Audio Foundation presents our 2019 International Artists in Residence, 180°, an electroacoustic trio from Sydney consisting of Jim Denley, Amanda Stewart, and Nick Ashwood.
180° is a new ensemble featuring a trio of veterans from the Australian improvised music scene. Having just released their album Submental, the trio make their way to New Zealand for several performances amongst a packed residency.
They will be undertaking a performance residency which consists of:
Tuesday 29 October – Audio Foundation
Ensemble improvisation workshop.
Jim Denley introduces the techniques and methods of large ensemble improvising employed by the Splinter Orchestra (Sydney)
Wednesday 30 October– The Wine Cellar
180º ensemble performs with support from Rachel Shearer.
Thursday 31 October – Audio Foundation
First night of performances featuring solos and collaborations with local musicians.
– Jim Denley (bass flute), John Radford (singing glasses), Jeff Henderson (harmonicas)
-Amanda Stewart (vocals), Hermione Johnson (prepared piano), Ro Rushton-Green (saxophone/violin)
– Nick Ashwood (prepared guitar), Astrolabe – Sam Longmore / James Sullivan (electronics)
Friday 1 November – Audio Foundation
Second night of performances featuring solos and collaborations with local musicians.
– Amanda Stewart – solo voice
– Jim Denley (bass flute), Phil Dadson (invented instruments), Paul Buckton (guitar)
– Nick Ashwood (prepared guitar), Anita Clark (violin), Chris O’Connor (drums)
Bio
180° is a new group formed in August 2018 – Nick Ashwood acoustic guitar, Jim Denley bass flute, and Amanda Stewart voice and text.
Amanda and Jim first met in the late 1980s founding Machine for Making Sense in 1989, as well as performing numerous duos over the years — a long and fruitful association. They’ve always been interested in what their music instinct can learn from language and vice versa.
Nick is from the southern tip of Tasmania. Jim and Nick have been developing a strong association together the last 3 years, despite the distance from Hobart to Sydney, mainly listening, playing and recording in outdoor spaces.
Nick Ashwood. Using a diversity of tuning systems and ranging from unique, tonal, geometric clusters to limitless fields of noise, percussive and timbral strategies, Nick extends the guitar and the way we experience it into new modes of being.
Jim Denley’s approach to the bass flute re-imagines the instrument, sometimes pushing it over an octave below its normal range, sometimes incorporating and abstracting approaches from his research into historical traditions from Pacific, Japanese and European trajectories. He also uses the full 180 degrees of the stereo spectrum to create new forms of listening.
Amanda Stewart is one of the few contemporary vocalists who is also a writer. Her unique approach draws on her own poetry and texts, abstracted ‘extended language’ techniques, philosophical and linguistic research as well as a diversity of experimental, extended vocal techniques ranging from tonal to noise-based strategies. Her use of live stereo creates a split voice, a split subject, where the full potentials of the voice are released into sculptural abstraction.