UPCOMING SHOWS
TWO EVENTS IN HOBART THIS WEEKEND!!!!
MORTAL ENGINE PLAYS BAM NEW YORK CITY DECEMBER
LASER SHOW @ THE TOTE 29th NOVEMBER
LASER SHOW @ EAST BRUNSWICK CLUB 20th NOVEMBER
Supporting Curse ov Dialect's CD launch.
WIRED LAB OPEN DAY 31st OCTOBER
Performing with two lasers through mist over the dam. Also performing:
Oren Ambarchi, Gary Bradbury, Dave Noyze, Alan Lamb.
DETAILS:
http://wiredlab.ning.com/events/wired-o-p-e-n-day
MORTAL ENGINE PLAYS PHILADELPHIA! 17th-19th September!
PATERAS/FOX TRIPLE BILL @ STEIRISCHER HERBST FEST GRAZ 29th SEPT
PIVIXKI/PATERAS/FOX/CHESSEX EUROPEAN TOUR 2009
1.10 FR: Nantes, Cable
2.10 CH: Basel, IGNM
3.10 CH: Chur, Soundhund
4.10 CH: Geneve, L’Usine
6.10 FR: Grenoble, Le 102
7.10 FR: Metz, Les Trinitaires
8.10 FR: Paris, Instants Chavires (*benefit gig*)
9.10 FR: Poitiers, Confort Moderne
10.10 FR: Lille, La Malterie
11.10 BE: Aalst, Netzwerk
12.10 NL: Amsterdam, DNK
13.10 NL: Rotterdam, Worm
15.10 DK: Kopenhagen, KNTM
16.10 NO: Oslo, Bla
BE THERE !!!!!!!!!!!!
DOUBLE LASER SHOW CORNER HOTEL 6th AUGUST....BE THERE!!
LASER SHOW @ MUSICA GENERA FESTIVAL WARSAW
http://www.musicagenera.net/festivals.html
DOUBLE LASER AT Z-1 FUSION!!!!!!!! 2nd MAY
RARE OSCILLOSCOPE PERFORMANCE @ ACMI APRIL 23rd!
MORTAL ENGINE PLAYS THE FESTIVAL de MEXICO 19-21st MARCH!
for details see: www.festival.org.mx
FOX and PATERAS CELEBRATE THE RELEASE OF THEIR THIRD AURAL ASSAULT
WITH A RELEASE PARTY AT HORSEBIZARRE THURSDAY 15th JANUARY
ALBUM END OF DAZE OUT NOW ON DeMEGO
MINDBENDING DOUBLE LASER SHOW AT THE WHARF IN HOBART!!!
11th JANUARY AS PART OF MONA FONA (Poster below)
TWO IMPROVISED MUSIC PERFORMANCES AT NOWnow FESTIVAL 2009
Late concert @ Akemi Friday 16th January
from 11:00pm : Lloyd Honeybrook & Robin Fox
Evening Concert @ Wentworth Falls School of Arts 17th Jan
7:00pm : Clayton Thomas / Clare Cooper / Robin Fox : strings
and computer manipulation
Digital culture is obsessed with synaesthesia, especially sound/image convergence. From club ‘visuals’ to automatic ‘visualiser’ plugins for mp3 applications, there’s an ideal of sensory fusion at work which draws on cyber/psychedelic rave culture, and utopian new media discourse.
Ideals aside, digital media forms do create new potential for varieties of ‘machine’ synaesthesia–automatic mappings between sound and image. Visualiser plugins offer specific and more-or-less arbitrary mappings of image to sound. While they can’t (promise to) induce a synaesthetic experience, they do offer a machine synaesthesia that might challenge, reorder, or at least reflect on, our own audiovisual perception. Yet most synaesthesia machines are little more than bolted-on nozzles that turn all your favourite tunes into generic visual sludge.
By contrast Robin Fox’s Backscatter disc presents a highly specific and refined synaesthesia machine. He has assembled a simple audiovisual synthesizer using simple digitally synthesised audio and an old analog oscilloscope. The oscilloscope is in ‘polar’ mode, so instead of scanning left to right, displaying the conventional ‘trace’ of the waveform, the trace orbits the screen. Waveforms create woven circles, loops, twisting spirals, filigreed knots.
Response is instantaneous, so the screen jumps and twitches in sync with Fox’s audio signature skitters and blips. The sound-vision mapping is supple, the images beautiful and sometimes surprising. The pieces feel quite controlled, even composed, the way they seem to literally reveal new twists and tricks. Overall, the results are staggering.
