Recent Works
Exhibiting in Italy Jan 24
Thanks to the curation of Ale Guzzetti my Intonarumori studies feature Art and Sound - a MASSIVE show . My work is in the "Strumenti angelici e macchine infernali" section. Naturally enough I am on team Infernal Machines : )
Kirby/Ward - Mill Lane residency The final work- Warehouse Drone Dec 23
In early 2023 Dani and I set up residency at Mill Lane, a massive warehouse that was being emptied in preparation for sale. Each week the sound changed as the shelves and plant equipment was shifted out until we were left with a massive empty space with fascinating acoustics. This video was recorded on the final evening on the space.
New Collaboration and Album Release with Mike Benoit Nov 23
I met Mike through a mutual friend who had suggested I could provide Piano for angoing project he is running. So i handed over 4 tracks, each recorded on a different Piano and Mike did the rest. You can hear the record on the Bandcamp link
The Hibernation Project Nov 23
Was part of one of this wonderful Canadian groups projects recently….
The Hibernation Project began as a weekly domestic intervention in Winter 2019, and was inspired, in part, by the open and deinstitutionalized weekly exhibitions at Kreuzberg Pavillion in Berlin. Artist-run in the most fundamental sense, the mandate of The Hibernation Project continues conversations from The House Project (2011) and WRECK CITY, empowering domestic space as an alternative to studio or gallery. Drawing from concepts of hygge, self-organization, and collectivity, at its core, this series is intended to nourish communal psychic wanderings during harsh winter months.
The Hibernation Project has come to house several off-season projects, including monthly sound art radio program EARS HAVE EYES, and spinoff car-based exhibition IDLE WORSHIP.
The project was instigated by artists Caitlind r.c. Brown & Wayne Garrett, and occurs in their home located in the neighbourhood of Ramsay, Calgary/Moh’kins’tsis on the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 in Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina First Nation, the Stoney Nakoda, and the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III. We share these lands with gratitude.
Banks/Kirby/Ward @ The Unconformity Festival Oct 23
Banks/Kirby/Ward presented a new version Discontinued Space - The Cinema of Maya Deren at the award winning Unconformity Festival in Queenstown on the West Coast of Tasmania. The performance was part of UNTV who this festival took over the old courthouse in Queenstown to do live broadcasts of Art, news and community based discussions throughout the festival.
Hexfarm Oct 23
Been jamming and remote recording with old mates and stellar musicians Dane Renshaw (Drums) and Phil Bywater ( Saxophones/Flute). We were ( and are now again) called Hexfarm back in the day. A noisy, largely improvised trio that brought together our shared love of disparate genres.
Duet For Bass Guitar and an Empty Warehouse Aug 23
Dylan and I have been back making strange noises in strange places. Debut gig ( in a normal kinda setting) happened recently too.
European Radio Season : )
Work from various projects getting some airtime in Sienna and Glasgow thanks to Radiophrenia Festival and Chiginia RadioArte Festival
New work in the wonderful Cities and Memory Project Remixing The World based on a field recording of Sacré Couer and its surroundings by Colin Hunter.
60 seconds radio 2023 - Jury Special Mention
In partnership with long term collaborator Cy Biane (Paris) I am happy to announce a special Jury mention in this years 60 sec radio competition. An excerpt from our piece Language Gap came in 4th place in this wonderful competition. Link to 60 sec website/winners playlist below
Then She Reaches For The Gun
DEBUT ALBUM
The Vociferous Mapping Of Your Unlikely Future
Released Oct 2022
Then She Reaches for the Gun was formed in 2021 by Mat Ward as a vehicle to bring together and expand upon some of his disparate musical collaborative projects. At its essence is sound collage, experimentation and the desire to merge and defy genres. Ward invites musicians, sound artists, poets and the general community to send him files to be used, abused and showcased ‘as suggested by the work’. They are not always ‘musical’ but found sounds, field recordings, spoken word, drunken rants and quite often the family dog! The raw material is arranged without prior concept, one phrase asks for the next in an alchemical and intuitive process that will most often feature dozens of tracks weaving in and out of each other, colliding, harmonising, arguing and laughing along the way.
Both the aesthetic and the compositional methods extensively use what Frank Zappa called Xenocrony - the mixing together of separately recorded and rhythmically opposing musical phrases to create polyrhythmic and polytempi compositions. Complex harmony and texture is also created in this way with seemingly at odd timbres and tones nestled together to create original sound beds and chord sequences. Then She Reaches for the Gun features fragmented story telling with the human voice (in many languages) appearing unannounced throughout the tracks offering up snippets of thoughts, conversations, jokes and existential angst. The absurdity of humanities desperate claim to have any real understanding of its place in the universe is revealed through the recorded follies and genuine emotions of the participants in these works. The project is a celebration of experimentation, chance, diversity and community. It pays homage to all musical tastes and genres whilst maintaining a sense of humour and irreverence that is needed to stay sane in the climate of early 21st Century contemporary culture.
