Sounding the Disappearance of Warehouse Space in Inner City Sydney

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:16:12 GMT

An interesting article by Ben Byrne about warehouse space in Sydney and it's role in developing the sound culture there; Focusing Incidents » The Space in Between: Sounding the Disappearance of Warehouse Space in Inner City Sydney.

I would like to make a single minor contention. Ben states;

However, the link between sound in Sydney and the space of the warehouse wasn’t expressed concretely until the development of rave culture in the late eighties.

Explicitly, spaces mentioned elsewhere in his article, such as The Gunnery, and others not (e.g. Lost In Space, Sid's, The Pie Factory and others), had most definitely by the mid-Eighties developed a sound culture, one mostly entrenched in the post-punk, experimentalism, industrial-electronic music culture of that time. For example, early Severed Heads performances in art-spaces such as, well, 'Art Space', and similar spaces which were basically converted warehouses and commercial spaces.

See also the geographic-specific events such as the IAU sound performance event in the disused railway tunnels under Hyde Park, and SPK's (in)famous performance inside the disused St. Peter's brickworks. This very site, once the brickwork surrounds has been converted into Sydney Park, was latterly the location of many illegal Vibe Tribe raves and other events such as Clan Analogue's seminal day long electronic music festival "Bob Moog's Birthday" (and incidentally the very first time I ever performed at a Clan Analogue event).

A shout-out also has to be given in this regard to gay party culture. The best, most lucid, and by far debauched parties always held in warehouses where the residents where mixed gay/straight men and women (see again, Sid's) but they also, with a high degree of people involved in various creative industries, had a serious and thoughtful side that was reflected in sound art and musical practice.

Chamber Music

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 10:03:06 GMT

Oh boy oh boy oh boy, I got a huge blast from the past today. Last week I ordered from Amazon.uk a CD copy of a little record I used to own, which I grew up with and spent most of my late teens absolutely fascinated by; "Leichenschrei" by Socialistisches Patienten Kollectiv or SPK. This record is a little beauty; the title translates to "corpse screams", an accurate picture of the audio content - a mad rush down a dismembered-body stuffed bolt-hole to HELL. All your latter day "dark music" and experimental-noise pretenders know nothing compared to what is on this record. Forty-three (43) minutes of pure aural noise assault, a bad acid trip accompanied by the incidental soundtrack to a 18th century battlefield surgery set in a dysfunctional iron foundry run by lunatics, and visualised for a dispassionately narrated US Army medical description of the results of torture. There are is little in the way of compromise here; nothing remotely resembles pop music, all is non-stop assault. Released in 1982, this record is the forerunner to a long history of industrial music that was to follow; dark noise experiments, experimental synthesiser music, "EBM", it's all here. More focussed than fellow "industrial" music luminaries Throbbing Gristle, less prone than that group to psychedelic noodling, and a thousand times as bleak, one gets the impression rather than a bohemian carnival of insanity that TG managed to project, SPK's music is the very embodiment of the insane.

Track listing

Genetic Transmission
Post-Morten
Desolation
Napalm (Terminal Patient)
Cry from the Sanatorium
Baby Blue Eyes
Israel
Internal Bleeding
Chamber Music
Despair
The Agony of the Plasma
Day of Pigs
Wars of Islam
Maladia Europa

Xray Dubs - spk tag

Sounding the Disappearance of Warehouse Space in Inner City Sydney

Chamber Music