potentially getting in the way – or indeed enhancing understanding.

The Audio Foundation mailing list is not in itself a community, but it is a space in which members of a community of musicians and audiences share information and assert their presence in a national experimental music scene. The list generates a sense of ongoing activity around and beyond the country. It articulates an imagined community of shared practice and interest, one email at a time. As messages build up in the archives the written traces of the list allows it to sustain a presence beyond each moment of connection, as documentation of the performances, releases, flames, fights, and gestures of support that map experimental music practice in New Zealand today.

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References:

[af_list] Delighted - Simon Kong, Friday April 29 2005, 1:57pm
[af_list] hello there - Bruce Russell, Friday April 29 2005, 2:06pm
[af_list] can we post gig announcements here? - Damian Stewart, Friday April 29 2005, 2:25pm
“I'm finding this surprisingly exciting...” - Andrew Clifford, Friday April 29 2005, 5:45pm
“wow, what a buzz...” - John Kennedy, Friday April 29 2005, 5:47pm
“Wellington people should head on down to the City Gallery” - Damian Stewart, Friday April 29 2005, 2:25pm
“Does anybody have any thoughts about good pressing options?” - Sam Stephens, Friday April 29 2005, 3:26pm
“can anyone reccomend a real-time granular synthsis program by any chance?” - Stephen Gallagher, Friday April 29 2005, 6:14pm
“i am in paris at the moment...” - Stephen Gallagher, Friday April 29 2005, 6:14pm
“Well it's great to have a discussion forum for...” - Sam Stephens, Friday April 29 2005, 3:26pm
“I'm currently over in Melbourne...” - David Edwards, Friday April 29 2005, 7:45pm

“What is Noise?” - fractal.design, Tuesday May 10 2005, 9:45pm
“fuck 'stage presence'...” - Michael Morley, Wednesday February 22 2006, 9:48pm
“i dont suppose anyone out there knows...” - Sam Hamilton, Monday December 5 2005, 3:38pm
“May be of interest to some...” - Michael Upton, Thursday July 29 2009, 9:41am
“The awesome Tom Tom Magazine...” - Alan Holt, Monday September 14 2009, 7:10pm
“UbuWeb has an interesting page on...” - johnny chang, Wednesday January 23 2008, 2:28pm
“In a rare show of intense public-ness...” - Peter P, via Admin, Wednesday November 26 2008, 3:44pm
“this week aucklanders get to see...” - stefan geoffrey neville, Tuesday May 19 2009, 11:05am
“Pimmon (AUS) + Cathedrals...” - Nigel Wright, Friday May 1 2009, 12:59pm

“at scapa at 7pm there will be some...” - Sam Hamilton, Wednesday December 7 2005, 1:30pm
“I am moving to Sydney in a week or so...” - Christopher Orczy, Saturday December 29 2007, 1:11pm
“The CD is entirely made up of samples of...” - Michael Upton, Friday January 18 2008, 9:03pm
“I operated an anechoic chamber...” - Paul Moss, Tuesday January 22 2008, 8:54pm
“Joel Stern, Brisbane based practitioner...” - Sally McIntyre, Friday February 10 2006, 12:46am
“The other is a record (mainly) of...” - Antony Milton, Thursday August 13 2009, 10:04am
“a small piece of New Zealand territory...” - Sam Hamilton, Friday April 3 2009, 6:15pm
“just back from Japan. Golly...” - Campbell Kneale, Sunday April 26 2009, 11:55am

“CHCH in my opinion has ALWAYS been...” - Mr Sterile, Saturday March 24 2007, 2:40pm

“ Christchurch... suffers from an excess of middle-class...” - David Borrie, Wednesday March 28 2007, 11:29am
“Palmerston North is another city that...” - Sam Stephens, via Admin, Wednesday March 28 2007, 12:17pm
“i was going to say a similar thing about auckland....” - Sam Hamilton, Thursday March 29 2007, 7:40pm
“One of the many pleasant realisations I had on the night...” - Sally McIntyre, Wednesday June 6 2007, 2:40pm

“I used to really love the program...” - Simon Kong, Wednesday May 17 2006, 7:02am
“I used to very much enjoy...” - Zita Joyce, Wednesday May 17 2006, 10:00am
“Fusing radio broadcast and live performance...” - Borderline Ballroom, via Admin, Wednesday September 17 2008, 3:24pm
“... has been holding stubborn ever since...” - Paul Winstanley, Monday January 14 2008, 11:30am
“Radio and magazines are actually more...” - Bruce Russell, email, Sunday August 2 2009, 11:12am

The list archive is here: http://list.audiofoundation.org.nz/pipermail/af_list-audiofoundation.org...

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Thanks:
Everyone who responded to questions on the list: Bruce Russell, Beth Ducklingmonster, Mike Minchington, Alex MacKinnon. Tim Coster, Jennifer French, and Sally McIntyre for the photos (Tim's were used in the end). Tim Coster, Sam Hamilton, Simon Kong, Adam Willetts, and Zoe Drayton for the general discussion.