Chronox

About

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:34:25 PST

Chronox create hypnotic, playful environments using slowly evolving layers of rhythm, motion, shape and colour. Creating works across music, installation and publication since 2008, Chronox have exhibited in such forums as MONA FOMA, PICA and the Now Now.

chronoxhq@gmail.com

Big in Japan

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:34:16 PST

Thousand £ Bend
Melbourne VIC

A Bunch of Twos

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 19:32:18 PDT

A series of four evening performances curated by Eamon Sprod and Camilla Hannan featuring local sound and visual artists working in duos.

westspace.org

Photography by Kelly Fliedner.

West Space
Melbourne VIC

Gwandalan C22

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 19:28:49 PDT

Available from Dungeon Taxis.

Dungeon Taxis 19
Edition of 100

Black Market

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:25:54 PDT

Gasometer
Collingwood VIC

USA Tour 2011

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 19:20:29 PDT

With Rodney J. Cooper, Das Butcher and Nutchild. Map.

San Francisco CA
Portland OR
Austin TX
New Orleans LA
Gainesville FL
Miami FL
Jacksonville FL
Atlanta GA
Asheville NC
New York NY
Boston MA

Mycetozoa Sound Marinade

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:17:11 PST

1/81 Bouverie St
Carlton VIC

Unclassified

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:15:59 PST

Curated by Gillian Brown and Rachel Feery. With Roy Ananda, Jarrah de Kuijer, Alanna Lorenzon, Riki-Metisse Marlow and Charles O’Loughlin.

Dianne Tanzer Gallery
Fitzroy VIC

CHRONOX (Liquid Architecture 11)

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 19:12:01 PDT

1/81 Bouverie St
Carlton VIC

Dan Rule: “Around the Galleries”

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:33:01 PDT

From: The Age, A2, June 12, 2010.

WHAT Chronox
WHERE Lamington Drive, 89 George Street, Fitzroy, 8060 9745, lamingtondrive.com

While there is a technical, mathematical fascination to Chronox – the collaborative installation project of Lachlan Conn and Michael Prior – its resonance is one of a far more esoteric, otherworldly character. In the darkened gallery space, a ceiling-mounted data projector intermittently illuminates a loose, grid-like arrangement of geometrical sculptures on the floor with gently pulsing, spinning light configurations that drift in and out of phase. Three turntables, set in the far corners of the space, play vinyl records pressed with locked, fragmentary sound loops, their undulating rhythms finding an unlikely synchronicity with the projections and one another. The magic lies herein. Even when we change tracks on each of the record players – lift the stylus and lower it to another loop – a new, slightly altered synchronicity forms amid the shuffling sounds and soft, purple light. No matter the combination of sonic and ocular rhythms, this glowing world in miniature evidences a new, interlocked cadence. It is as if we’ve entered the unwitnessed mechanisms of time itself; a world in parallel, unaffected by the rotation of the globe and passing of the seasons. Chronox is a virtuality that transcends the arbitrary ticking of a clock. It is a world that exists between the cracks.

Wed to Fri 11am–6pm, Sat noon–5pm, until July 3.

The Age

CHRONOX (Lamington Drive)

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 20:28:31 PDT

Prints from this show are available at Lamington Drive

Lamington Drive
Fitzroy VIC

Andrew Harper: “Looping and Shimmering”

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:23:02 PDT

MONA FOMA Festival of Art & Music, Hobart.

From: Realtime 96

RATHER THAN INVENTING A THEME FOR THE 2010 MONA FESTIVAL OF ART AND MUSIC, CURATOR BRIAN RITCHIE SEEMS TO HAVE ACCESSED PERFORMERS AND MATERIAL HE THOUGHT MIGHT BE INTERESTING OR FUN, FOR AUDIENCES TO EXPERIENCE PRETTY MUCH AS THEY WISHED. YOU COULD HAVE ATTENDED NOTHING BUT THE MANY EVENTS IN THE PRINCESS WHARF NO.1 SHED, OR AVOIDED THAT SPACE ENTIRELY, AND STILL FELT TOTALLY IMMERSED IN THE FESTIVAL. AND EVEN WHEN MONA FOMA WAS ARCHLY CEREBRAL, IT WAS PLAYFUL.

