Sky Needle + Clinton Green

Thursday 14 September 2023, 8pm

Long Play Cinema – 318 St Georges Rd, Fitzroy North.

Tickets

Sky Needle is an improvising band that originated in Brisbane in 2009, taking its name from the ‘sky needle’, an architectural oddity built by the Japanese pavilion for Expo 88, which remained abandoned for many years. Mainstays of the group have been Sarah Byrne, Alex Cuffe, and Joel Stern, joined over the years by Ross Manning, Michael Donnelly, Glen Schenau, Daniel Jenatsch, and Alan Nguyen amongst others. The band’s performances feature an array of self-made and invented instruments, including ‘leg horns’, ‘speaker box bass’, and ‘the plank’. Sky Needle’s sound is difficult to place but instantly recognizable; a confounding and detuned hybrid of rhythm, noise, repetition, and wordless vocalization that oscillates between broken motorik grooves and psychological collapse. Since its formation, Sky Needle has released various LPs, 7″s, and tapes, including works such as “Rave Cave” (Negative Guest List), “Debased Shapes” (Bruit Direct Disques), “Neckliner” (Albert’s Basement), and “Acid Perm” (Nihilistic Orbs). The band has performed extensively across Australia, Indonesia, and Europe.

Clinton Green is an Naarm/Melbourne-based experimental musician who has worked with hacked and faulty equipment and idiophones, including turntables, bowed metal and telephone pole infrastructure. His latest work involves drawing rhythmic minimalist music from decrepit Walkmans playing parts of themselves.

Clinton Green presents a new work for sound generated from the insides of broken Walkmans.

Jasmin Wing-Yin Leung plays various huqin (erhu, zhonghu, yehu), presents material from her ‘Fishing Songs’ series – fingertip precision, patience, and Cantonese folk aesthetics.

Studio Norwood Lab (Colin Hodson) debuts a new instrument that detournes the bicycle as a sonic object.

Long Play, 318 St Georges Road, Fitzroy North – $15 on the door.

Next Saturday (1 July) I’ll be presenting a new solo work I’ve been working on of late. It’s at an event called Exp-West, which I’ve curated for Sleepless Footscray, also featuring Whitehorse, Maltese Well Monster/Mito Elias/Fina Po, and Deep Sneeze (a new trio of Jen Callaway, Llara Isabell Arena and David Palliser). Fucked up music from the Western suburbs will be flying our flag high in the old Club X shop in Footscray.

Saturday 1 July, 7:30pm
Exp-West
170 Nicholson St, Footscray

Tickets $15