The Sound Barrier

Ever since Bach first showed that the one keyboard could play music in 24 different keys, and redefined tonality in the process, music has been driven ahead by experimenters. The Sound Barrier is an opportunity to explore and celebrate some of the really daring and fascinating innovation that has taken place in music over the past hundred years and that continues to take place now every day, everywhere.

The Sound Barrier will present music across four main categories;

• the icons of innovation (such as Stockhausen, Varèse, Xenakis and Cage)
• Melbourne’s musical underbelly (drawing on the incredible richness of Melbourne’s local experimental music scene: expect to hear artists such as Paul Kidney Experience, Monolith, Undecisive God, and Ernie Althoff)
• music deconstructed and reconstructed (musicians and sound artists from everywhere who pull sounds apart, and put them back together again, showing us new ways to understand and listen to music – everything from William Basinski to Merzbow)
• the genre benders (musicians who take old genres to new places, bending them into new shapes, such as John Zorn, Dissecting Table and Anthony Pateras)

A show that breaks all the barriers and opens up a whole universe of musical possibilities and ideas, I am proud to be able to bring The Sound Barrier into Melbourne’s home of little heard music.

pbs.sound.barrier@gmail.com