A little pre-season show at Alpha House!

The New Zealand Noise artist Noel Meek has been engaging with the Sydney scene for a few years. In the last 2 years he’s been playing regularly with Jim Denley, and when he’s been in Sydney he’s been deeply impressed with Laura Altman’s cloud tones that use clarinet and feedback. Of course Laura and Jim have played together for some years – but this will be the first time they play as a trio.

Noel Meek is an improvising electronic musician from Wellington, New Zealand. His solo work has been described as “sheer joy . . . unexpectedly bottled in analogue gizmo rituals.” (The Wire), “chaotically playful noise music,” (The Quietus) and “pretty whacked,” by Byron Coley. He has played and recorded with the likes of Sun Araw, Lasse Marhaug, Richard Youngs, Mette Rasmussen, Neil Campbell, Alexander Tucker, Tetuzi Akiyama and Bruce Russell.
A trained ethnomusicologist, Meek contributes regularly to The Wire and other underground publications, focussing on experimental music from far flung parts of the world. Through his label, End of the Alphabet Records, he promotes underground music from New Zealand and other unusual parts of the world through tapes, lathes and musicians’ publications.
“Pedals, synths, and drum machines snapping away at each other like kids in a playground . . . If anything can be described as a "symphony of noise", this tape is surely it.” – The Quietus
“Meek’s freakouts loop like a worm into your cortex and control your movements.” – Tiny Mix Tapes

Peter Blamey is a Sydney-based artist. His practice is often sound-focussed and accomplished with a minimum of means, and includes performances, videos, recordings and installations. Broadly speaking, his work explores (amongst other things) the interconnected themes of energies and residues, often through reimagining our everyday encounters with mundane materials and technologies and the physical world, and our experiences of energy generation, use and wastage.

J I M D E N L E Y wind instruments
Spontaneity, site-specificity and collaboration have been central to his work. He sees no clear distinctions between his roles as instrumentalist, improviser and composer.

In 1990 he joined Derek Bailey’s festival, ‘Company’ in London for a series of concerts. Over the decades he has played throughout Australia, Europe, The Americas, Lebanon and Japan.

In Sydney his main activity is with the Splinter Orchestra, they released ‘MUNGO’, (splitrec 27) a 3 CD set early in 2017. He is intensely interested in unusual contexts – these CDs were recorded in a desert region in far-west NSW.

In 2018 he released a new solo on Sofa 557, ‘Cut Air’. It explores his new ideas of playing the percussive flute, inspired by his love of the flute music from the Solomon Islands.

"This is music at it's most primal, enhancing the beauty of creation."
John Shand - Sydney Morning Herald.


Laura Altman is a clarinetist, improviser and composer. Born 1987 in Sydney. She is based in Sydney.

A long-standing member of Splinter Orchestra and Prophets, Laura has been an important voice in the Sydney improvised and exploratory music scene for more than a decade.

Her collaborations with Australian and international musicians have seen her perform across the country and around the world, and feature on multiple recordings, notably with trio Great Waitress. Other current projects include solo clarinet + tapes + feedback, duos with Low Flung (Couch), Monica Brooks, Melanie Herbert and Nick Ashwood, as well as folk-jazz-chamber ensemble, Chaika, and Prophets’ side-project, BB+CAM.