Liquid Architecture

A Creek Story is a newly commissioned moving image and concrete poetry work by artist Joy Zhou. Collaging text, images, and audio in a series of moving image works and gifs, Zhou builds on their interest in visually and sonically mapping the plurality of encounters one may have with such waterways and creeks on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung land.

Inspired by the hidden waterway of Williams creek that runs underneath Melbourne’s CBD, Zhou has thought up a fictional story that follows two cities — one above ground, the other buried deep underground — that are connected by The Waltzing Creek.

Joy Zhou talks through their process of active listening to form knowledge; the exploration of the Williams Creek that inspired the fictional narrative of A Creek Story; and the links formed between language, sound and environment as an action to give voice to those often unseen.

Joy Zhou is a China born emerging artist and design practitioner based in Naarm/. Informed by their background in Interior Design, Joy’s practice entails gestures of queering which unfold encounters and events that draw relationships between people, places, and spaces.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/a-creek-story

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

How can sound and listening be mobilised for understanding questions of power, capture, and extraction under networked capitalism and data colonialism?

Capture All is a multiyear collaboration between Liquid Architecture and Sarai, featuring artists, scholars, and writers based in India and Australia contributing to a series of critical intensives and dialogues, public programs and publications.

Capture All curator Laura McLean and artists, Suvani Suri, Thomas Smith, Aasma Tulika, and Shareeka Helaluddin talk through the works developed through Capture All in relation to cross-cultural exchange, scale, and technologies as well as reflecting on the shared experience and learnings that took place.

This project is contextualised by Sarai’s pioneering work on media and information, urbanism, infrastructure, media archaeology, data and law, the commons, and the public domain in South Asia, and in Liquid Architecture’s ongoing research projects, including ‘Machine Listening’, a constantly evolving platform investigating the effects of algorithmic, machinic, networked and technologised listening on our social and political lives.

Led by research curators Laura McLean (Liquid Architecture) and Mehak Sawhney (Sarai), Capture All considers Australia and India’s complex relationships to coloniality and extraction across physical and digital spaces.

A Capture All digital collection has been published in Liquid Architecture’s online journal Disclaimer featuring works from Tom Smith, Shareeka Helaluddin, Uzma Falak, Aasma Tulika, and Suvani Suri.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/capture-all

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Close collaborator, writer and experimental musician James Hazel unfurls the complex weavings of Holowell's nuanced approach to vocal composition and improvisation in Dancing on The Margins: The Manifold, Minor Voci of Sonya Holowell published on Disclaimer.

https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/dancing-on-the-margins-the-manifold-minor-voci-of-sonya-holowell

On the podcast Sonya Holowell talks through how her voice as the instrument anchors her body through multidisciplinary practice; the freedom improvisation contains in allowing mistakes to further creativity; and the use and dis-use of scores and notation.

Image: Sam Provost

Music: Sumn Conduit performing at the Blake Poetry Prize, Casula Powerhouse.

Using the poems, notes and inspirations:

Everything Must Go - Meredith Wattison

Rogue Objects - Gershon Maller

Pencils from Heaven - Kirsten Krauth

...And Since Then I Didn’t Grow Anything There - Monica Rani Rudhar

Trigon - Szymon Dorabialski

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Eva Birch talks through her shift into sound poetry; the parallel influences of Dada and psychoanalysis on her practice; and reflects on her recent performance with J, at The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent for Liquid Architecture’s Ritual Community Music series.

Eva Birch is a poet living in Melbourne on Woiwurrung country. She has published her work in Cordite Poetry Review, Sick Leave, and Un. Magazine, among others, and is the author of three chapbooks: Megalodon (SoD press, 2019), We Eat Out Together: My Heart Cam (WEOT collective, 2020), and Sun’s Window (Eva Birch and Kieren Seymour, 2021). For this performance she collaborated with J, a dj, musician and founder of the record label and publishing platform daisart.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/adam-golebiewski-eva-birch-with-j-alexandra-spence

Ritual Community Music

24 July 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Adam Gołębiewski describes how he has extended the drum kit to include mysterious and unusual objects; outlines the pleasures and difficulties of collaboration; and reflects on his recent performance at The Oratory Abbotsford Convent for Liquid Architecture’s Ritual Community Music series.

Adam Gołębiewski is an experimental musician, composer and musicologist who uses drums and self-made objects to explore the basic characteristics of sound: volume, timbre, register and time, as well as their relationship to the performer’s body. 

