Tuesday 25 October 2016

Working with people on the Autism Spectrum

Also at Parramatta, ICE,
I have been working with Autism Spectrum Australia's Club Weld Program



A lil bit about the master class..

The Korg MS-20 Mini is a monophonic analog synthesizer. At Club Weld we use a lot of virtual instruments modelled on analog synthesizers like this, but thanks to a visit from experimental artist, Nicola Mortan, we were about to try out the ‘real deal’.

Nicola introduced her Korg MS-20 Mini to Paolo & Jerry’s session and it wasn’t long before things started sounding pretty crazy and cool. In asking Nicola to explain the magic and appeal of the Korg MS-20 she said,
“Just one touch of the 30+ knobs on the Korg MS-20 Mini can drastically change the sound. The amazing thing about the MS-20 is even though its monophonic, using modulation of the 2x self-resonating filters and the 2x envelope generators can cause complex sound patterns to emerge”
Paolo & Jerry had some serious fun discovering the possibilities of the knobs to create sounds they loved hearing and discovering sounds they had never heard before. The MS-20 also works fantastically with audio in. Nicola demonstrated this feature by giving Paolo the opportunity to explore modifying a track he’d been working on. By changing the envelope of the filters that process the audio of Paolo’s track, he could chop up the audio in different ways, turns of the knobs caused rhythmic and tonal build-ups and come-downs as well as adding a sub-bass.
Paolo and Jerry had a great time exploring what’s possible with the MS-20.  A big thank you goes out to Nicola for coming to Club Weld and creating the opportunity.  You can hear a small grab of some of the sounds explored in the session by playing the video link.

Monday 3 October 2016

Performances Coming Up:




Sep 30 solo at Portugal Madeira Club for Ela Stiles new LP
Oct 2 in Vavenge at Croatian Wickham Sports Club, This is Art
Oct 3 in Club Sound Witches at Croatia Wickham Sports Club, This is Not Fair
Oct 8 in Club Sound Witches at 107 Projects (early) 5pm w/ warehouse (melb)
Oct 12 solo at Marrickville in Motion, Air Project Gallery, Marrickville w/ Splinter Orchestra

Oct 23 in Club Sound Witches Collab with Zen City Orchestra at electrofringe, 107 Projects
Oct 29 solo at mixtape art space, sydenham, halloween party
Nov 10 All Girl Electronic Dance Party, ICE, Parramatta

Wednesday 20 July 2016

I've got a few music shows coming up in Sydney.. launching new Club Sound Witches cassette/CDR recorded in Brisbane with DJ White Pimpernell for Sonicstate..

Thursday July 21, Bald Faced Stag, Leichhardt... No Refunds Presents (Front Bar) w/ Jannah Quill.. FREE

Saturday July 23, Verge Gallery, UnivofSydney... Double Vision Presents w/ Matthew P Hopkins, Ghost Hobo (SOLO SHOW)..FREE

Sunday Aug 7, 107 Projects, Redfern....NowNow Music Series w/ Kynan Tan..$10

Friday Aug 12, Life Groove Cafe... Club Sound Witches with special guest Matthew Brown...$6

Monday 20 June 2016

SONIC STATE FESTIVAL - Queensland Week

So as part of Queensland Week I was invited to take part in this Micro-Festival before they announced the state budget the next day.. Are you thinking, Was it a conspiracy to get everyone wasted?  For those of you who couldn't afford the $15 ticket or get a copy of the program.. here is my excerpt. To see what the others like Lawrence English and Kieran Welch had to say check it here:
http://www.metroarts.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/SONIC-STATE-festival-booklet-ONLINE-VERSION.pdf
SUN 12 JUNE 5PM
THE WAREHOUSE

NICOLA MORTON

as CLUB SOUND WITCHES                            
(with MATT EARLE) and DJ
WHITE PIMPERNELL (ADAM
SUSSMANN)


with

SHOOGA

THE PERFECT LOVERS


LJ: Can you take me back to the days before
Real Bad Music. Where you involved in
events then?


NM: Before Real Bad Music, I was really lucky
in Brisbane to have Cheryl Siecker (ex-Shooga)
and Tara Pattenden, they would organise gigs
in clubs and public spaces when I first started
playing live. When I joined Tara in Berlin, me
and my housemates put on a couple of gigs
when there were bands from overseas that noone
else wanted to put on. This always involved
hiring a club space, same in Indonesia where I
was just before Real Bad Music.


The first gig I went to on returning to Brisbane
at the end of 2011, was a house show at 116,
Matt Kennedy's (Kitchen's Floor, Bitter Defeat)
house in Paddington).



How did Real Bad begin?

Matt Earle and Melanie Jade Simpson (from
Shooga) started Real Bad Music when they saw
a spray painted sign on the side of the building
proclaiming it for lease. Downstairs was an
adult book store and Matt and Mel also took
that over too as part of the renovation process,
Real Bad started off as the Breakdance the
Dawn headquarters (Matt's cassette/CDR
Label). Once it was open people started coming
in donating stock, soon there were second
hand records, rare import CDs from Japan and
local DIY music.

