Featured

Atlas of the Sky

Atlas of the Sky is a new work of dramatic and ritualistic power by award-winning and internationally acclaimed Australian composer Liza Lim. It combines driving rhythms with swarming percussion and vocal sounds from a ‘crowd’ of performers.

Featuring Speak Percussion’s virtuosic instrumentalism and Jessica Aszodi’s vast palette of vocal colour, Atlas of the Sky tells stories about the stars, the power of crowds and changing constellations of memory.

The ‘crowd’ of performers consists of a group twenty trained and untrained musicians plus young people from Speak Percussion’s Sounds Unheard program, who will create large-scale patterns that counterpoint the turbulent rhythms of our contemporary world. Using purpose-built instruments, the work demonstrates the expressive elemental power of string drums, stones, wood blocks made of Australian timber and the semantron — a resonant plank of wood that is used like a bell in Greek and Eastern European Christian Orthodox ritual.

The music is expressive, lyrical, textural, percussive, playful, dynamic and conceptually rich. Liza Lim is one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary classical composers, and has strong affinities with Asian and indigenous Australian cultural practices.

Image: Jeff Busby

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In Development: Polar Force

An immersive live performance combining custom built ice instruments with Antarctic field recordings, set within a chilled inflatable performance space.

Polar Force is an investigation of extreme wind and temperature through hyper-realistic art. This visceral and multi-sensorial work immerses the audience within an overwhelming sound world and performance environment. Presented within a chilled and gusty inflated space, pristine Antarctic field recordings combine with live ice percussion as the audience are exposed to wind, cold, light and haze.

Polar Force explores notions of human fragility and isolation whilst pointing towards climate change. New ice-instruments that produce wholly unique acoustic results will be developed, distorting as they melt and fracture to render the ice and ‘weather’ into audible phenomena.

High fidelity field recordings made in the Australian Antarctic Territory of katabatic winds and extreme weather events will form the musical and structural foundation of the work. Dr Philip Samartzis will draw upon the hundreds of hours of recordings made during his two Australian Antarctic Arts Fellowships to underpin the work.

Image: Jeff Busby

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Assembly Operation

Three percussionists dutifully form an assembly line to extract music from everyday objects.

Drawing on the visual, sonic and conceptual qualities of the one Yuan note, using paper, packaging, electronic toys and traditional objects, Speak Percussion delivers a loaded sonic odyssey.

In this major new collaboration between Eugene Ughetti, performance maker Clare Britton and visual artists Cyrus Tang and Jia Jia Chen, dark video sequences and minimalistic set design conjure surreal reflections on mass-production.

Assembly Operation manufactures high quality sound by crunching and grinding low worth goods.

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