Natasha Anderson

Amanda Stewart & Natasha Anderson

voice | recorder & electronics

Formed in 2006, the duo of Anderson and Stewart take the voice and recorder into new timbral territories. In performance, their unique palette fuses into a multi-faceted organism, with a shared language forced from contradiction. Discipline subverts chaos, acoustic becomes electronic, microsounds enlarge into powerful statements.

Anderson’s unique compositional and instrumental approach creates alien landscapes blasted by extended technique, psychoacoustic electronics and ominous low end. Stewart’s dizzying array of vocal timbres - from the microsonic to textual deconstruction - punctuates and melds with Anderson's sound world. In performance tension is paramount: explosive phrases ricochet off sudden silences. Together, a beautifully volatile sound world is created, informed by extreme dynamic control and temporal precision.

As regular fixtures at experimental music festivals in Australia, Anderson & Stewart have also collaborated with filmmaker Louise Curham and French musician Jerome Noetinger.

Cyclic Defrost
"...Their performance on the night was jaw dropping...It felt like we were watching some kind of high pitched chemical reaction."

RealTime
"...An extroardinary range of sounds ... It was often truly startling, with both performers demonstrating extraordinary control over dynamics and timing. They weren’t so much responding to each other as operating as one volatile unit."

Twitch

Natasha Anderson Recorders/Electronics
Robin Fox Live Processing/Sound Diffusion/Programming
Anthony Pateras Prepared Piano/Electronics
Vanessa Tomlinson Percussion
Erkki Veltheim Strings
James Wilkinson Trombone/Electronics

Formed in 2003, Twitch is an electro-acoustic sextet which investigates the symbiosis of notation, improvisation and technology. Using the unique combination of analogue electronics, recorders, viola, trombone, percussion, prepared piano and live signal processing, the group is united by an uncompromising approach to sound and exploratory instrumental performance.

Featuring some of the more unique players in the Australian experimental music community, Twitch has played the ABC Iwaki Auditorium, What is Music? Festival, Deadhorse’s Concave City (2006) and in 2004 were invited to play in Amsterdam at the Gaudeamus Music Week.

6×6 is the first major collaborative work by Twitch.

RealTime Dec-Jan 2006
“Twitch then premiered their 6×6, a huge work for which each of the six members wrote one movement. This turbulent, chaotic piece—for prepared piano, violin, viola, ukelele, percussion, trombone, recorders, electronics and assorted objects and devices—recalls Dada and Fluxus events, but there is method in the madness, as the performers work from scores including graphic ones. Twitch has developed an individual and coherent musical form out of musical references pushed to the limit—a rubbery-sounding prepared piano, morphed voices speaking—shrieking nonsense syllables drafted on the spot and comic elements including a balloon being rubbed, a large book being slapped shut and another being repeatedly thrown to the floor. Some elements are recorded and replayed during the work. The performers, in stocking masks with whitened eyes and reddened mouths, create a cathartic piece of theatre.”
Chris Reid

Metalog

Metalog was founded by Jim Denley in 2007, bringing together six unique artists from Sydney and Melbourne in an attempt to reflect on and extend our experiences of 'the electroacoustic'. Each member is deeply involved in creating their own 'Meta' instruments and our aim, as a group, is to create a 'metaband'.

Natasha Anderson – although her practice began to some extent with notions of the recorder, where it is now is so far removed from this that she has completely invented a new way of thinking about instrumentalism, (with some serious hardware and software additions). Robbie Avenaim's concepts of percussion continue to astound. His use of automated electronic devices for hitting made us all rethink our assumptions of 'playing together'. Ben Byrne performs with a revox reel-to-reel tape recorder and other electronics. He explores the act of recording sound and operating electronic equipment as a a gestural and performative musical practice which foregrounds the materiality and potential of recorded sound while at the same time adding a meta musical level in which the temporality of the performance itself comes into question. Jim Denley's uncompromising creativity emanates from a radical approach to improvisation. He works with mutated percussion on his sax, throat mikes, contacts, computer and triggering devices - exploring the acoustics of his respiratory system. Dale Gorfinkel - is an instrument re-designer, on the vibraphone. His idea of 'play' involves automated inventions, spatialised sounds and an approach to the trumpet that never knew convention. Amanda Stewart's voice isn't just a voice, she uses amazing technique, amplification and diffusion to collide it's smallest particles - she is as much an electronic musician as any laptopper. In the sense that a Metalanguage is a language about a language, this allows her to comment on notions and perceptions of voice.

In playing together we explore various ways of diffusing the electro-acoustic sound. Each individual approach is an installation in itself, so that each musician must negotiate a number of parallel time/space structures within the performance. This band isn't mixed together in the space, it's mixed together in your head.
Jim Denley

RealTime Dec-Jan 2006
"...The success of this work came from the bringing together of six very compatible artists, always listening closely, never cluttered, and maintaining their distinctive voices while sustaining a strong aesthetic direction throughout."