It’s a wet and wild night in Auckland as a group gathered in the St Paul Street Gallery move calmly around the space, creating shifting vocal harmonies and dissonances as they go. First each one sings their own note, then replicates one they’ve just heard sung by a distant voice, before returning to intone a note that no one else is making, and so on. As participants alternatively tune into themselves and then others, it’s an uplifting exchange and one that perfectly illustrates Pauline Oliveros’s idea of Deep Listening.

It's a shame that New Zealand's thriving experimental/noise/improv scene has gone so neglected by our local press when it's been so revered overseas. While the words "noise" and "experimental" might suggest some level of inaccessibility - and I'll be the first to admit some of the shit still scares me - this lovely compilation by Auckland sound artist Tim Coster should perhaps unlock a few doors for those curious to explore other rich musical frontiers beyond the realm of the conventional.

http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3432/artsbooks/5515/crude_effective.html...

Outside the moveable but reassuring guidelines of genre and tradition – perhaps especially in the white-guy tradition that likes to think it’s always about boldly going beyond them – choice paralysis and worse confront the musician who takes seriously the possibility that anything goes. Self-conscious experimentation collapses easily into convention: clownish genre hybrids, or genre fare in thin disguise (self-important club music, conspicuously).

Some years back, having written a few sound stories of my own, I began collecting anecdotes from sound artists and experimental instrument builders I met with whilst travelling in the USA. Each artist would be asked to tell a yarn about a sound experience imprinted on their memory that may have influenced the direction or path they were to take as artists. A collection of these I later published as a video, titled
“Sound Stories #1: Meetings with 14 U.S experimental instrument makers”.