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Canberra Today 12°/15° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Arts / Festival plans to ‘move sound mountains’

THE “SoundOut” free improvisational, free jazz and experimental music festival is about as wild and weird as a music celebration can be.

Award-winner Richard Johnson… organising an “incredible bristling explorative sonic arts event”.
Award-winner Richard Johnson… organising an “incredible bristling explorative sonic arts event”.
Armed with a 2015 ART Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music, its founder and director, the clarinet and sax player Richard Johnson, is busy preparing for the seventh festival late this month.

An “incredible bristling explorative sonic arts event” is how Johnson likes to think of it, intended to “uplift tired ears, explore the unknown, see within the fabric of sound, unravel the threads of normative musical praxis and question sonic hegemonies”.

Despite delays in funding, he’s engaged artists from Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland and the US and asked them to “move sound mountains”. 

The January festival will see the RHRR trio from France with clarinettist Xavier Charles, vocalist Guylaine Cosseron and pianist Frederic Blondy, as well as Austrian vocalist Franziska Baumann and violinist Mia Zabelka. From Switzerland comes bass clarinettist Hans Koch in duo with electronic artist Thomas Peter and from Norway, trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø.

In “19 hours over four sessions of extraordinary music”, there’ll also be German guitarist Hannes Buder, Dutch tenor saxophonist/electronic artist Luc Houtkamp, and the US drummer/tenor sax instrumentalist Stephen Roach.

“The 2016 group of artists has never gathered before and never will again in the same configuration,” Johnson enthuses.

“SoundOut 2016” at the Ainslie Arts Centre Main Hall, Elouera Street, Braddon, Saturday, January 30, and Sunday, January 31, bookings to agac.com.au or tickets at the door. More information at isoundout.wix.com/soundout2016 and crowdfunding donations to pozible.com/project/202952

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Ian Meikle, editor

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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