Mitchell Whitelaw: Earbash.
coagulate CD (with Anthony Pateras)
also on synaesthesia records
Review of Coagulate CD:
Exquisitely packaged (the cover work by Sarah Pirrie is outstanding), intriguingly diverse, this succeeds as a series of excursions into a strange, painful territory we can touch with our fingers but can't see with our eyes. This is nowhere more true than the closing track 'Recombinant', which spins a web of whining feedback around gentle chimes, creating a mournful, faintly sinister atmosphere which reverberates between the listener's ears. Similarly 'Cranking The Dwarf', one of the noisier track on the album, merrily twangs on your nerve endings, with its chatter and gibber enveloped by blisters of grating distortion. 'Circuits & Glass' is another standout, with bursts of full-on electronic noise punctuated by speaker feedback and abrasive clatters and tinkles. There's a lot of this sort of stuff about, and in the main it sounds like a couple of blokes playing about with their kit, making it up as they go along. That may be the case with Pateras and Fox, neither of whom I have previously heard of, but if they can produce a record of this quality by so doing then good luck to them. 'Circuits & Glass' could be Merzbow at his best, and I can think of no higher compliment than that.
Fluxeuropa: Stewart Gott - 3 June 2003.
flux compendium CD (with Anthony Pateras)
on eMEGO www.editionsmego.com
Review of flux compendium
First and maybe obvious point. This magnificent disc has to be listened to at full volume on a proper hi-fi, not headphones or incar stereo. That way the sonic terrorism of the opening track comes at you full force, and the subtler effects of subsequent tracks aren't lost in environmental sound. Pateras and Fox are a terrifying soundart double-act from Melbourne's outer suburbs - Pateras produces the material ..boards or as here exclusively, vocalising, and Fox processes the result in real-time on laptop. I was misled to some extent by the CD blurb: "Equal parts postwar beard and modern patchnocrat…two of Melbourne's hairiest sons nosedive and writhe in their unique take of sonic totalism, rising out of the muck with their kaleidoscopic best." You might be too if you don't dig beneath the zany humour that's such an attractive part of their act. Don't take it without argument that sounds of slurping reflect the pair's eating habits, or that the oral noises should have invoked a Parental Advisory sticker.
Tracks are quite short, each with a distinct character, multi-dynamic and in constant flux. The comparatively brief opening barrage of "Apocalypse Now And Then" is a wacky, scratch 'n' sniff manipulation of electroacoustic clichés and sci-fi effects, bizarrely juxtaposed with a compendium of bodily functions – "punk concrète" as its authors call it. The way Pateras licks around the mic on "Aphasia" and "Olfactophobia" is quietly disgusting, while "$2.50" is a relief from orality in its focus on bell and coin sounds. The compressed and fractured argument of "Threat In Three Parts" leaves this listener in stitches, while "Perilymph" is untypical in its 13-minute length, and haunting, glitch-inflected evocation of the sine-wave/sci-fi school of electroacoustic composition. To process Pateras's signal, Fox employs a variety of techniques, mostly involving live sampling and manipulation of those samples, he explains – moving between real-time musique concrète and a kind of granular synthesis which inserts pre-designed ideas or licks built up from grains of sound. Make no mistake, Pateras and Fox are serious and major artists who happen, on occasion, to be very funny. Flux Compendium is a scream and also very beautiful, the finest showcase to date of their compositional flair and wit.
ANDY HAMILTON, Wire Magazine
END OF DAZE cd (with Anthony Pateras)
The first cabs off the Editions Mego rank in 2006, Pateras and Fox return with their third shredding album of Antipodean-blasted bliss that will get even the darkest of doomlords crawling out of their abyss of hatred, and dancing like lunatics.
End of Daze is a bulletproof testament to the Duo’s eight year history in the trenches of live electro-acoustic music - their messy, over-the top contact-miked beginnings now formed into a powerful and futuristic meta-language borrowing from the early electronic masters, bizarre sound poetry, vintage synth festishism, the eternal patch tweak and good old fashioned Melbourne experimentalist brutality, fuelled by a poisonous love affair with sonic invention.
