☞ Exciting news! ☜
Audio Foundation is pleased to announce the re-launch of our online journal ‘Soundbleed’.
Check it out here: soundbleed.org.nz
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Established in 2013 by AF founder Zoe Drayton, Soundbleed is being re-booted with a dedicated website, functioning as a publishing platform for conversations around experimental sound culture and Sonic Arts – including essays and critical writing, reviews, interviews, oral histories, a database of local recent releases, written lessons and workshops.
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The Soundbleed Online Journal fills a significant niche in the discourse around sound art and experimental music in Aotearoa NZ, supporting the artistic community through the development of a multifaceted platform supporting the activities of artists, musicians and writers working across a range of fields.
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Soundbleed integrates new writing with archival material from The Audio Foundation and work published by partners such as undertheradar. As an online platform, Soundbleed caters to a local and international readership, continuing an established overseas interest in the sound culture of Aotearoa-NZ. It serves a broad community of writers, artists, and audiences, interested in writing about and around sound, performance and listening. Soundbleed seeks to create a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.
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Audio Foundation Oral History Programme:
Peter James Stapleton was a musician from New Zealand who was best known as the drummer and co-founder of the alternative rock band The Terminals. Stapleton was also a member of the groups Vacuum, Dadamah, Flies Inside The Sun, Eye, and Scorched Earth Policy.
Oral history interview with Peter Stapleton (parts 1 – 3)
Oral history interview with Peter Stapleton (parts 4 and 5)
Oral history interview with Peter Stapleton (parts 6 – 8)
Oral history interview with Peter Stapleton (parts 9 and 10)
Stefan Neville is an artist, musician and educator based in Auckland. His work as Pumice is well known and celebrated around the world. Less known is the history of his work as a label runner, comic artist/illustrator and art-therapy educator.
Oral history interview with Stefan Neville
Matt Middleton is Crude: coarse and colourful, masterful and exasperating, sharp-witted and self-sabotaging. He compulsively unties – and re-ties – the sinews of his electronica/garage rock/free noise Frankenstein. Initially enlisted by benevolent Christians to learn the recorder, Invercargill-born Middleton advanced to clarinet in the Southland Youth Orchestra before gobbling up the godless offerings of Slayer, Carcass and Napalm Death.
Oral history interview with Matthew Middleton
Audio Foundation Interviews:
The Audio Foundation staff frequently talk with artists performing or exhibiting as part of Audio Foundation programmes.
Bruce Russell / Marco Fustinato
Hermione Johnson & Susan Alcorn
More interviews to be added soon.
COVID-19 Artist Interview Series:
In 2019/2020 the world was beset by a virulent and highly contagious virus. In response to the pandemic, governments of many nations including Aotearoa / New Zealand introduced strict measures to slow the spread of the virus. In New Zealand, a four-level alert system was created at the hight of which non-essential business and organisations were required to close and the population was confined to their homes unless traveling to a supermarket or pharmacy or taking daily exercise in their immediate vicinity.
During this period of isolation, the staff of The Audio Foundation conducted a series of interviews with artists and musicians, seeking perspectives on the situation which were lacking from the wider commentary.
Interview: Edwina Stevens & Sam Longmore
Edwina Stevens (Dunedin, Aotearoa/Melbourne) is an audiovisual artist working across composition, installation and live performance focusing on synthesized sound, field recordings, found acoustic elements/instruments and obsolete media. Her work investigates audiovisual processes of engaging with places that are collaborative, improvisational and serendipitous, exploring entanglements of the temporal, material and experiential through chance encounters, tangential processes and unanticipated outcomes.
Interview: Grace Verweij & Flo Wilson
Grace Verweij (Ngāti Mutunga o Wharekauri) lives in Waitakere, Auckland. A promoter, sound-maker and visual artist, her work often explores themes of abject loneliness, intimacy and spatial/psychological dissociation – creating dense and cathartic soundscapes, often utilising environmental or found-sound and heavy digital processing. Grace run’s the label Related Articles and ‘Outlier Festival’. Her visual practice shifts between moving image, functional objects and abstract sculptural forms. She seeks empowerment through creating intuitively and collaborating with others.
