Music For Libraries is a showcase of innovative Australian ambient and experimental music, riffing on the conceptual Brian Eno Ambient record series of the late 70s and early 80s and featuring the most exciting innovators and practitioners in the country.
Libraries have always been places of intense listening. Deeply communal, public spaces. where a shared, collective, unsaid agreement is made upon entering. Loud discussion is avoided and personal business is gone about quietly and privately, creating an awareness of even the smallest of environmental sounds as we navigate the space.
It seems a logical, thematic extension of the original simple but eloquent philosophical framework underpinning Eno’s original concept of ambient music and one we thought worth exploring. We’ve long thought Eno’s insistence that ‘….ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting’ was one particularly worth exploring within the confines of a library. To celebrate the communal elements of a library as a public space where each individual present is left to engage with the sounds presented to them by the artists performing as actively or as passively as they choose.
Edition 1 ‘Threads’ features a program co-curated by Aeddan Cox, presenter of ‘Unfurl’ on FBI Radio, and Lazy Thinking. Feat. Lisa Lerkenfeldt (Naarm), Luca Forcucci (Suisse) and Banana (Gadigal)
Lisa Lerkenfeldt is an Australian composer and performer. Her endless piano and tape loop variations dissolve time through collages of decayed ambience, analogue manipulation and cyclic structure. Informed by patience and a tactile elegance, Lerkenfeldt has been working with extended durations and electroacoustic techniques since her debut ‘A Liquor Of Daisies’ on Shelter Press in 2020.
Banana is M. Hopkins & Alexandra Spence, two sound artists/musicians living and working on Wangal and Gadigal land. Together they have developed a tactile, circular and displaced way of working with sound and space, using small instruments, domestic objects, and electronic devices to play, record, listen, forget, transcribe, then play, record, listen, forget, transcribe, then play… Banana have presented their work with More Mars, Infant Tree, Mappa, Liquid Architecture, Make It Up Club, Café Oto, & more. “Spence and Hopkins have a knack for exploring without digressing, keeping their focus while never limiting themselves.” Marc Masters, Bandcamp.
Luca Forcucci is a composer, artist and researcher, who investigates sonic perception in relation to space, memory, subjectivity and consciousness. His work combines electroacoustic aesthetics, field recordings, live electronics, sound installations, texts, photography, video, architecture, art and science research.