A combination of materials forged live on stage alongside carefully considered studio mayhem, the audio contained on this disc is their finest vein-popping blend of chaos and order to date. Recorded beautifully by longtime engineer James “Wilkinsound” Wilkinson in Melbourne, combined with some sessions from WORM in Rotterdam, End of Daze promises a sonic range as wide as its genesis, complete with angry boy artwork courtesy of Clare Cooper.
Limited to 500 copies.
SUBSTATION CD (with Clayton Thomas)
on Room40 www.room40.org
Review of Substation CD:
Australian duo Robin Fox & Clayton Thomas have created something of an oddity with their debut collaborative release ‘Substation’. Fox is an expert in Max/MSP programming (it’s a piece of music software for those of you living in the real world) wheras Thomas is an expert on the double bass and a luminary of the Aussie improv scene. An interesting pairing then and one which lives up to expectations; the first piece ‘Direct Couriers’ lulls you into a false sense of security with haunting chimes and double bass tones, but as the second track ‘Shuffle’ awakens you quickly realise that ‘Substation’ is not going to be an easy piece of listening. Harsh processed squeaks and squeals burst from Thomas’s double bass and Fox’s laptop to create an all-encompassing headphone listening onslaught. By the time it finishes, you'll feel quite exhausted, luckily the album’s centrepiece – the almost 30 minute ‘Dust on the Diodes’ is a more slow burning work, gradually building deep drones and clanking sounds into a sea of processed plucks. ‘Substation’ is by no means an album for a quiet night in – it’s an experience, something which requires all your senses to be fully honed to allow yourself room to experience the music. One of Room40’s most peculiar releases, but also one of it’s most rewarding – recommended.
http://www.boomkat.com/item.cfm?id=23125
BETA ERKO (spastic quartet)
on Quecksilber www.quecksilber-music.com
Review of I'm Ok You're Ok
Books
Heroes
Robin Fox's Details
Status:
In a Relationship
Hometown:
melbourne
Zodiac Sign:
Cancer
Robin Fox in your extended network Posted at 11:31 AM Jul 19, 2007 view more
Robin Fox is an experimental artist working in the fields of computer music performance and audio visual diffusion. He has made a series of films for the cathode ray oscilloscope (released on the DVD 'backscatter on synaesthesia records) and now performs with an audio controlled laser system (check out the videos!)
Musically, he has released two albums with composer/performer Anthony Pateras ('coagulate' on synaesthesia and 'flux compendium' on eMego), one album with Double Bass player Clayton Thomas ('substation' on Room40) and a record with band beta erko ('i'm ok you're ok' on quecksilber). Solo audio release due early 2007.
He performs regularly across Australia and Europe with recent appearances at: Wien Modern Festival (Vienna), Why Note? festival (Dijon), A4 festival (Bratislava), Netmage festival (Bologna), Pont Ephemere (paris), Transcoustic AV festival (Auckland), What is Music? (Australia), Electrofringe (newcastle), NowNOW (Sydney) among many others....
....FRIZZ RECORDS is proud to announce our fourth LP release...
LEILA ADU has been described as 'A Nina Simone for the Noughties', and her two acclaimed albums infuse a broadly 'art-rock' approach with elements of torch song, speakeasy blues, avant garde jazz, gamelan, post-rock textures, and a David Lynch style dreamlike b-movie melodrama. As her website has it, exploring the "dissonant edges of familiar forms", but with that kind of 'dissonance' that they once accused Thelonious Monk or Debussy of, the kind that soon betrays it's own compelling melodic and harmonic logic to the attentive listener...
'Dark Joan', Leila's third album as a solo artist, was recorded in Chicago with the legendary Steve Albini (PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsome, Nirvana, Pixies), and Albini's genius has been to strip her sound back to it's essence, and hold it's most distinctive qualities up to the light. It doesn't hurt that this is by far Leila's most powerful set of songs to date, and if anything we are lead even deeper into her world by the pictures painted with just piano (or in some cases harpsichord or a grime-encrusted electric piano) and that voice...
Capable of anything from delicate heartbreaking purity to a fearsome dramatic power, her powers are seemingly limitless, yet unlike most other singers of her calibre, never does she resort to melodrama or show-boating, or any kind of pastiche, instead she employs her resources fully in the expression of her distinctive musical vision and the deep well-spring of her imagination. Nothing ever sounds as though it could have not been sung...
Hey, just sayin hey, and by the way, thanks for takin the time to become a Pure Heir friend. You're officially mad haha! What you been up to anyway? Nath [Pure Heir]
