What are the forces currently driving improvised music in Australia? American music writer Bill Shoemaker, editor of the online journal Point of Departure, asked four leading practitioners to address the question in relation to their own work.
Tony Buck, Jim Denley, Anthony Pateras and Clayton Thomas discuss the role of place, international connections and the search for an individual voice.
Bill Shoemaker: Granted, using nationality in any way to identify artistic movements is problematic; but, given its size, its distance from Europe and North America, and the vigorous self-reliance that Australians are generally portrayed as having in abundance through mass media to the rest of the world, it would follow that Australian improvised music, its polemics and its political history would be somewhat different than the European endeavor to clear the shadow of American cultural hegemony and the American project to create a viable counterculture. From your respective vantages, what have been forces driving improvised music to its current state and status in Australia and how has your work been informed and propelled by these ongoing processes?
Jim Denley: I don’t want to play up the nationalist issue because I think wherever you live in the world you have deep internationalist influences and commitments, and also cogent local influences, priorities, histories and commitments. It’s almost what our job description is in this 21st Century. Make a music that reflects our current reality, you live in local communities and also an international one — in fact I’d say that improvised music is possibly the music methodology that has been and will be best placed to deal with this. Ultimately we have to show it is not a dichotomy or a dilemma.
While it would be true to say there was much that influenced me growing up in Wollongong in the Illawarra, Australia, that would have influenced John Butcher or Xavier Charles, it’s also true to say that there were then, and are now, differences. We could hear on disk anything we wanted to get our hands on, but we could rarely see those things live, and the live acts that I was deeply influenced by, the northern hemisphere has no knowledge of.
For example, as a teenager, Teletopa, a noise / impro group formed by David Ahern (after his experience working with Scratch and Cardew in England) was in retrospect, my most important influence. It was just as radical and exploratory as other similar groups of the era operating in the UK or Roma. I heard a tape of this group last week, (for the first time in about 35 years) and like other great Aussie groups (**The Necks**) it has particular flavors that I recognize as being from this place. How you articulate those flavors is interesting and difficult.
But I think there are other potent influences in how you conceive of music that are harder to define. The land, the sea, the air, the birds, the animals, – the sounds of Australia – are different to the sounds of other continents. Australian religion believed that the spirit of a place entered you at conception. I can’t avoid the power of the places that inhabit me.
If then we strive to make a life of honest and intelligent musical play and toil, that spirit will become manifest, whether we like it, strive for it, or not.
There is also another factor – we are aware of our provincial status in the world, politically and culturally. We are bombarded with media that has a strong northern hemisphere centric view of the world, and we react with and against that. Some of us want to play like Jap noise, some like Euro free, sometimes we are for LBJ and some are against Bush’s war. Some of us want to create a new accent, to differentiate us from youse.
Read the full discussion on The Point of Departure website.
