The Sound Barrier: Monday, 7 May 2012

Music in space - and space in music!

Coming up on the next show of The Sound Barrier: a whole lot of music about space - not just the space where the stars are, but the space in music too. There will be music that creates its own space by the way it spreads its sounds across the aural spectrum; music that creates a sense of the vastness of space, or its smallness, or even its absence. Here's just some of what you will hear:

Karlheinz Stockhausen: Oktophonie
Electronic music written to be played over eight sets of loudspeakers spread around the auditorium. The dark sound of warfare, large and frightening but inescapable - a huge, a cataclysmic, experience, even in stereo.

Nekrasov: No Room for Liberation found 'Here' or 'Now'
This music, from one of Melbourne's great noise artists, uses the stereo spectrum to entrap you with massive bomb blasts within a huge, endless black metal soundscape. This music is vast and claustrophobic at once.

Super Critical Mass: Swells
The work of Australian composers Julian Day, Luke Jaaniste and Janet McKay, Swells is written for 18 brass instruments, spread throughout the performance space. Here are huge, huge sounds, where drones and tones and overtones encircle you and overwhelm you, and space is filled, as if by a dense but brilliant fog, with the music and its reverberations.

Rhys Chatham: A Crimson Grail (Part 2)
Ambient music turned inside out by 200 electric guitars that surround you and then invade you so that the music is no longer in the background - you are.

And there will be much more too: like music for bass flute and percussion by Anthony Pateras, where, using the barest of ingredients, time and space are collapsed almost into nothingness; or a piece by Ross Bolleter, where music is disconnected over space by two performers who play simultaneously on opposed sides of the country, without hearing each other; there will be music that spreads itself across left and right, from the quiet hypnotic percussion of ping-pong balls, to the overpowering noise of Merzbow.

Make sure you tune in, or log on, to The Sound Barrier this Monday morning, 2AM - 6AM on PBS!