Mono

Melbourne art-hop renegades Curse Ov Dialect and Canadian laptoper Tim Hecker. MONO: Expansive Sonic Environments, Intersecting Audiospheres, Singularity of Sound, curated by Lawrence English (::Room40::).

Over the past twenty-five years, Francisco Lopez's concerts and installations have generated astonishing sonic universes. The Spaniard's personal iconoclastic work is grounded in a profoundsense of listening, through which he seeks an absolute transformation of reality through sound. López will deliver one of his trademark performances in which audience members are offered blindfolds to focus their ears while he recontextualises sound materials. A not-to-be-missed, once-in-a-lifetime sonic experience! Presented with Queensland Music Festival and Brisbane City Council. 

As Optrum, Tokyo-based artist and curator Atsuhiro Ito explores an intense almost coma-inducing haze of flickering light and noise using his self-designed amplified fluorescent-light instrument. He teams up with Australia's most unusual rhythmic force Robbie Avenaim, for an all-out sensual assault. Presented in conjunction with Audiopollen, MONO6 plays host to the launch of Audiopollen's Ready, Fire, Aim festival, a culmination of all things underground. [image: Atsuhiro Ito]

Italian-based post-everything musician Mike Cooper creates a live soundtrack to Paradjanov's lauded film The Colour of Pomegranates (1968). Cooper writes, 'This ravishingly beautiful film was originally refused an export license, and banned by Soviet authorities for religious sympathies and lack of conformity to the strict socialist realism of the former Soviet Union. Paradjanov was arrested in December of 1973 and sentenced to five years hard-labor camps, charged with rape and homosexuality. His extraordinary film traces the life of eighteenth-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova ('The King of Song'), but with a series of painterly images strung together to form tableaux corresponding to moments of his life rather than any conventional biographic techniques. Pomegranates bleed their juice into the shape of a map of the old region of Armenia, the poet changes sex at least once in the course of his career, angels descend: the result is a stream of religious, poetic and local iconography which has an arcane and astonishing beauty.' [image: The Colour of Pomegranates]

Fresh from his inclusion in Sonic Youth's Sensational Fix exhibition, Melbourne-based artist and musician Marco Fusinato heads to Brisbane to debut material from his forthcoming album Ripping Skies , on American label No Fun Productions. An exploratory guitarist, he creates massive washes of caustic vibration. Joining him are electro-acoustic scouts Joe Talia and James Rushford who seek out the exotic and erratic terrain of their instruments. They are purveyors of stasis: part instrumental concrete, part alien drone. [image: Marco Fusinato]

September is a month of MONO, with sound events in the gallery and across the Valley as part of Valley Fiesta. Joining forces for a night of sonic extremity on 12 September are Lucas Abela (who plays an amplified sheet of glass), Robin Fox (with his double-laser), Japan's Tim Olive (who explores the boundaries of electro-acoustic improvisation), and Brisbane's Blank Realm. Also, 12-14 September at TCB, catch American DJ Olive's Triage installation, also seen at this year's Whitney Biennial.  And, on Thursday 25 September, Melbourne-based audio/visual duo Philip Samartzis and Marcia Jane debut their new work Trace, which backtracks through their personal video history, coating pulsing painterly images with abstracted sounds, and American writer and sonic conceptualist Brandon LaBelle presents a spoken work. [image: Lucas Abela]

The martial art of Shintaido informs Japan's Shoji Hano's unique style of improvised drumming. Hano transforms the drum kit from a series of skins and surfaces into a vibrating wash of pulsing sound. In association with Audiopollen.

Italian-based Hawaiian-guitar maestro and improviser Mike Cooper performs a score to Kaneto Shindo's film Onibaba. The film is set in sixteenth-century Japan, where hardened middle-aged woman and her young daughter-in-law have turned predator to survive, murdering soldiers who wander into the sea of pampas grass surrounding their hut and selling their weapons for rice. When their war-deserter neighbour returns home and makes his moves on the young woman, their numb equilibrium is complicated by greed, jealousy, and lust. The consequences are terrible.

New Zealand songwriter/composer Dean Roberts has secured a rare position somewhere between post-rock icon and eclectic master of electronics. His recent work with Autistic Daughters stakes out a deeply original approach to song-form. Guitar experimentalist Lukas Simonis is known for his legendary Worm project in Rotterdam. Valerio Tricoli, from Italy, performs for the first time in Queensland. [image: Dean Roberts]

Iceland resident, Bjork collaborator, and current icon of the European post-electronic sound, Ben Frost is coming to Brisbane for his first show in years! His new album Theory Of Machines has created quite a stir, and, alongside his recently re-pressed Steelwound, seems to be further proof that he is onto something unique with his densely textured works. Percussionist Chris Corsano will be joining the bill. From rolling with the free-folk scene (Sunburned Hand Of The Man, MV+EE and Tower Recordings), through Free Jazz (Evan Parker, John Edwards and Paul Flaherty), Noise (Vampire Belt, Jim O, Thurston Moore and Dream Aktion Unit +++) and onto the big stages playing in Bjork's live band, Corsano has fired sparks of invention. His solo sets are jaw-dropping displays of technical prowess and advanced musicality. [image: Ben Frost]

From New Zealand’s North Island comes Rosy Parlane, renowned for his collaborations with Fennesz and others, as well as his epic, swelling albums for UK label Touch. From the South Island comes Greg Malcolm, whose recent multiple-guitars work places him at the centre of a growing array of musicians exploring the potential of experimental performance techniques. The night is rounded out with intimate solo keyboard works by expat Aucklander Leighton Craig. 

For the third MONO, we gather some of the world's leading field-recordists for an evening of abstracted environmental sounds and imagined audio landscapes. Hailing from Yokohama, Toshiya Tsunoda's works bring to the fore overlooked and unheard sounds and spaces. Joining him are leading American phonographer Loren Chasse (whose field recording approach highlights unusual ways in which sound might be drawn from environments and objects) and Netherlands-based surround-sound musician and composer Martijn Tellinga (who performs two electro-acoustic works spun around a compositional framework that has been extracted out of extra-musical information plotted within a variety of musical spaces). During his stay in Brisbane Toshiya Tsunoda will also collaborate with Lawrence English on a work for Grey Water. [image: Toshiya Tsunoda]

The second event in our Mono series brings together three sound artists involved in sound/space interaction, each presented in a different space. Japanese-resident Swiss-born Christophe Charles has been responsible for a number of outstanding textural electronic records for such labels as Sub Rosa, Atak, and Mille Plateaux/Ritornell. He is known for his detailed surround-sound pieces. This is his first concert in Brisbane. Melbourne's Rod Cooper's music is resolutely physical and sculptural, using unique his handmade instruments. Brisbane audio-visual unit Abject Leader's film installations are set against divergent music concrete soundscapes.

Expanding on his earlier work with oscilloscopes, visualising sound signals, Melbourne's Robin Fox delivers the premiere performance of his synasesthetic high-tech integrated laser-sound experiments. Fogging up the gallery, his sound-directed laser draws lines and cuts planes through space. For a complete contrast, veteran composer, performer and instrument maker, Melbourne's Ernie Althoff performs with his low-tech sound-making gizmos. Scattered across the floor, they offer a landscape of sonic opportunities. Althoff's quirky work is an exercise in lateral thinking, or lateral hearing. [image: Robin Fox]