John Cale’s presence in Australia is not unprecedented, though Hobart is not really somewhere you’d expect to see him, so his near ubiquitous presence on posters, programs and in performances was astonishing enough before we even got to the content. Labeled “Eminent Artist in Residence” for the festival, he came with a five-screen video installation, Dyddiau Du (Cale’s native Welsh for Dark Days), a very talented young band and varying styles of musical performance. Coming directly to Hobart from the Venice Biennale, Dyddiau Du describes a haunted Wales, mixing long meditative shots of empty rooms, ancient and abandoned stone dwellings, intense close-ups of Cale trudging uphill, breathing hard and finally, some kind of water torture. The images bled out over an hour in a darkened room with a concrete floor. It was cold and uncomfortable, which seemed the intention.

A spirit of endurance was also needed for the grueling intensity created by Michael Keiran-Harvey in his astonishing piano work, 48 Fugues for Frank, at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Influenced by one of music’s great individualists, Frank Zappa, Keiran-Harvey attacked the piano with the vigour of an athlete. Like the music or not, the commitment to the work and virtuosity on display were undeniable, and at times breathtaking. A group of Hobart artists and curator Leigh Hobba, reacted to Keiran-Harvey’s composition, Zappa and the space itself, creating an exciting and witty four-floor installation. Rob O’Connor’s large, colorful F-for-Frank series lay in the dust of the basement’s earth floor, Aedan Howlett’s swirling street style paintings hung from pillars, Mat Ward (a certified Zappa fanatic) sifted through lyrics and filled the top floor with luridly bright sharks, pygmy ponies and poodles while Michelle Lee stretched a shadow along the floor and up the wall into an image of a pianist’s hands. Harvey raced between floors playing instruments, his performance then relayed to his seated audience by camera.

Site and spatial relations between audience and performance were a feature of the festival more generally, with spaces used in unusual ways throughout. In Abe Sada: Sade Abe 1936, Perth artist Cat Hope generated continent shifting feedback bass noise in a storeroom directly under the Peacock Theatre audience, so one had the odd but not unpleasant sensation of vibration coming through the floor and into the seat. That these sounds were felt rather heard was not new, but the context refreshed the idea. Not content with that exploration, Hope did it again, getting an orchestra of bass instruments, played by a collection of local musicians, to create a vast field of sound in the Princess Wharf through which the audience could wander or lie back in and be bathed in sound.

The Chronox installation by Michael Prior and Lachlan Conn was located in the Sidespace of the Salamanca Arts Centre for the festival’s duration. Cheekily described as a machine for “travelling to the present,” the work obliterates space and time with repetition created from sound and animated projection. An engaging and beautiful work, Chronox invites the audience to interact by altering the looping vinyl records that provide the sound—pick up the tone arm, carefully put it down again. As I succumbed to the hypnotising loops and glowing shapes, the edges of the room appeared to wander off into the dark.

Next door, in the Long Gallery, Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning’s humorous moving sculptures—all fan engines playing drums and driving amplifiers—came alive with a brief, clever performance. Attached to a spinning fan motor, a thin rope whirled along the wooden floor, responding to objects placed in its path—plastic, paper, garbage and metal. It seemed frantic and uncontrolled, but a second viewing revealed a sense of composition and even narrative—from scurrying to fluttering to a bell-like shimmer. This small work remains in the memory.

Kinetic sound production on a more ambitious scale was the focus of Pursuit, a performance that transformed the Princess Wharf Shed into a singing bicycle track. Jon Rose, Robin Fox, Rod Cooper and Paul Bryant, all seasoned creators of new noise, directed a squadron of bike enthusiasts on a looping chase around the shed while the audience watched from the middle. The bikes had been altered to make sounds and some looked a little crazy, but as they scraped and squeaked and honked about the space, music emerged: this bike and its horn came and went at controlled intervals; new bikes emerged making new sound; one chap rode about with a camera atop his helmet, giving the audience a perspective from within the work. While each sculpted bicycle had its own sound and character, the effect of the whole thing grew, swelling into an ecstatic moment when all the bikes rang their bells, echoing all the other loops and shimmering sounds to be found elsewhere in the festival’s program.

