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 2 features a program curated entirely by legendary sound artist, composer and label owner Lawrence English and features sets from Amby Downs (Naarm), Ai Yamamoto (Naarm) and Vanessa Tomlinson (Meanjin).
Amby Downs (Naarm) Tahlia Palmer is an artist of Murri and European background born on Whudjuk Noongar Boodjar (Perth, WA), working in a variety of mediums to explore history, identity and perception. Descended from a paternal line who survived dispossession and forced assimilation (NSW+QLD), and maternal Dutch grandparents who survived WW2, her art practice works on confronting the conditions that create and perpetuate inter-generational trauma, as well as finding pathways for healing. She releases ambient/drone/noise soundscapes under the pseudonym “amby downs”, named after one of the southern QLD stations on which her Murri ancestors worked in servitude.
Ai Yamamoto's practice comes with sonic exploration and melodies. She sources sounds from her surroundings including insects, machines, animals, kitchen equipment, etc. Then, she composes with those manipulated textures and instruments to create atmospheric sound escapes. She collaborates with dancers, video artists and animators. Her recent works are commissioned by MCA for Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibition https://linktr.ee/yamamotoaimusic
She has worked with a range of sound artists, video artists and contemporary dance performers such as Lawrence English, Dan West, Ben Frost, Yumi Umiumare, Sofi Basseghi, Jeanette Hoe, Tammy Hulbert, Siying Zhou, Kiki Ando, Raceless AKA Curse of Dialect, Dave Thrussle (aka SNOG), Steve Law, Bita Fayyazi, Junko Azukawa, Antuong Nguyen, and others.
Vanessa Tomlinson is a percussionist-composer with a long history in experimental music. She proposes new futures for 21st century music including on a rockface, in the bush, sounding objects, or following flooded river systems. Central to all her work is listening - opening our ears to paying attention to the world around us as we consider space and place, the human and the more-than-human, matters of care, and matters of time. Driven by the unknown, her speculative text-based compositions, object-based re-purposing, and deep sonic gatherings stimulate our imagination as we listen in a climate-transforming world.
Vanessa's work orbits around broadly around extended approaches, site-specific investigations, minimalist reductions and a visceral sense of embodied play. She has toured the world for 30 years, premiering hundreds of works, musicking with scores of improvisers, presenting work at major international festivals, and sharing her knowledge as a teacher, mentor, director and arts advocate.
She is Professor of Music, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University.