Category: Features & Essays
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Swampland Magazine | New music again? On the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre
In 1981 Melbourne band Essendon Airport released their second album Palimpsest. If you’re lucky enough to have the original vinyl, you can reach inside the sleeve and find a red-and-white screen-printed paper detailing various album information, including the following acknowledgement: “All” “songs” “written” “and” “produced” “by” “ESSENDON AIRPORT”. Like the prevailing character of Essendon Airport,…
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Exhibition Essay | (un)Known Realities
There are many films, whether it’s The Blockbuster or the more ‘experimentally’ inclined, that negotiate memory and fantasy by setting their (non)narrative around various ontological instabilities. Characters fail to distinguish fantasy from reality, or are kept from the knowledge of reality and, by implication, the knowledge of themselves. Think Vanilla Sky, Mulholland Drive, Memento, Synecdoche New York, The Bourne series, The Wolverine, Brazil, Eternal…
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un Magazine | The polyphony of polyphonies
Originally published by un Magazine 10.2. To throw around polyphony with an unstructured multiplicity and plurality is now a commonplace. Ideas of fluctuating disunity and rhizomatic structures clumsily circulate around the contemporary dialogue, resembling what some now terrifyingly call a ‘classic’ postmodernism. Yet there is more to say about polyphony than this now-normalised discourse, and Polyphonic…
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Overland | One baby to another: twenty-five years of Nevermind
This piece originally appeared on Overland (online). Twenty-five years since the album’s release, it is very easy to become wistful when talking about Nirvana’s Nevermind. Having not been born when the album hit number one, I’ve tried to imagine the extent of Nevermind’s fame: three million sales in the first four months, 100,000 every week for the…
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Exhibition Essay | Slow /Dark: The Speaker Who Grew Up To Become A Canvas
This exhibition essay was written for Kusum Normoyle’s 2016 exhibition Slow /Dark at Nicholas Projects, Melbourne. A sound that thinks it’s a painting. A speaker that thinks it’s the bearer of the never-ending bliss of commodified connectivity. A death metal crest that doesn’t realise it’s found its way into an art installation. These are the…
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The Lifted Brow (Online) | “Many things I, I musn’t say”: Approaching the mystery and uncertainty of Xiu Xiu’s “Plays the Music of Twin Peaks”
This piece was originally published by The Lifted Brow. There were strange things happening, and without any decent coherency events could have taken place in any order. I was feeling nauseated and unsettled and couldn’t sleep without waking five or six times a night; a homeless man came running after me, waving his dick and…
Tiarney Miekus 