MONA FOMA 2010 was a huge mixed bag of art and ideas. It was totally different from 2009, and there’s no doubt that 2011, when the actual Museum of Old and New Art reveals its contents, will be just as surprising. If there’s anything this festival is about, keeping people guessing would seem to be it.

MONA FOMA, Festival of Music and Art, curator Brian Ritchie, Hobart, Jan 8-24 http://www.mofo.net.au

Realtime
Issue 96

CHRONOX (First Draft)

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 18:43:14 PDT

First Draft
Surry Hills NSW

Kings Relaunch

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:35:02 PST

Kings ARI
Melbourne VIC

Adrian Elmer: "The Now Now Festival 2010"

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:26:20 PST

From: cyclicdefrost.com

Not even the 867m ascension up the Blue Mountains was enough to ward off the sweltering 42˚ heat. It didn’t take long for Michel Doneda to work up a sweat, opening the second day of the annual Now Now Festival of Spontaneous Music. Applying extended technique to his soprano and (I think) soprillo saxophones, his half hour of sometimes phantom playing, sometimes gurgling and guttural, was an excellent set to establish some of the parameters that would be explored over the following 7 hours. Not being a sax player myself, it felt as though much of what might be amazing passed well over my head. I’m certain there were some sounds he produced which were technically extraordinary, but my frames of reference always had me thinking in terms of sound association – plumbing, didgeridoo, air valves. No doubt this undermines Doneda’s achievement, but what is a non-sax player to do? The academic austerity managed to disperse as Doneda progressed, however – a brief interlude with a bothersome fly at one spot allowing wry smiles across the room, and the amassed range of the performance appreciated by way of the rapturous applause at its conclusion.

The audience was then ushered into the Wentworth Falls School of Arts main theatre, where a quartet performance on a collection of Kraig Grady’s hand built microtonal instruments. The showpiece of the performance was undoubtedly the Super-Large Vibraphone, built from metal plates suspended over large metal pipes which, by the time all four members were gently hammering away, created an immense swarm of deep harmonics which filled the theatre. The four then gradually moved on to different microtonal xylophones and a pump organ. The loosely scored piece paced through distinct movements as instruments were changed and rhythms adjusted. It was a pulsing, vibrant work. It contrasted with Doneda in that the sound was primary over technique, even though the players obviously had an expert grasp on what they were doing. This was undoubtedly one of the high points of the day’s activities.

An Australian/Norwegian quintet of Laura Altman on clarinet, Rory Brown on prepared double bass, Aemon Webb on electronics, Kim Myhr mostly on classical guitar and Espen Reinertsen on tenor sax were back in the centre’s front room. Obviously less experienced from their young age, the quintet never quite scaled breathtaking heights or found new sonic terrain, but there were many sparks to hold interest – a segment of sax and electronics interplay where the source of each sound became blurred; some of the sudden bangs of Brown’s bass adding excitement; the visual spectacle of Altman’s homemade clarinet mute held in place by her feet.

The next piece was the most theoretically rigorous but, conversely, probably the least musically successful. The premise is that the players, tonight consisting of Abel Cross on electric bass, Adrian Klumpes on synth, Tony Osbourne on vocals, Hirofumi Uchino on noise guitar and Claire Herbert and Fred Rodrigues on controlling laptop, do their regular improvisation, but the audience is at liberty to make their own contributions. Titled the SIMS Project, the work is an interactive one, with the audience invited to control the turning on and off of four different effects processes for each instrument player. As these four improvise, audience members SMS specific words to the main laptops and these instructions act as on/off switches. An interesting concept, but the outcome was largely forgettable. The prescribed effects were very severe – pitch shifters, bit crushers and the like- which had the effect of removing any shreds of subtlety from the performance, particularly when applied pretty much at random. The players themselves seemed to struggle with their prescribed roles. Cross’ bass was pitch-shifted up for the majority of the performance so he was unable to find his own space in the sonic field. For just a few minutes he was able to give a low, rumbling grounding and this was easily the most potent section of the performance but was cut abruptly once someone in the audience pitch shifted his sound back up again. Klumpes spent much of the performance sitting back with a look of consternation on his face and, even more tellingly, at one stage pulled out his own phone and began texting in order to try to get a sound he was happy with.

