The inexorable Byrne and the wild young thing St. Vincent team up to make music of extraordinary energy, originality and savor. They're backed by a
synchronised dancing brass band… Just don't miss this.
David Longstreth and his Brooklyn band promise sophisticated songwriting and elegant, melody-driven pop. We're excited.
This extreme electronic artist from the States will make the shed shake with excitement.
Supported by the United States Consulate
We were peeved when Death Grips choked last year, but they're really here this time, and contrite (if by 'contrite' you mean screaming in a frenzied manner into a microphone). Which is brilliant, because we are
gagging for a hip-hop noise extravaganza.
Amanda has cancelled all gigs, including this one, due to the illness of a close friend. Tickets will be automatically refunded in 7-10 days.
We love Neil, which is why we keep asking him back: to transfix us with his stories, which are spooky and funny, and have won shitloads of awards, too many to mention. There'll be music, too, by Jherek Bischoff and local musicians.
Bickram is one of the world's finest players of the tabla - the Indian drum: his career includes gigs with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. He draws on his traditional training and fuses it with electronics and improvisation,
backed by Hindustani vocals and heaps of extra bang.
Robert Wyatt is the progenitor of some of the most seminal rock music of our era (as well as his own verb, 'Wyatting': the practice of deliberately choosing high-brow music on an mp3 jukebox to annoy the other people in
the pub). His career spans Soft Machine, Matching Mole, and a
stellar solo output.
The ONJ - a fabulous French institution, established in 1986 by
the Ministry of Culture - worked with Wyatt to produce this program
of his compositions.
ONJ is supported by Spedidam and Institut Français.
Six men playing men's instruments just as men were born to do.
Shaun Tan is a well-loved children's author and illustrator. His wordless novel The Arrival tells the story of a refugee's foray in an alien world. Sydney musician and composer Ben
Walsh picked up the novel in a bookshop and promptly fell in love
with it; three years later, and his eleven-piece Orkestra brings
the textless world to life with sound: sousaphone, saxophone,
clarinet, violin, guitar, tabla, synthesizers, percussion, zithers
and a vacuum cleaner.
POUAW! celebrates the centenary of Luigi Russolo's manifesto L'arte dei rumori - The art of noises, a seminal text in the history of musical aesthetics. The concert turns its back on the digital tools of contemporary
noise and sound art, and returns to Russolo's roots: an ensemble
of six noise machines based on his original sound families will be
accompanied by power tools, heavy machinery, domestic white goods,
spoken word, and forklift trucks.
'Imagine being bound and gagged by Throbbing Gristle then dumped
on the factory floor as the workers revolt and dance to the sounds
of their boss' demise.' - Mat Ward. A made-for-MOFO premiere.
A tribute to the father of fingerstyle guitar and 'American Primitive' music John Fahey, who died in 2001. 'From the day I first heard this approach,' says Richard Gilewitz, 'my fingers gravitated towards this style that has
driven my career over three decades.' Gilewitz toured with Fahey over the course of his own distinguished career - and traced his footsteps to Tasmania, where Fahey recorded a live album in 1981.
Spanish surf music. Pasodoble wipe-out!
Our Artists in Residence are, as their name suggests, nimble of limb and timbre: they're an art, electro, theatre, dance and fashion collective, so there will be snazzy visuals and
dressing up and stuff like that. They'll be popping up all over the shop.
Andrián Pertout's composition for one of Australia's most celebrated concert pianists, Michael Kieran Harvey, will premiere here for us at MOFO.
Pertout's multi award-winning music has been performed in over thirty countries; Harvey is an original and prolific interpreter of contemporary piano. Hobart-based writer Arjun von Caemmerer has collaborated with Harvey and Pertout to create an accompanying text for Luz meridional, and will open the concert with a talk about the genesis of the project.
'The System' refers to the mass transportation of convicts to Australian penal colonies. Thomas and co. take a new look at our nation's musical past, sampling traditional
songs and bush ballads to make original, modern music.
Colin Offord - singer, traveller, and instrument inventor - will play live to a screening of Norman Dawn's 1927 film adaptation of Marcus Clarke's novel For the term of his natural life.
Offord's blend of birdsong and sounds from the Australian
natural world reframe and enrich the onscreen depiction of the
lives of Australian convicts, shot on location at Berrima, Sydney
Harbour, Wombeyan Caves, and the ruins of the convict settlement at
Port Arthur.
Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of
Australia
Great island mouthbow, voice and winds, with Taiwanese artist Yilan Yeh on the moonbells and waterbells. Texts by Phillip Hammial.
Elizabeth Anderson - harpsichord
Janet Rutherford - viola
Brett Rutherford - cello
Elizabeth wants to demystify the process of making classical
music.
As such, she invites you to a series of open rehearsals (come and go as you please), to observe the process of interpretation and collaboration that takes place in the lead-up to the final performance at the Baha'i centre. The program features Bach, Ross Edwards, and GP Telemann.
Elizabeth Anderson - harpsichord
Janet Rutherford - viola
Brett Rutherford - cello
Elizabeth wants to demystify the process of making classical
music.
As such, she invites you to a series of open rehearsals (come and go as you please), to observe the process of interpretation and collaboration that takes place in the lead-up to the final performance at the Baha'i centre. The program features Bach, Ross Edwards, and GP Telemann.
This concert explores Barock harpsichord music across three centuries, ranging from traditional Baroque repertoire by Bach, Purcell and Balbastre, through nineteenth-
century Spanish favourite Leyenda, Gershwin, and the Beatles.
And now, something to relax us. A suite of lullabies, played by violinist Anna McMichael - fresh from a multi-decade stint in Europe. She's
accompanied by pianist Tamara Anna Cislowska, the sound designs
of Cor Fuhler, and visuals by artist Isabelle Vigier.
Program includes some new works made just for us.
Lawrence, on the organ, tears it up with Nagorcka's electronics and didjeridu, and singers from the Australian Chamber Choir, in a program where Bach sits next to some of the loudest and most dissonant sounds the Town Hall has ever heard
('except during certain council meetings' - BR).
OPEN REHEARSAL
Nick is a jazz bassist and a well-loved MOFO regular. He and a
corps of Melbourne and Tassie musos perform
Akathistos in the Void at Mona.
You're invited to drop in on the open rehearsal on Saturday, and
to the epic performance on Sunday - it goes for seven hours (!) so
come and go as you please.
PERFORMANCE
Nick is a jazz bassist and a well-loved MOFO regular. He and a
corps of Melbourne and Tassie musos perform
Akathistos in the Void at Mona.
You're invited to drop in on the open rehearsal on Saturday, and
to the epic performance on Sunday - it goes for seven hours (!) so
come and go as you please.
Nick's child told him that infinity is 'one hundred months, third of east'. Look, we're not saying that's strictly accurate, but it's definitely something to meditate to, while Nick plays the bass for you.
Ahmed is an icon of the 'golden era' of Ethiopian music. He was talent-spotted working as a handy man at Addis Ababa's Arizona Club in 1962, the hang-out for Emperor Selassie's Imperial Body Guard Band; he quickly became famous
in Ethiopia, and from there a huge hit with the African diaspora and fans of African music in Europe and America. Now he's here. It would be silly, it seems, to miss out on hearing him sing. Backed by Australian-Ethiopian jazz band J-Azmaris.
Ghosh performs with Hindustani vocalist Amabarish Das.
Tassie composer Dylan Sheridan serves up a chamber opera with soprano Allison Farrow and a girl soprano, as well as sax, electronics, flute, found objects, and hand-made acoustic instruments.
An eerie tale, set in colonial-era Hobart, of a lonely shipwright's
bargain with a banshee. Christopher Downes draws live and sets projections while Josh Santospirito plays the haunting (well, it is a ghost story) soundtrack.
Josephine is an Australian singer specialising in extended vocal techniques. What this means is: she's got an amazing range, and she knows how to use it. She sang and studied in Europe for several years and has
brought back home with her a repertoire of skills and sounds.
Josephine is an Australian singer specialising in extended vocal techniques. What this means is: she's got an amazing range, and she knows how to use it.
She sang and studied in Europe for several years and has brought back home with her a repertoire of skills and sounds.
Josephine is an Australian singer specialising in extended vocal techniques. What this means is: she's got an amazing range, and she knows how to use it.
She sang and studied in Europe for several years and has brought back home with her a repertoire of skills and sounds.
composed by Tania Bosak
with Musical Director Adam Simmons.
