- The conservatory at Adelaide Botanic Garden looks like a giant silver spaceship that's crash-landed in a prehistoric jungle. Strange water birds with long black beaks stalk the ferns under towering leaves and gleaming steel. Last weekend, the feathered creatures might have wondered about the whale song, elephant calls and glacial rumbles joining the usual Australian bush chatter under the sci-fi dome. The immersive sound installation by former Cabaret Voltaire field recordist Chris Watson lay at the peaceful end of the fifth Unsound Adelaide, a three-day festival of electronic exploration that was, for the most part, much more eager to frighten the wildlife.
The 100-year-old foundations of the main venue, Thebarton Theatre, a kind of inside-out wedding-cake just a short ride across town, were tested on the opening night. Melbourne audiovisual maven Robin Fox set the bone-juddering tone with a laser-guided experience that loosened internal organs and dazzled the mind with primary-coloured light beams. The Unsound regular reversed his usual sound-makes-light performance method, instead manipulating the geometric laser shapes to blaze their own trails of sound, buzzing and swarming in distinct layers of frequencies, from shrieking crickets to seismic rumbling.
New York trance-noise provocateur Margaret Chardiet, AKA Pharmakon, upped the volume and the aggro behind a curtain of long blonde hair. Even on her first visit to Australia, her reputation for non-specific bellowing rage and dance floor confrontation preceded her. The Thebarton crowd seemed more bemused than taken aback as she threw herself from one end of the stage to the other, returning to her rig to tweak the sound of shearing sheet metal.
A sense of focused curiosity seemed to outweigh genuine excitement for Wolf Eyes, too, as they pursued a similar shock-and-awe plan of attack. Lost behind dark glasses and poker faces, the Detroit trio funnelled overdriven trumpet, cello and electronics into a ragged vortex of semi-improvised noise they've called "trip metal." (The following day, during a panel discussion at the nearby University Of South Australia campus, frontman Nate Young was happy to disown the term.)
For those who survived the late-night club sessions, the daytime discussion panels were a welcome bonus. One called "Permutations Of Performance" struck a particularly salient note. How have traditional notions of performance morphed in the electronic era? How does the modern artist embrace ideas of spontaneous creation and visual engagement while anonymously hunched over a system of samples and circuits?
The answers came thick and loud over the weekend, not least in the impenetrable smoke of Fowler's Live, the festival's late-night venue. Usually set up for hip-hop and hardcore bands, the black-walled club's soundsystem had a major production upgrade for Unsound, pushed to the limit by Finnish duo Amnesia Scanner. Delivering a cyber-rock onslaught, the mysterious pair remained virtually invisible as strobes silhouetted the crowd in dense mists of red and blue. Seemingly random words flashed in our skulls, so fast that subliminal suggestion was the only option. The result was exhilarating.
Amnesia Scanner's finest hour was still to come. Teaming up with visual artist Harm Van Den Dorpel and PAN boss Bill Kouligas, their stunning Lexachast project was a highlight of the weekend, a real-time photographic collage of human and animal ritual erupting and dissolving on a giant screen. It only fleetingly revealed the artists as towering, godlike silhouettes generating their horrific soundtrack.
The scope and intensity of that performance made the long-awaited arrival of German dub techno duo Porter Ricks—another Australian debut—feel a little deflating. Their reanimated '90s pulse certainly upped the energy on the dance floor, but if Unsound is about exploration and discovery at the electronic frontier, this sailed too close to the genre's established comfort zone.
What sticks in the mind, naturally, are the more disarming answers to Unsound's progressive brief. The layered harmonic narrative of Kara-Lis Coverdale was an unexpected trip along the borderline between prog and classical nostalgia. Holly Herndon's radical choice to breach the fourth wall between performer and audience resulted in a show that was joyous and playful—complete with jokes, love letters and advice ("leave facebook. srsly, it's ruining your life") typed by laptop accomplice Mat Dryhurst. In a dark jungle full of crashing spaceships, it's nice when a ray of sunshine filters through the smoke.
Photo credits /
Andre Castellucci - Lead, Robin Fox, Wolf Eyes, Amnesia Scanner
Eddy Hamra - Lexachast, Holly Herndon
A sense of focused curiosity seemed to outweigh genuine excitement for Wolf Eyes, too, as they pursued a similar shock-and-awe plan of attack. Lost behind dark glasses and poker faces, the Detroit trio funnelled overdriven trumpet, cello and electronics into a ragged vortex of semi-improvised noise they've called "trip metal." (The following day, during a panel discussion at the nearby University Of South Australia campus, frontman Nate Young was happy to disown the term.) For those who survived the late-night club sessions, the daytime discussion panels were a welcome bonus. One called "Permutations Of Performance" struck a particularly salient note. How have traditional notions of performance morphed in the electronic era? How does the modern artist embrace ideas of spontaneous creation and visual engagement while anonymously hunched over a system of samples and circuits?
The answers came thick and loud over the weekend, not least in the impenetrable smoke of Fowler's Live, the festival's late-night venue. Usually set up for hip-hop and hardcore bands, the black-walled club's soundsystem had a major production upgrade for Unsound, pushed to the limit by Finnish duo Amnesia Scanner. Delivering a cyber-rock onslaught, the mysterious pair remained virtually invisible as strobes silhouetted the crowd in dense mists of red and blue. Seemingly random words flashed in our skulls, so fast that subliminal suggestion was the only option. The result was exhilarating. Amnesia Scanner's finest hour was still to come. Teaming up with visual artist Harm Van Den Dorpel and PAN boss Bill Kouligas, their stunning Lexachast project was a highlight of the weekend, a real-time photographic collage of human and animal ritual erupting and dissolving on a giant screen. It only fleetingly revealed the artists as towering, godlike silhouettes generating their horrific soundtrack.
The scope and intensity of that performance made the long-awaited arrival of German dub techno duo Porter Ricks—another Australian debut—feel a little deflating. Their reanimated '90s pulse certainly upped the energy on the dance floor, but if Unsound is about exploration and discovery at the electronic frontier, this sailed too close to the genre's established comfort zone. What sticks in the mind, naturally, are the more disarming answers to Unsound's progressive brief. The layered harmonic narrative of Kara-Lis Coverdale was an unexpected trip along the borderline between prog and classical nostalgia. Holly Herndon's radical choice to breach the fourth wall between performer and audience resulted in a show that was joyous and playful—complete with jokes, love letters and advice ("leave facebook. srsly, it's ruining your life") typed by laptop accomplice Mat Dryhurst. In a dark jungle full of crashing spaceships, it's nice when a ray of sunshine filters through the smoke. Photo credits / Andre Castellucci - Lead, Robin Fox, Wolf Eyes, Amnesia Scanner Eddy Hamra - Lexachast, Holly Herndon