CANBERRA’S experimental SoundOut Music Festival is back for the 12th time this weekend at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, and its survival is due to the resilience of one man.

Canberra sax and clarinet player, Richard Johnson, who won a 2015 ART Music Award for the festival, is a true believer that music need not be confined to the page. For many years he has spearheaded this summit of sometimes notated and sometimes purely improvised music on all kinds of instruments, great and small, usually performed by a line-up from across the globe.

Over the years he’s battled against indifference from ACT funding authorities, in spite of evidence that there are many Canberrans who are deeply interested in exploring the boundaries of music.

The event will go ahead in what he calls “a much more refined mode” because of covid restrictions, turning it into a mostly local event for 2021.

The event is now limited to 30 audience members for each of four two-hour sessions, at 6pm-8pm and 8.30pm-10.30pm on both Saturday, February 6 and Sunday, February 7.

But Johnson is fond of a colourful phrase, so bills this year’s festival as “faster than a speeding pianist, more powerful than Brotzmann’s Machine Gun, able to leap 12 octaves in a single bound”.

Names on the line-up include Old Media Orchestra with Louise Curham presenting an 8mm film, David McDade on drums, Miroslav Bukovsky on trumpet and the very original Chayla Ueckert-Smith on her own ceramic instruments and oboe.

Book here. For information, visit soundoutrecordings.bandcamp.com or  soundout2020.blogspot.com. Donations via paypal.me/SoundOut