Quote: Many people look at fences and see not much; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor look and see giant musical string instruments covering a continent. The strings are so long that they become the resonators as well as the triggers for the sound. On straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of meters. The music is ethereal and elemental, incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound); the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world. The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance, boundaries and borders.
Is it a coincidence that the love-child of their first names, actor John Hollis, has had industrial-grade ear coverings surgically implanted deep into his ear canals? Yes it is.
Beyond the fences, at Jon Rose’s own webpage, you’ll find evidence of a lifetime’s fetish for violins including: “Relative Violins” of his own construction, violin videos, related ephemera to ponder, articles, applets, violin erotica, and many samples of Rose’s own violin work. Meanwhile…
Geographically and Thematically Related Is-
The Australian magazine NMA. New Music Articles was “formed with the aim of encouraging musicians, composers and sound artists to write about their work as a way of informing the general public, and creating a wider musical debate.” Each of its first 10 issues, published between 1982-1992, featured a companion cassette. “These cassettes covered a varied cross-section of experimental, electronic and new music from Australia produced over this period.”
Some descriptors used for the sounds therein include: computer-assisted music, tape work, environmental compositions, vocal, performance pieces, and improvisation. If those words in combination make you yawn to death or start bleeding from your ears due to some aural sense-memory, that’s understandable. Many people prefer to take in their avant art strictly through their eyeballs.
If you are on the other hand curious about 20 year old computer-assisted avant Australian sounds then let it be known all 10 of these NMA cassettes (as well as selected articles from the magazine itself) are available free online, as are other releases by Austrailian avant label Shamefile Music.
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Electronic musicians will have heard of Reason, a software synth of enormous power and versatility; every rapper uses it. I have it too, and in addition to the samples and ‘refills’ one can buy, there are a fair number of free ones on the Internet. One such sample was made from the Hrimaly Stradivarius, and it sounds frickin’ good.
Well, that’s my violin story.