Image: Helena Majewska

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/adam-golebiewski-eva-birch-with-j-alexandra-spence

Ritual Community Music

24 July 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

YL Hooi talks through the convergence of genres that influence her sound, her collaborative relationship with Tarquin Manek and how her songs have evolved over time.

YL Hooi is the project of Valya Ying-Li Hooi, inhabiting a subtle and mysterious realm of furtive, dubbed-out song, sparse electronic percussion, and distant winds. Moving seamlessly from angelic song to gritty tape gunk, Hooi’s work opens onto a multitude of genres and directions while retaining a distinctly personal stamp through her obsessively zoned-out dub production tactics.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/yl-hooi-bhairavi-raman-with-nanthesh-sivarajah

Ritual Community Music

7 August 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Alexandra Spence expands on her relationship to objects and how she translates their textures and histories into sound; the development of her practice and its relation to landscape; and shares reflections on her new album Blue waves, Green waves.

Alexandra Spence is a sound artist and musician attempting to reimagine the intricate relationships between the listener, the object, and the surrounding environment. Her aesthetic favours field recordings, analogue technologies and object interventions. She holds the belief that electricity might actually be magic.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/adam-golebiewski-eva-birch-with-j-alexandra-spence

Ritual Community Music

24 July 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

Image: Joseph Mayers

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Jarrod and Nisa of Fabulous Diamonds talk through how their sound has changed over their two decade collaboration with instrumentation and genre; the influence on line music and techno-feudalism; and their delayed production flow that keeps them moving into new musical territories.

Fabulous Diamonds are the long-running duo of Nisa Venerosa and Jarrod Zlatic producing uneasy and understated chamber songs for the neo-feudal age. While in the past their music has drawn from a wellspring of dubby post-punk and bubblegum-minimalism their current approach takes its cues from twentieth century art song and contemporary sound design; tenor vocals and choralesque keyboards play atop sparse, muffled rhythms and ambiguous soundscapes.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/lyra-pramuk-fabulous-diamonds

Ritual Community Music

17 July 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

Financial support from patrons at any level has a resounding impact on our work. You can support Liquid Architecture’s weekly podcast and our online journal Disclaimer, for new thinking and writing on listening and sound through a Patreon subscription, for as little as $5 a month.

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

Folk, Noise, Electronics, Improvisation – how can radical music help us manifest new possibilities for thinking and imagine new ways of organising community through ritual behaviours, actions and languages?

Bhairavi Raman reflects on her early love for the violin, the questions that push her musical practice to new parameters, and expands on her inquiries into the space between Western and Carnatic classical music.

Bhairavi Raman is an Indian-Australian violinist, classically trained in Western and Carnatic forms. She merges concepts and techniques to express her bicultural identity, representing a formidable blend of traditional knowledge honed in India, technical mastery, musical boldness and an authentically Melbournian voice.

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/yl-hooi-bhairavi-raman-with-nanthesh-sivarajah

Ritual Community Music

10 July 2022

The Oratory, Abbotsford Convent

Presented by Abbotsford Convent and Liquid Architecture

Image: Amar Ramesh

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.

An earhole is an open meatus into the body, through which sonic subjectivities are digested and recomposed. Sound and vibration leak in and out from all orifices, connecting and entangling in the folds of bodies, disturbing those boundaries.

Today on the podcast Archie Barry and V Barratt join Frances Barrett and Debris Facility for a conversation that dissects their performances for Orifice Oriented Ontologies, a performance program for 'Meatus’ at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Orifice Oriented Ontologies focuses on fleshy void spaces, rather than materialist objects, moving with queer dis/embodiements; worm as method, digestion and intimacy; and a haptic force of the guttural. The performances respond to the conceptual and spatial prompts in France Barrett’s exhibition Meatus

An Orifice Oriented Ontologies digital collection – Worm (w)hole:

Orifice Oriented Ontologies – is published in Liquid Architecture’s online journal Disclaimer with works from the performing artists Sage Pbbt, Allison Gibbs, Archie Barry and V Barrett alongside Ander Rennick, Ivan Cheng, Jared Davis and Frances Barrett: https://disclaimer.org.au/contents/orifice-oriented-ontologies

https://liquidarchitecture.org.au/events/orifice-oriented-ontologies

Orifice Oriented Ontologies

21 May 2022

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Naarm

Presented by Liquid Architecture, ACCA and City of Melbourne

Image: Keelan O'Hehir

Produced by Mara Schwerdtfeger.

https://www.patreon.com/liquidarchitecture

For the past 20 years, Liquid Architecture has been Australia’s leading organisation for artists working with sound and listening. LA investigates the sounds themselves, but also the ideas communicated about, and the meaning of, sound and listening.