Mono

David Shea is concerned with collage, memory, and auditory cross-pollination. The American-born composer presents a new work developing out of his Art of Memory record. Using ASR-10, he transforms disparate sound sources into a coherent pulsing. Hailing from Gifu, Japan, Craftwife performs Kraftwerk covers on her iphone. [image: Craftwife]

Tokyo-based guitarist and improvisor Tetuzi Akiyama is known for his subtle acoustic-guitar treatments. Working with feedback and tonal shaping, his performances extend the guitar's sonic capacity. From Brisbane, Ur Duo (Tam Patton and Kahl Monticone) generate flowing melodic patterns housed in a grid of coarse percussive motion. [image: Tetuzi Akiyama]

American-Australian Kraig Grady composes for microtonal acoustic instruments of his own design, including metallophones, marimbas, hammered dulcimers, and reed organs. He produces a dense, high-frequency atmosphere that, when removed, leaves a lingering impression on our hearing. Steel guitarist and MONO regular Mike Cooper performs an instrumental set of 'exotic' musics to accompany Folco Quilici's 1957 documentary Paul Gauguin. Cooper's interest in exotic music will be familiar to fans of his album Rayon Hula.

Melbourne-based group Curse Ov Dialect fuse hip-hop and world music. Music Australia Guide described them as 'tying traditional Middle Eastern and European folk, field recordings, and found sounds into a visceral, multilingual, and wildly experimental avant-hip-hop knot drawing from anything from psychedelic Turkish rock to Mandarin Opera.' Wearing traditional Macedonian costumes, they create a surreal one-of-a-kind concert experience that tears to shreds the hip-hop rule book. The New York Times described  Canadian laptoper Tim Hecker's music as 'foreboding, abstract pieces in which static and sub-bass rumbles open up around slow moving notes and chords, like fissures in the earth waiting to swallow them whole.' [image: Curse ov Dialect]

Tokyo's Aus (Yasuhiko Fukuzono) unites small melodic passages with layers of rhythm, with texture provided by field recordings gathered from his everyday surroundings. He has remixed many international acts including Tujiko Noriko, The Declining Winter, Fedaden, Northerner, The Boats, Miou Miou, and The Heart Horses, and produced foreign artists like Robert Svensson and Squares on Both Sides. Recently, he co-founded post-pop ensemble Mita Kuuluu with Gutevolk and Itoken. Tokyo's Cokiyu's suggestive melodies and sweeping emotive passages recall the pastural qualities of Iceland's Mum. From her college days, she has been creating works using the Max/MSP, composing for voice, woodwind, and percussion. She also records as a vocalist with Bichi, Aus, Eberg, and Robert Svensson. [image: Cokiyu]

Over the past twenty-five years, Francisco Lopez's concerts and installations have generated astonishing sonic universes, dissolving distinctions between industrial sounds and wilderness sounds, and creating dreadful sonic abysses. The Spaniard's iconoclastic work is grounded in a profound sense of listening. Lopez delivers one of his trademark performances in which audience members are offered blindfolds to focus their ears. Presented with Queensland Music Festival and Brisbane City Council.

Mike Cooper offers a repeat performance of his live-cinema soundtrack for The Colour of Pomegranates (microMONO7). COCA, 96 Abbott Street, Cairns.

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. The Melbourne-based duo are part instrumental concréte, part ambient drone. They use prepared viola and tabletop percussion to create sounds more akin to a modular synthesiser than acoustic instruments. Influenced by composers such as Iancu Dumitrescu and Eliane Radigue, their static, slowly unfolding textures become dappled and immersive environments, ecstatic and terrifying. Each is also a celebrated solo musician. Talia works as a percussionist and electro-acoustic performer. Rushford is indebted to classical and avant-garde traditions, having studied with composers Robert Ashley, Phill Niblock, Brett Dean, Liza Lim, and Anthony Pateras. [image: Marco Fusinato]

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]

Tenniscoats (Saya and Takashi Ueno) combine the wistful sensibilities of Japanese post-folk, the frenetic energy of free improvisation, and the harmonic unity of pop to create a unique sound. They relentlessly seek out new possibilities in unconventional musical elements: guitars played with utensils, drums massaged by hand, and voices unified in the pursuit of melody.

Japan's Shoji Hano combines the intensity of free drumming with the meditative attentiveness of the martial art of Shintaido. He transforms the drum kit's series of skins and surfaces into a vibrating wash of pulsing sound. His voice marks out the contours of his performance with yelled stops and starts as he seeks the point where chaos can be reigned in. In association with Audiopollen.

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 installation Triage, 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. American sonic conceptualist and writer Brandon LaBelle presents a spoken work.

Lucas Abela (aka Justice Yeldham) is a maverick. Previous works were conducted under various guises, including A Kombi, Dj Smallcock, and Peeled Hearts Paste, and through his band Rice Corpse. He was initially classed as an experimental turntablist, though his early work rarely resembled anything in the field: he would stab vinyl with Freddy-Kruger-style stylus gloves, bounce on electro-acoustic trampolines, drag race the popemobile across Sydney Harbour Bridge, perform duet duels with amplified samurai swords, and get hospitalised by high-powered turntables constructed from sewing-machine motors. In his current work He purses his lips against shards of amplified glass, employing vocal techniques ranging from throat singing to raspberries, feeding his sound through effects boxes. The result is cacophonous yet strangely controlled and musical. Throughout the performances, he breaks the glass on his face, changing its size and thus its pitch, often leaving him bloodied.

Hailing from Canadian prairies, Tim Olive's early musical education took in blues, jazz, reggae, and punk. A move to the city revealed free jazz, early electronic music, and Asian music. He sought to accommodate this range within the limits of rock instrumentation, but regular rhythms and tempered pitches were eventually jettisoned in favor of open forms, improvisation, and exploration of the full sonic possibilities of steel strings and magnetic pickups, his instrument moving from chest to lap to tabletop, the number and diameter of strings varying periodically.

In the early 1990s, DJ Olive (Gregor Asch), the 'Audio Janitor' became an active member of the infamous Williamsburg art scene, co-founding Lalalandia Entertainment Research Corporation and producing ambient events throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. He coined the term 'illbient'. He started two recording labels in 2000, and continues to design and produce segments from Multipolyomni's opera Quark Soup. He remains a member of Christian Marclay's turntable trio, which has performed at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Pompidou Centre, Paris; and the Philharmonia, Cologne. He continues to play dance clubs, raves, and chillout rooms throughout the world and to program Skin Tone Riddles in his Brooklyn studio S

Brandon LaBelle is a writer and artist working with sound, text, public/private space, and cultural narratives. He runs Errant Bodies Press, and collaborates regularly as e+l (with Ken Ehrlich). He is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. [image: Lucas Abela]

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 songwriting. Experimentalist guitarist 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. [image: Greg Malcolm]

Hailing from Yokohama, Toshiya Tsunoda's works bring to the fore overlooked and unheard sounds. 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 from 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]

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. [image: Abject Leader]

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]