Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music: 1930 – 1973

As a follow up to a posting from last year on Andrew Murphie and Ross Harley's "Australian Electronica: A Brief History", here's a quick alert about an interview with Clinton Green who "spent three years excavating, researching and compiling the Shame File Music’s latest release, Artefacts of Australian Experimental Music: 1930 – 1973", an archival effort that has brought "an antipodean perspective to the documentation of early electronic music".

The interview is by Oliver Laing and you can find it in the November issue of Cyclic Defrost Magazine:An Australian magazine focussing on interesting music. You can download a PDF copy of the issue here.

The same issue also has FANGIRL's interview with Burial.

The photo above is of Jack Ellitt whose Journey #1 is included in the "Artefacts" collection

"An excerpt from Ellitt’s ‘Journey #1’ opens Artefacts—its breathtaking collision of cut-up sounds, including the portentous sound of a booing crowd, perfectly demonstrates the fierce exploratory overtones of the collection. “Jack Ellitt’s music has been a real startling find, he’s basically unknown to most people. Very few artists were doing anything like this in the 1930s; it’s quite a startling bit of history on an international scale. Ellitt recorded directly onto film stock, because tape was so rudimentary at that stage. Tape recorders were basically impossible to edit or do any sort of decent long length recording on. ‘Journey #1’ has an incredible amount of editing going on, there were a few other people who were doing a similar sound collage at that stage, but nothing as way out as this recording."


1. jack ellitt "journey #1" excerpt (early 1930s)

ellitt grew up in sydney in the early decades of the twentieth century, where he met the young new zealander len lye (who would later become an important avant-garde film maker and sculptor). ellitt later worked with lye on his films in london from the early 1930s, when ellitt began to create musique concrete compositions on tape. he wrote, somewhat prophetically of contemporary sound art practice, in 1935, "when good recording apparatus is easily acquired, many people will record simple everyday sounds which give them pleasure. the next step would be to mould these sound-snaps into formal continuity" ellitt worked in film for many years and on retiring returned to australia in the 1970s where he continued to work on his sound compositions in private, eschewing attempts from the likes of stockhausen to contact him.