The first gig I went to at Real Bad was in the
shop downstairs. Leif Gifford (Shooga) took me
there, We fit her full length keyboard in the car,
and set up..It was wild. There was music
equipment everywhere, but most of it looked
like it was broken, kinda like an 80's grotto of
vintage leftovers. All the cassettes and CDs had
intricately drawn covers and graffiti-like
designs. It really opened up my eyes to how
much DIY music could really do. At that first
jam, Melanie Jade let me use a pedal of hers.
And yeah, the music was wild AND inviting. !
There was a wonderful sense of freedom, as if
anyone could join in at anytime and it would be
impossible to make a mistake. It sounded like
equipment breaking apart in an industrial
wasteland. Who wouldn't want to be a part of
that?

Real Bad was a really bad house. as far as
suburban houses go. But to me it had such a
beautiful decayed civility about it. kind of just
enough of what you needed to live but
nothing more. you need a roof but maybe not
too many internal walls etc... but is this too
much of a romantic view? how did it feel
living there?



The Real Bad House really is a reflection of
Matt Earle's wild living aesthetic, based on
creating lots of open space where you won't
feel bad if you drop a beer, enhancing the
creative spirit. It was inspiring to live there and
witness the freedom, often it did feel like the
wild west. Its amazing how much floor space
you can get when you're willing to actually put
the floor boards down!

How does this compare to where you are now
in Sydney - it feels similar in many ways,
living above a shop, off a busy industrial road
to the Western suburbs, hosted house gigs
and so on... how is it similar, and different?

Well, Real Bad was a mansion. An amazing
deal of space. Here in Sydney our space is a lot
smaller and we deal with Real Estate etc. Here,
you really can't cast a doubt on the upcoming
gentrification, like you could at Moorooka.. But
in both spaces there are a lot of players just
passionate about playing music together, doing
the weekly workshop/improv sessions like at
Real Bad, here in Sydney at Life Groove - gives
it that sense of oneness..People and places are
different but maybe the song is the same :-) !
What is it about the living-in-the-space-ofthe-
gigs that attracts you? are there creative
synergies and/or tensions with the living
part of it, and the gigging part?

Experimental music has its roots in community
and I think thats why living in the space is also
special. Its kinda acknowledging the sharing
and personal nature of what is going on, our
music may not be too emotional or expressive,
but we are still a great community.
And where does the decrepit house gig fit
into your wider practice - I mean, is it the
most ideal space for your own music-making,
or do you like other spaces equally as much?
what does a space need, to excite you?

The decrepit house allows us to jam all the
time, with little or no interference from
neighbours. And it allows us to use equipment
so broken/fragile that it would not survive
transport. I love playing music. Each type of
space has its benefits, I even learn stuff when
playing to hostile or no audiences. For me, I
just love to play, but will always really love
coming home to a house gig.


How do you understand and navigate the
artist-making mode and the artist-puttingon-
events mode? when do they work best
together? when is it most challenging?

Ha! Thats whats so good about the house
shows, it combines the artist-making and the
artist-putting-on. The emotional tides and
intellectual rabbit holes often trouble my artist
making but I find surrounding myself with
friends by putting on events, always puts me
back on my feet.

Who have you chosen? when did you first
come across their work (can you recall that)
and what previous gigs/events/
collaborations have you done with them? and
what interests/excites/intrigues you about
their work?

The Perfect Lovers played at my first art event,
Bloodbath at The White House ARI on George
St in the City in 2005. I'm really excited that
eleven years later they are all still around and
developing even more as musicians. Jamie
Hume has always been a great influence on
every noise/experimental musician that walked
the streets of Brisbane over the last 20 years.
We even share the same birthday. Kat Martin,
Rin Healey, Donat Tahiraj, Adam Park, Kaspar
Schnyder and Marek Rygielski accompany
Jamie to convey pure romance through the
night. Guaranteed events: surprises! smiles!

Shooga play a really important role in
experimental music, an all-girl improvised
electronic group with some of the best ladies
Brisbane has birthed. I keyed into the great
contribution Brisbane girls have to offer when
interviewing people about gender and noise for
my Musicology project in 2004. Brisbane girls
get in there and encourage others to as well.
I've played a few gigs beside Shooga and am
always entranced by their sublime, immersive
sounds and visuals. Dedicating space, time,
hearts and minds to the feminine is and should
be an important part of a holistic exploratory
music practice.

I am also stoked to be playing in Club Sound
Witches, a collaboration with Matt Earle and
this time also with special guest, DJ White
Pimpernell. Adam Sussmann's unique
concrete style is unpredictable and
uncompromising in its exploration of timbre
and technique. No Schmalz. His abstract tones
will supplement the minimal styles of Club
Sound Witches and push us to 'tune in' to new
sounds and break through the mind-sound
dimension barriers. Yes, we'll blow your top off
and you might not even notice.

