This is the last post to this site… I have a new one, a new domain and whole heap of new stuff online including videos from the Toy Satellite archive, archived recordings of various collaborations, open licensed content and a project wiki, largely dedicated to my various compositions and sound works.

New site: http://agarton.org/

New rss feed: http://agarton.org/feed/

Under the hood I’m running WordPress, Mediawiki and Darwin streaming server.

My podcasts are now on their own site and Secession has a wiki to. We are now an entirely virtual company.

Podcast: http://podcast.secession-records.org/.

Secession wiki: http://wiki.secession-records.org/

See you there

Andrew

Arrived in Vienna this morning stiff and achy. There’s far too little leg room in Austria Airlines flights. I’d promised myself I’d not fly with them any more, but hard to tell who’s flying who with all the carrier deals going. I thought I’d be on Thai Air, but they took me from Melbourne to Bangkok only.

I’ll be based in Graz for at least a couple of months with plans for a white Christmas, the first ever, with family here. It’s been a long while since I’ve worked on a gallery piece. The ESC Gallery is giving me that opportunity with my new installation, Nothing Known. When I think about it, I’ve had more invitations like this from Austria than any other country and certainly far more than at home.

Kenyah elder, Sarawak

I want to put the faces of indigenous Sarawak on large screens, the larger the better. At very slow frame rates one will see the faces shown in detail, in close up with the camera tracking over contours of skin, facial outlines, eyes…

I’d learnt in Sarawak that archiving cultural knowledge, indigenous cultural knowledge does little to protect it. It becomes remembered in research, coffee table chatter, gossip… the deepest transmission occurs through presence… physical, immediate presence. The songs, the dances, hunting, farming, the stuff of life, accumulated generational knowledge, wisdom… from what I’d seen, from the interviews we had with the eldest people in one of the Bidayuh Kampongs, one generation is all it takes to lose their story-tellers and musicians.

The story was the same in South Africa. Meeting the anthropologist Barbera Tyrrell (on her 94th birthday!) it was clear her attempt to record traditional and ceremonial garments from many African tribes was but a drop in the proverbial ocean. She’d told me that there were few people in the various Diaspora on the continent that could remember what their own people had worn let alone danced in at least one to two generations past.

More when I’m less tired and a charged laptop…

Today Secession Records is 10 years old. The 22nd of September 1998 Secession launch was a lively event hosted by Toy Satellite on Smith Street, Fitzroy with a cast of firsts under that hood.

Founder of Synesthesia Records, Mark Harwood, played his first gig there and John Power lit up the venue with his first projected, live video mix.

The launch was video streamed to an international audience of enthusiasts and I was engrossed in a generative Lost Time Accident performance that kicked off our first release, a series of generatively composed works titled, Age to Wonder At.

From 1999 to 2000 Secession ran the ESC experimental sound and music series and produced the Unseen / Unheard interactive audio visual sessions in Melbourne.

We co-produced the Return to Timor millennium eve concert in Aliu, East Timor and contributed to the formative years of the This Is Not Art Festival.

In 2001 Secession artists performed Undercurrents at the opening of the Taipei International Arts Festival. Undercurrents was also performed at the Fringe Fashion Awards, Melbourne International Film Festival, Multimedia Asia Pacific Festival and This is Not Art.

We believe we may have even published the first podcast out of Australia. In November 2004 we commenced Sound Information with the release of Some Rights Reserved works destined for use by podcast producers the world over. We had also been a Creative Commons early adopter.

In 2004 Ollie Olsen and Steve Law joined me at the helm… we released some works online, but joint releases are yet to come – personal stuff, 21st century stuff… the stuff of life hindered and expanded us.

Secession has consistently applied itself to music and sound works that extend the capabilities of our artists, that challenges and excites, that inspires and reflects the common attributes of diversity in a world suffering the dynamics of economies that deplete natural resources and enclose creative and cultural endeavour in protections that stifle innovation, breeding sameness and a dangerously dull, careless society.

Proposed for book launch presentation at The MAK (Museum fuer Angewandte Kunst / Museum for Applied Arts), Vienna, 21 October 2008. Commissioned by KunstRadio.

GRIT #02 – Illusions of Homogeneity / Illusionen von Homogenität

Performance for solo voice, oral microphone, hard curve saturation and open licensed visuals.

Homogeneity means “being similar throughout”. What homogeneity brings to societies is an illusion. Sameness is celebrated. Difference is discarded. It is a monoculture, a folly. Sameness will be our undoing.

• Reference: wikipedia.org (Homogeneity)
• GRIT #01 – open licensed photo, video and sound collage by Andrew Garton

Garton @ Soup

On the eighth day of the eighth month of two thousand and eight I performed an entirely new solo set to mark the launch of my new album, Son of Science.

At 11 pm I stepped into one of the simplest set up’s I’ve used in years, tipping into the unknown at Soup, the undisputed underground venue for Tokyo’s noise and ambient scene. The ideas for the piece were first formulated in Brisbane when working on the recent Terminal Quartet piece, Licht Drift.

The delivery was more in keeping with my former Fierce Throat pieces and was an entirely enjoyable, if but intense experience to realise! I was to play some acoustic guitar treatments, but couldn’t stop the PA from feeding back… I was perched just above the sub! Guitar will have to wait!

Listen to Tokyo Lagoon.

The entire evening was a splendid, reverberant evening of new, fresh and solid sound works from the crew at Soup, including the delightful Paul(ie) Dunphy (aka Evil Penguin).