Tania is respected for her diverse creative practice, and loved
for starting Hobart's weekly courtyard
party, Rektango. Her barefoot band - Adam Simmons, Anita Hustas, Phil Bywater, Kynan Robinson, Justin Marshall, Dan Witton and Jon Delaney - perform in Hobart together for the first time. It's a multi-media, inter-disciplinary piece that revolves around the concept of exile. She's spent the best part of a decade putting this project together. A MOFO premiere.
Benjamin is the ultimate MOFO man - a Japanese-Australian, multi-talented musician-composer-performance artist, sporting some amazing hair-dos. He's classically trained within an inch of his life, but utterly unique in execution. Come and see for yourself.
Susan uses sound to engage with social spaces. Her work draws in the listener, inviting the possibility for reflection, and the kind of wordless recognition that sits somewhere between memory and longing. This is a new creation that uses the
architectural space of the GASP! boardwalk and the resonating
and reflective qualities of the water.
FINISHES 7PM.
Presented by GASP!
Leon Theremin, a Russian physicist, accidentally discovered one day in 1920 that you could make music by placing a person in the path of an electronic circuit. It was the first electronic musical instrument, played without physical contact: the player
simply moves a hand nearer to an antenna to manipulate the pitch
or volume of the oscillators. Melbourne artist Robin Fox has made a
massive Theremin, which lots of us play at once, with our whole
bodies - by walking past, dancing around, or any such
tomfoolery.
FINISHES LATE.
Originally commissioned by City of Melbourne
Tina is an 'extreme drummer', video artist and observational filmmaker. We're going to crane her into the Derwent River, and she's going to play the drums 'underwater style' while
she's down there. See diagram for further information.
Australian art duo Soda_Jerk mix up moments in visual cultural history to hint at new possibilities for the present and the future. Their slick creations, comprised of digital found-material, create a kind of counter-narrative about our collective identity - and at the same time, are wickedly amusing.
The Carousel, at the Mona cinema, is a video-performance lecture
that explores film as 'a form of mummification' as well as 'a site
where the dead are resurrected through the life-giving motion of
the film projector'. The artists play and dissect segments from
films spanning genres such as sci fi, horror, and
documentary.
Image Courtesy of the Artbank Collection.
The collector is part of an ongoing collaboration between Tasmanian arts Meijers and Walsh. It centres on the fictional character Henri Papin - an isolated and eccentric figure the artists have
constructed from fragments of films and books that take a look
at the underside of human nature. For this incarnation of the
project, Detached has been turned into the inside of Henri Papin's
head…
FINISHES 5PM.
An interactive installation made up of these brilliant sound pod things… You need to come and discover them for yourself, at PW1.
Commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre for Transmission,
curated by Carrie Miller
Photographer Susannah Wimberley
Vicky Browne is represented by Galerie Pompom, Sydney
Sydney artist Dr. Wade Marynowsky works across art and technology. Here, he makes music using five flying V guitars mounted atop a rotating spin wheel (think Wheel of Fortune). The guitars create the shape of a five-pointed star - a pentagram, which conjures certain magical
connotations, and is used as a symbol of faith by Wiccans and
Neo-pagans.
This pentagram, however, depicts diabolus in musica: the
'tri-tone' musical interval that has been used since the eighteenth
century as the signature of the devil.
FINISHES 5PM.
This project is a partnership between MONA FOMA and
CAST
The composed elements for today's performance come from a suite written for my trio, Origami, which is to be released on CD in March this year. It is a kind of lament about the increasing need for art to be seen as a
commodity, but at the same time I think of it as an
optimistic collection of the qualities that art can engender. This
will be the premiere presentation of the work as a solo
performance.
- Adam Simmons, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, shakuhachi
The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra's Don Bate (trombone) and Tim Jones (tuba) are joined by saxophonist extraordinaire Danny Healy, and Christine Guidici on the berimbau - a Brazilian percussion instrument.
They build traditional folk songs from various cultures into pure improvisation, with the aim of disrupting the listener's usual associations with individual instruments.
From David Walsh:
Elvis Costello has a portmanteau name that belies his astonishing
originality. In 1978 I desperately wanted to go to Chelsea for the
sole reason that Mr Costello didn't. Since then he has sent me to
many other places, while performing in the many styles of the day
(and earlier days): pub rock, punk, new wave, country, jazz, folk,
classical... He played one of the best gigs we have had on the lawn
at Moorilla in 2005, his guitar and voice spectacularly separated,
and spectacularly brilliant. Elvis has been entertaining us for so
long, MOFO management is considering seating, fearing that we, his
audience, are becoming infirm.
