LIQUID
ARCHITECTURE originated in 2000
at RMIT University, when RMIT's Union Arts
offered the ((tRansMIT)) student sound collective
the chance to stage a festival promoting
the talents of ((tRansMIT)) members. Since
then, it's grown to the point where it is
now attracting top-line international guests,
while still holding true to the promotion
of local talent. Simon Sellars spoke to
festival directors Nat Bates and Bruce Mowson
about Liquid Architecture's past and future.
How has Liquid
Architecture evolved over the years?
BRUCE:
The festival has grown at the maximum sustainable
rate every year – and only just sustainable!
LA2 was a comfortable expansion, with just
a couple of interstate guests. LA3 took
on a gallery-exhibition program, larger-scale
performances and our first international
guest, Thomas Koner. LA4 was a highly successful
festival, and a lot of credit goes to Philip
Samartzis for working with us to bring
French composer/filmmaker/theorist, Bernard
Parmegiani, to Australia. Parmegiani is
a master of his art, and to have that type
of work alongside emerging artists and local
performers reminds you that what we do now
will have a different meaning in history,
one that we can't see now.
How is LA5
shaping up?
NAT:
Liquid Architecture is growing internally,
consolidating existing partnerships and
building new ones. Brisbane, in particular,
has become a major part of the festival
for us, but, essentially, our philosophy
and approach remains the same: we try to
put on things that don't get heard often,
ranging from emerging artists playing their
first gigs to major international figures.
We try to be as blind as possible to genre
boundaries every year, as a way of re-presenting
or re-contextualising something that we
find interesting.
BRUCE:
Every year we experiment with models. LA4
was about getting associates to curate sections
of the program. This year, we have a lot
more people working in specific roles doing
things that we've done ourselves in the
past. What's really clear is that there
is an immense need for infrastructure to
support the artistic activity. The art presented
in Liquid Architecture is vital and contemporary,
but it is very challenging to expand audiences
without fulltime staff, long term plans,
marketing budgets and so on. I'd say we
are at a turning point, were we either reduce
the outcomes, or push through to a new level.
What's your
approach when choosing international guests?
NAT:
The reason the international guests are
there is to get bums on seats so that the
local artists have a bigger audience than
usual; to expose audiences to something
they don't get to see or hear very often;
and to hold up the local content against
the foreign stuff in order to counter cultural
cringe and show up similarities and comparative
worth.
BRUCE: And this year we have a really mixed bunch of artists and approaches. Tony Conrad is a pioneer of really loud, bodily sound: art brains with a rock aesthetic. Pierre Bastein works with an automation orchestra. There are stacks of connotations and ideas about technology, human performance, machines and music, expressionism and the role of the composer in his work, but he doesn't talk about it – he just puts the work on. Reinhold Friedl and Michael Vorfeld present a sublime aesthetic and a highly developed approach to music, composing and performing; Reinhold leads the Zeitkratzer ensemble and has really interesting attitudes about professional music.
How did Liquid Architecture branch out into Brisbane?
BRUCE: Going to Brisbane was borne out of raw curiosity and ambition: "Hey, let's do other cities". At a cultural level, we are keen to see how other groups work and to bring Melbourne material to them. Stimulating a conversation has always been a prime objective.
Sound art can be a difficult discipline for the uninitiated. Does Liquid Architecture preach to the converted, or do you think it's genuinely opened the public's ears to new ways of listening?
BRUCE: Punters love the material – it's just a matter of getting them there and into the right frame of mind. The most common response is that the material is different, unlike what they've heard before, and that it touches something within them. We just need more resources to bring people in!
NAT: Although I know people who've had their ideas about music turned around by an AC/DC concert, so whether we go out of our way to open the public's ears to new ways of listening or not is somewhat irrelevant.
The Sydney-based What is Music? festival often has similar artists on its bill, but Liquid Architecture's program of installations and gallery projects is a substantial difference. What other points of divergence are there? Is there room for both events?
BRUCE: What is Music? trades on the 'carnival' format: the freak show comes to town. It's fun, and a good way to promote art music and bring people in. Liquid Architecture comes out of Media Arts' polytechnic approach, which in turn came from English art schools in the '70s, where the aim was to work in a variety of media, but without sacrificing expertise. But your comparison shouldn't be about Liquid Architecture versus What is Music?. It should be about experimental music, which is a very alive culture – look at what teenagers are doing with their guitars and computers at home – against the dead culture of orchestral music, opera, ballet and so on. These establishment forms only survive because of the huge sums of money, infrastructure and promotion behind them.