Photos by Marek Rygielski

Tuesday 1 March 2016

OTHER WEBSITES

#romanticgrasses

http://romanticgrasses.com


#moonpsychics

http://moonpsychics.com


Both these projects have been amassing A LOT of information, too much for this blog anymore so from now on all updates will be posted on these websites and the pages on this blog will be archived

- Nicola Feb 24, 2015

Saturday 20 February 2016

Intercession Open - MOST Mar 5 & 6

Intercessions Open

 This March I am participating in a two day program of performance art by artists affiliated with base-metal.
The performances will take place at Scratch Art Space over the weekend of March 5th & 6th (from 11 – 5pm) as part of the Marrickville Open Studio Trail. The address is 67 Sydenham Rd, Marrickville.
I’d love for you to come along and check it out!

Other artists include: Katya Petetskaya, Meri Hellisnt, Julie Vulcan, Yiorgos Zafirou, Tamara Elkins, Gianni Wise. Julian Woods, Rakini Devi, Tom Isaacs and James Needham-Walker

Monday 15 February 2016

Wednesday 10 February 2016

#moonpsychics: results new moon in aquarius feb 8

http://moonpsychics.com/content/index3.html

radical you, radical world: i asked boo bear to ask the ghosts to get the wifi faster outside. its been a tough year already for ghosts. thanks for helping me out..

Wednesday 3 February 2016

#moonpsychics: full moon in leo jan 24, 2016 results

RESULTS FULL MOON IN LEO JAN 24, 2016

I'm back on the horse, I got it right again.

moonpsychics: full moon in leo

song for full moon in leo  - http://breakdancethedawn.com/bdtd-pages-101-177/bdtd146.html

(the email group is now getting songs for each full and new moon phase - ask to join the group to get your astrology predictions)

Tuesday 26 January 2016

Club Sound Witches on WFMU

Club Sound Witches new release BDTD208 has been getting airplay on WFMU!!

listen to this mad show from scott williams where we get mixed in with acid mothers temple!! (or for the flash deprived try this link https://wfmu.org/flashplayer.php?version=2&show=64659&archive=137011&starttime=1:38:52

Tuesday 19 January 2016

results new moon in capricorn

So I tried my ghost sensing teddy bear in the other room in our appartment for the wifi sweet spot.. i put it down and asked it to get the ghosts to boost the wi-fi.. the day after david bowie died.
new moon in capricorn: wireless psychic experiment #7

Monday 18 January 2016

Bad Intentions: Review

Hi,
so turns out girl noise bands can be a bit of a slow burner.. peter bramley still has a few of these bad intentions tapes left, he put out for vacant valley last year.. here sonic masala reviews us to try and get those tapes into consuming hands..

"Brisbane has had some garrulous member in the VV stable (Per Purpose, Psy Ants, Cured Pink), and Bad Intentions now joins them. Everybody’s Doing It showcases the warping talents of Nicola Morton (Club Sound Witches, ) and Rebecca Hlodich. The cassette is made up of recordings from two performances at the sadly now defunct Real Bad Music space (which Morton co-ran), one of the last bastions of outlier music left in Brisbane, back in 2013, and it is two sides of a sonically fractious coin. ‘She’s Onto It’ is a metallic industrial lullaby, distorted lyrics coming through a distorted Dynamike (so it sounds), astral projection into the very outer limits, that invariably starts to fray and unravel, spluttering to many false stops before sifting the corrosive layers away, leaving low-level murmuring (from the crowd) to slowly replace the space. ‘Don’t Take It Personally’ is even less constructed in some ways (a misnomer as both sets seem to be largely improvised), guitar and drumming so out of sync (not just with each other but what equates to actually playing) that what starts out like two musically-base children strapping into instruments at Allen’s Music for an eighteen minute flurry of hands and feet, making noise because, becomes a little more – almost an epiphany just before it fully forms, a realisation dawning – the Moorooka Mile equivalent of the monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps? It’s something that doesn’t hang as well as the first half, but posits that the physical experience would have been far more rewarding."
http://sonicmasala.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/badaboum-in-vacant-valley.html

Monday 4 January 2016

#moonpsychics Wireless Psychics Experiment #10 December

RESULTS FULL MOON IN CANCER DEC 25, 2015

the smallest full moon since 2004.. last full moon on christmas in 1977... interesting results..

from Aimee Anderson:
2 devices, both right :-)
(London, UK)


from Bonnie Hart
Henry Meals and I both psyched out affirmatively under a sozzled full moon
(Gympie, Australia)


from Louise Bennett
Chillin beach side at Caloundra's park using the library's free wifi. Three phones and Christmas choccies! Full moon psychic power is low - oh no my first failed test!


from me:
i am not in the best psychic shape.. my seaside christmas without wi-fi went searching for free wi-fi.. found only maccas wifi, cops and kripsy kreme donuts.. am so bummed i missed the cop giving a child a donut in the background..
Brisbane, Australia




December 25, 2015


clouds in queensland might have affected louise and i?