They are, of course, aware that prayer has the power to make the lame walk. They are apparently unaware that song has the power to make the lame dance. (Contrariwise, at least one of the management team has the power to make a joke lame).
Pinky Beecroft (who played many of the other best gigs we've had
at Moorilla), ageing ex-nearly-rock-star with too many talents to
name, and many talents without names, has been commissioned to
support. He himself may need some support, being the victim
of two 'incurable diseases'. The only contagious component of his
performance is, however, melody; his catchy but clever tunes have
been the soundtrack to many of my few successful seductions and
also to a few of my many failed relationships.
Doors open 6pm.
Break down and cook a little lamb. You sick f**k.
Summer of Riesling.
Make a vegie garden.
Make beer using old and modern techniques. Compare. Discuss. Etc.
Scot will create a 'no-input' sound system for us: 'Outputs taken from an audio mixer are fed back into the inputs of the same mixer, creating a contained, semi-controllable
feedback system,' he says. Like a snake eating its own tail. Sort of.
2013 is the International Year of Anti-Discrimination against
Eastern-Shories (or 'ES'). ES are just like the rest of us, and
hence, we are holding a fabulous mini-fest in a barn. It's just a
little trip across the river - no more than ten minutes or
so.
They still speak Hobartian over there, and the local cuisine
remains Dim
Sims (call them 'dimmies' though, as in, 'How much for that bag
of yesterday's dimmies, and can you throw in the cheese kransky',
or they'll get confused).
Bickram Ghosh
Joshua Santospirito and Christopher Downes
Troup Formant
A more intimate, acoustic turn from this tabla-banging great.
This year's market has been moved to the Mona lawns to escape the bad-ass wind. It's still effing awesome, though; in fact, you could say - should you happen to despise the English language - that it is even awesomer. The theme this year is, 'Let's eat things you aren't really supposed to eat,' or, hang on, no, that's not it. The theme is: 'Let's eat invasive species, like weeds and Bambi'. Yep, that's the one. Meanwhile, Tasmanian artist Brigita Ozolins' central installation honours native Tasmanian species, and doubles as a handy wedding chapel,
should the mood strike (worship the wallaby and join hands
before the eyes of God, that sort of thing). There will be strictly
non-dorky workshops, as well as a dazzling array of eat-on-site
yummies, and the take-home variety, too. Art works pop-up
willy-nilly, as art works are wont to do. Mona Minors kids' tent's
back, re-vamped (new and improved!). Cigarette girls prowl the
site, not handing out cigarettes, because that would be
inappropriate. This is all a bit overwhelming, going to lie down
now.
EVERY SATURDAY, DEC 15-MAR 30
OPENING NIGHT
Sydney artist Dr. Wade Marynowsky works across art and technology.
Here, he makes music using five flying V guitars mounted atop a
rotating spin wheel (think Wheel of Fortune). The guitars create
the shape of a five-pointed star - a pentagram, which conjures
certain magical
connotations, and is used as a symbol of faith by Wiccans and
Neo-pagans. This pentagram, however, depicts diabolus in musica:
the 'tri-tone' musical interval that has been used since the
eighteenth century as the signature of the devil.
This project is a partnership between MONA FOMA and
CAST
OPENING NIGHT
Susan uses sound to engage with social spaces. Her work draws in
the listener, inviting the possibility for reflection, and the kind
of wordless recognition that sits somewhere between memory and
longing. This is a new creation that uses the
architectural space of the GASP! boardwalk and the resonating
and reflective qualities of the water.
Presented by GASP!
Pinky Beecroft aka 'Our Pinky' is supporting Elvis Costello. What a combo. Pinky's a super-talent, a funny bastard, and looks totally hot in a school uniform.
Get a drink or do a wee in the intermission. Or take part in something much weirder and cooler.
Artists are looking for secret agents to take part in their video performance. Interested? Email intermission.2013@gmail.com
SCREENINGS:
PW1 after the last act
Friday JAN 18
Saturday JAN 19
Sunday JAN 20
Dark and dreamy sythpop and new wave. Don't miss it.