Interview: Marika Pratley & Flo Wilson
Marika Pratley is a composer, sonic artist, improviser and performer based in Wellington, New Zealand. Her diversity of work is reflective on the eclectic influences of her music and cultural upbringing, using found objects, Indonesian Gamelan, Greek Folk Instruments, synthesizers and field recordings in her compositions. Conceptually, Marika covers a range of topics, exploring radical relaxation, the phenomenology of spacetime, trauma recovery and intersectional identity politics.
Interview: Greg Malcolm & Jeff Henderson
Greg Malcolm (born 1965, Whakatane New Zealand) is a guitarist with a long musical history; he has composed, performed and recorded music for short films, theatre, children’s performance, radio plays, and held solo art exhibitions at the High Street Gallery and Film Archives. He also contributed a chapter in ‘echtzeitmusik berlin published in 2011 on the ‘echtzeit’ Berlin music scene – where he was based for two years and was part of a collective running a venue for new/experimental music called The Anorak. He has released many CDs and DVDs including Some Other Time Kning Disk 2009, Leather and Lacy Interregnum records 2008, Homesick For Nowhere Corpus Hermeticum 2002 (Jenny Ward), Jazz School Monotype Records with Eugene Chadbourne 2010, Six Strings with Tetutzi Akiyama Korm Plastics (brombron) 2007, International Domestic Corpus (Hermeticum Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Bruce Russell) 2003, Surferdelic Proper Records 2001 Surfing USSR, What is it Keith? Proper Records 2000 (Tony Buck, Leo Bachmann, Jenny Ward, Jon Rose, Joe Williamson), and Trust Only This Face Braille Records 12 1995.
Interview: Pat Kraus & Sam Longmore
Kraus is an experimental musician and composer, best known for his solo work (as well as stints in The Futurians, The Aesthetics, and Olympus, among others). The New Zealand Listener called him “a national treasure” and “one of the most quietly important and interesting people making music in New Zealand”. He is influenced by medieval music, renaissance music, traditional Japanese music, psychedelic music and electronic music. Kraus’ work has been lauded internationally, crossing the boundaries of electronic music, post-rock, no wave, space folk, noise pop, punk rock and martian stomp. Kraus has stated that he makes music for freaks, outsiders, losers and weirdos. His recent release A Golden Brain can be found online.
For more information on Kraus and his work, see: http://www.kraus.co.nz
Interview: William Henry Meung & Sam Longmore
William Henry Meung is a Dunedin-based no/low/home-fi recording artist.
Since 1998, Meung has performed regularly solo and in groups such as Volt, Horsehead Nebula, Wolfskull, The Expendable Animals. He remains steady member of The Ladder is Part of the Pit and releases music himself as well as through labels such as Chemical Imbalance, Celebrate Psi Phenomenon and mf/mp.
More interviews to be added soon.
Publication – Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand (2012)
Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand is a lavishly-illustrated new publication from the Audio Foundation and CMR . It is a survey of how a bunch of antipodean misfits and malcontents have forged new ways and new reasons to make noise, here at the end of the earth. Edited by Bruce Russell (the Dead C.), in association with Richard Francis and Zoe Drayton; the aim of this volume is to survey the full range of ‘non-standard’ audio practices in contemporary NZ culture. The book’s remit runs from the borders of composed art music, through improvised noise, to deconstructed ‘rock’n pop filth’; and every genre, every scene, every permutation of unconventional audio practice in-between. The aim is not to be comprehensive (there is literally too much vitality and diversity for any book!). The hope is to ‘throw a good handful of gravel into the pool’. While not every eel will have been hit, the surface will have been rippled from shore to shore, which is more than anyone else has even attempted before.
Erewhon Calling makes room for many voices, allowing multiple and possibly conflicting voices and points of view. A range of artists and informed commentators mainly tell their own stories, describe their own work, and outline their own goals in working on the fringes of audio culture. The readers of this important source book will be able to discern their own meanings and make their own connections from this thought-provoking and unique publication.
Orders for Erewhon Calling can be made by email to admin@audiofoundation.org.nz
Interview by Emma Smith with Bruce Russell on Radio NZ
Reviews:
Soundbleed Online Journal:
SoundBleed is an online journal of critical writing around sound in NZ/Aotearoa – a forum for discussion around sound-related activity and practice.