NAT: Comparisons with What Is Music? are inevitable because, more than any other festival, we do often share the same artists. But essentially the difference is WIM? focuses upon a specific genre – improvisation – whereas Liquid Architecture tries to present work across genres or in disregard of genres. We try and present things in a very different context. Like Bruce says, they take a wild, 'carnival comes to town' approach, whereas we are the critically serious, 'chinstrokers'.
Gail Priest wrote in RealTime that "gatekeepers dismiss whole avenues of audio art as bad music, or refuse to acknowledge the form at all". Do you see this situation changing in the very near future?
BRUCE: Not as long as these idiot 'gatekeepers' keep getting publicity.
In previous incarnations of Liquid Architecture, there was an abundance of academically orientated lectures and talks, but there seems less of that in this year's model.
NAT: It is perhaps misguided to view this year's program as having less of that than in the past. We just want to have the talks more focussed and overflowing in quality rather than quantity. Lectures and talks have been there since the start and always will be, because we come from a discussion-heavy background and value information exchange and critical debate.
BRUCE: I'm not interested in what most academic discourse has to say – as obscure as my art is, at least it occurs in public. As an academic, you are almost conversing with yourself. We have always been keen to talk and write about art in a way that is accessible, and I'd love to have more of this, but there are logistical problems. We could run as a conference, but in the end we privilege the actual art.
How does sound theory and art inform your life?
BRUCE: As a kid, if I got a toy I'd play with it for about two minutes before pulling it to bits to see how it worked. I haven't changed, and art is a way to pull parts of life to bits and see what's going on. My family has a musical background, and I gravitated toward listening as a way to closely examine the world I live in. I was talking the other day about how I find the traffic noise from the road near my house annoying, but my friend doesn't. She grew up on a busy road, me a quiet street. But my question was: is there something physically painful in the sound for me, or was that purely my personal response? The fact that life is very much about how you hear or see it interests me a lot, and I like to take it further and think about how we can make sense of co-existing with the tension between our reality and other people's.
Do you reckon film and its focus on the marriage of sound and vision has brought the art of sound design to a wider audience?
NAT: I don't agree that film focuses upon the marriage of sound and vision. In fact, the multitude of audio-visual possibilities is mostly ignored in favour of conventions working to continue satisfying expectations. This results in the most conservative of mediums: film and television.
BRUCE: Do many people appreciate the design of the chair they are sitting on?
Do you think the steady rise in the popularity of sound art and appreciation, in Melbourne especially, is due to the predominance of crap, bland electronic music in clubs and on the radio?
BRUCE: No. It's because there's a certain amount of people who are passionate about sound art, and they push it.
NAT: It's also directly related to the accessibility of technology. The means of production has become more and more available to the average person, so consequently more people making stuff means that fringe activities grow also. But you're partly right: it's like the Internet, where there's an abundance of information suddenly available but so much of it is crap you don't need. Do
you see yourselves as non-musicians, in
the Brian Eno sense: that is, someone who's
perhaps more of a conceptual thinker than
a trained musician?
NAT: I don't see these as mutually exclusive categories. And I don't see intuitive art practice as being a lesser practice. I just happen to really enjoy critical thinking and debate and I want to work on a festival that promotes that.
BRUCE: Yes. I don't have much dexterity – my guitar licks are limited – but I like the working method visual artists adopt. I've given up categorising things as music/sound/art/noise.
What do you make of the rise and rise of MP3 and music trading? The whole concept of making a record and selling it is going down the gurgler, so how does a sound artist survive in such a day and age?
NAT: It's a major mistruth perpetrated by the recording industry that artists depend upon record sales as their major source of income. In actual fact, it's touring that rakes in the big bucks, and in many mainstream instances, merchandising. In that respect, for an independent artist making non-mainstream sound it is of little real consequence should the recording industry dissolve. Independent self distribution, always the best alternative, has just become a little easier.
BRUCE: I love MP3. Get rid of record company executives with stacks of money. Bruce, I'd like you to have the last word. In Nat's essay Hotel Womb, he wrote that he considers much of the music he listens to as an "acoustic uterine wall". Do you share that view?