Quintet Experimenta from Argentina were the day’s other great highlight. Not only did they supply a series of relatively short, distinct improvisations but they utilised an idea often neglected in improvisation circles – performing to an audience. At times this came by way of the physical nature of their instrument play. Adriana de la Santos climbed all around her prepared grand piano,even spending one track perched underneath to create sounds. Zypce moved up and down his home made percussion instrument, a sort of mutant workshop tool with its range of bits amplified by contact mics. At others it was just the exuberance of losing themselves in the sound, but it gave visual focus (something that was slightly diluted by the couple of brief video projections). At times they ventured into regular rhythms, at others noisy washes. There was constant light and shade across their set with each member contributing discernibly and significantly. These were well seasoned improvisors. They worked within established parameters for each piece, but this gave their set the ability to jump around without becoming disjointed. The little flourishes, like Zypce finishing one track by playing back a recording of it created in situ on his mobile phone or Grod Morel (on sampler/laptop) looping his live coughing as a rhythmic bed for another track, were lifted above gimmick by the context of continual playfulness in the entire set.

Potato Masta seemed an incongruous addition. I’m reasonably certain the Now Now Festival has never quite had a packed dancefloor, but it did create a nice contrast to the more cerebral work. How much of his music was spontaneous is debatable – he basically played backing tracks of fairly standard digital dub over which he occasionally rapped or twinkled on a keyboard, and played with a single beat cutting effect over the entire sound fairly regularly. It was fun and sounded great, but I know from experience that there are dozens of electronic producers around Australia making much more progressive, much more improvisatory music with just as much focus on physical movement. Potato Masta felt a bit like a curator’s idea of putting someone on the bill to ‘push the boundaries’ of the improv traditionalists, but finding themselves out of their depth (a little like me reviewing solo sax improv!). It was no fault of Potato Masta (Brisbane’s Hayato Yoshinari) who did what he did well, but if the curators want to be more ‘with it’ they should scratch a little deeper.

Chronox (Lachlan Con and Michael Prior) provided a soothing set of improvised electronic drone. The focus of the set, however, was visual, as a projector mounted on the ceiling projected with circles onto the floor below. Placed on that floor were a series of glass bowls, each the size of the circle of light it sat under and each containing milk. As the duo began to play, certain frequencies triggered the light projections. As the sound grew in intensity, so did the intensity and number of flashing circles. This provided a very spellbinding visual focus well suited to the sound. One criticism might be that the narrow scope of the sinewaves meant that it was, once there was any level of intensity happening, virtually impossible to match specific lights with specific sounds or volumes, meaning that whatever was triggering each light became rather redundant. This also meant that the light and sound separated from each other – what might have been trance-like was left at very good eye candy with an excellent soundtrack.

Last up for the day was Jon Rose on an instrument listed in the program as ‘fence’. A metal frame about 3 metres wide and 2 high was traversed by five metal strings. Rose played these with violin bows. He played for about half an hour. It was mesmerising. The range of sounds elicited from the instrument was pretty incredible, aided by subtle use of distortion and equalisation. He played it as a virtuoso, completely in control of the rise and fall of his set as he walked back and forward, bowed, banged, plucked and stomped on his instrument. One ironic thought that entered my mind was, if he is getting this range of sounds from his instrument playing it as it was intended, imagine what he’ll do if he starts exploring extended technique!

Reading back over all that, there might be a perception that there was a fair bit to be critical of. It was, however, one of the more enjoyable evenings of music I’ve seen in quite some time. As with all improvised music, there will inevitably be flatter sections. But the quality on display over the course of seven hours here was very high, criticism only in some of the details. And when it reached heights, they were high indeed.

Cyclic Defrost

The Now Now: Festival of Spontaneous Music

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 18:30:14 PST

Wentworth Falls School
of Arts
Wentworth Falls NSW

Difficult Music Festival

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:01:35 PST

Sedition photo by Lachlan Hardy on Flickr.

Sedition
Darlinghurst NSW

Untitled 12” LP

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:39:28 PST

Available from Discogs.

Thoth Press 6
Edition of 100

CHRONOX (MONA FOMA 2010)

chronoxhq@gmail.com (Chronox) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 18:37:14 PST

Salamanca Arts Centre
Hobart TAS