Shot Bar

Japanese service staff are so eager to assist, to ensure one is more than adequately served that it is a wonder, in their exuberance, they do not break! It has been said many many times that the Japanese are efficient. Today, Day 01 of the iSummit, I could do with a healthy dose of efficiency to bolster the headache incurred at the hand of the Shot Bar’s skilled shaker of an 800 Yen Martini.

The iSummit kicked off with a pro-active presentation and welcome introduction from Heather Ford, diving straight into global issues and the scope, the urgent need for open strategies to address them.

Heather was also quite direct about the global instrumentalities and institutions that have been largely ineffective in dealing with the very real problems we face… climate change, poverty, land use. Heather points to the need for open commons frameworks, open commons innovations, broad open commons protections to not only provide solutions to our problems, but to support ongoing development in general. Perhaps we need to understand what we mean by development in the context of global and local crisis? If we are to tackle climate change for instance, we need to address consumption and excess… but I digress.

Today Pavel Antenov and I begin work on the Identifying the Commons video. Unfortunately, one of the two camera’s I came here with has not lasted the distance. So, we’re down to one camera and a lot of people to interview… in essence, we are seeking to know what people at the iSummit understand as the commons, what they feel constitutes an information commons and finally, what are the concerns of developing countries in relation to the information/knowledge commons?

One of 2 remaining elders

Eighty three year old elder, one of two remaining in Kampong Danu, under an hours drive west of Kuching… regrettably, many of the Kampongs have lost their last generation of story tellers and musicians. He could recall only one folk tale, that of a village that had entirely vanished leaving only a stone that is said to be a woman that had turned to stone.

He could, however, remember, as a very young man, seeing deer eat flower buds from his house of an evening… shine a torch out the door and animals would be every where… The land was abundant then. He had also worked for the Japanese, building an airstrip for a few cents a day.

He also remembered playing in the caves as a child. There are large caves in that area, within an hours walk or so from Kampong Danu, some of which take one from one side of the mountain, visible from the Kampong, to the other.

The last performance of the Terminal Quartet took place in Brisbane, at the State Library of Queensland, 24 June. A recording of that performance, featuring Lawrence English, Andrew Kettle, Julian Knowles and myself, is now available online:

Licht Drift MP3 Download

• http://secession-records.org/tq/

Licht Drift Podcast

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/secession

It’s 3 am and I’ve just about completed the first in this micro docs series. It’s in fact the second episode based on data I’d pulled from the Bengoh Dam Environment Impact Assessment (EIA).

It was curious to find a decent listing of protected species such as bats, but no mention what so ever of the pitcher plants we had seen along the track, some of which I’d shot and you’ll see in this series. Also, no mention of any primates. Monkeys are known to steal fruit from the Kampong gardens and farms. I’d also seen a long tail species, which I think is a protected primate (in fact all primates are entirely protected here) caged in one of the Kampongs. They’re often kept as pets, occasionally eaten, often scared off.

They’re known to show themselves when it’s rained. We didn’t see any in the wild, so to speak, but we were inundated (a word used throughout the EIA) with mighty downpours and wind.

The EIA is detailed to say the least, but that it overlooked significant flora and fauna was quite a surprise when for us amateurs, it was clearly evident that we were walking through one of the more remarkable landscapes in this part of the world.

Okay, some may argue that shifting cultivation has destroyed the pristine nature of the landscape, but shifting cultivation is generally considered sustainable because it moves around, where as forestry will remove the entire biomass leaving both flora and fauna in a tragic state to recover from.

Ornamental fern

Here’s one such species I found in Semban, the highest of the four Kampongs.

To our left, sprouting from a cocunut shell is a unique ornamental fern of the epiphytic Lycopodium family. It’s a threatened species and is not listed in the EIA!

Although hunted infrequently in the region, the EIA made no mention of wild boar. Check out this photo I’d taken of wild boar jaw bones hunted by the Headman of Kampong Tabu Sait.

There was no mention of deer, although low in numbers, one of the villagers mentioned they’re known in the region. And not a single lizard listed despite the fact I’d seen many during the trek and eaten a monitor lizard in Kampong Rejoi!

I’m pretty happy with Episode 2! The soundtrack grew from a piece I’d started writing on Seymore’s guitar in Kamping Rejoi. You have no idea how pleased I was to see that instrument in Seymore’s house when we arrived and found we were staying there. Seymore and his wife are two of the loveliest people… He’s the local parishioner as well as the regions master bamboo bridge builder. And he plays guitar.

• Bengoh Dam EIA, pages 1 – 310 (PDF, 15 MB)
• Bengoh Dam EIA, Executive Summary (PDF, 2 MB)
• Bengoh Dam EIA, Appendices (PDF, 5 MB)

I’m working on a video project in Sarawak, yet another dam, yet another land rights dispute, yet more displaced people, yet more misery and hardship to come… will it ever end?

Headman of Kampong Rejoi

Sarawak Gone explores four remote Bidayu communities accessible by foot within an hour’s drive from Kuching, capital city of Sarawak, Malaysia. They will lose their livelihood, traditional lands and culture, their rights and heritage with the development of the controversial Bengoh Dam project.

Sarawak Gone is a micro docs series intended to raise awareness to the denigration of the rapidly dwindling societies on the island of Borneo, the native land titles at stake and the rapidly decreasing habitats for protected and endangered flora and fauna.

Micro-docs are short, 5 – 10 minute documentaries designed for online distribution and portable media devices and laptop screening events.