Duet For Bass Guitar And A Huge Pile of Crap
A new duo project with Dylan Banks….conceived when the two of us were standing in a beautiful performance space and wondered what we would do in it if someone was kind enough to allow us the opportunity. It was quickly decided we should assemble an enormous pile of old car bodies, plant equipment, whatever which Dylan would play whilst I attempted to improvise some sort of bass work over the top
New Material Winter 2022 - Kirby/Ward
Introduce your brand
Take a minute to write an introduction that is short, sweet, and to the point. If you sell something, use this space to describe it in detail and tell us why we should make a purchase. Tap into your creativity. You’ve got this.
Organology Jan - April 2022
Had the pleasure of showing a couple of Intonarumori in this exhibition of instrument making in Launceston, Tasmania with master Intonarumori builder Dylan Banks. Some amazing instruments on show. Curatorial statement below as well as link to Gallery Exhibition Catalogue.
Mat Ward/Marco Lucchi - Empirica Records/REF Resilience Festival 2021/2022
With long time collaborator Marco Lucchi ( Modena, Italy) we released “ We Lay In The Grass, Staring At The Sky, Breathing With The Machines” as part of both the inaugural first REF Resilience Sound Festival and the debut compilation from Empirica Records. Link to the album on Spotify below.l
Then She Reaches For The Gun
Then She Reaches For The Gun is an international sound art collective I founded in 2021. It features artists, musicians, poets and noise makers from all over the world that contribute files for me to arrange and craft into experimental and down right weird pieces of music. Currently there are more than 50 active members from 20 countries involved.The project’s inspiration is two fold: Firstly its a homage to some of the stuff i grew up listening to like Mr. Bungle and other noisy bastards where anything goes, and often in quick fire succession and secondly it creates a chance to work with an never ending stream of talented musicians that i have known for years either in real life Australia or via the Internet. Below are a few examples : )
Sounds from Italy - Cities and Memory
Field Recordings and Re-imagined Compositions from Italy
Composition made from field recordings of the Falcone Borsellino Airport outside Palermo , Sicily as part of the Cities and Memory “Sounds from Italy” project 2021. You can scroll across the map of Italy and select works from all the contributors below
Discontinued Space -The Cinema of Maya Deren
Dani Kirby Piano/Voice
Mat Ward Bass/Intonarumori/Percussion
Dylan Banks Intonarumori
A live Expand Cinema event as part of The Clarence City Council’s Winter Concert Series held in august 2021. Live at The Rosny Barn 26/08/21
Maya Deren (1917 - 1961) is considered one of true pioneers of experimental film yet unlike many of the film makers she influenced ( Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch) her work is rarely experienced outside of academic and film school environments. As part of Kirby and Ward’s continuing investigation into the important (and often overlooked) role of women in the history of Contemporary Art Discontinued Space: The Cinema of Maya Deren will present several of Deren’s short movies with original live scores written by Kirby, Ward and Banks.
Deren employed a vast array of cinematic devices (looping, reversing, overlaying and time manipulation) to create vignettes that focused on graphic and kinetic form rather than straightforward narrative. Conceptually the work examines rhythm, isolation, social constructs, movement and ritual, all of which is underpinned by the notion of the inner world and its disconnection from the space of everyday life.
It is the conceptual framework of Deren’s cinema that informs the scores produced for this project. Rather than compositions that ‘soundtrack’ the action and the visual imagery the music reflects and explores Deren’s philosophical beliefs and her desire to immerse her audience in a world that is barely hinted at in everyday life yet sits just under the skin of reality.
The performance by Kirby, Ward and Banks showcases the 7 major short films Deren produced from 1943 to 1958.
relay//country remembers her names
Feeling very lucky to be involved in this recent festival project. Link to website at the bottom of the post. There is a lot to this one! The short version: Under the guidance of Composer Madeleine Flynn myself and 6 other musicians performed a beautiful work on two different rivers in my home state of Tasmania during the MONA FOMA 2021 festival. The instrumentation included horns, strings, sirens/fog horns, intonarumori and many other sound and trad instruments as well as a beautiful and moving text from Theresa Saintly. Here is a small summary from the program guide….
Relay / Country Remembers Her Names
Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey with Theresa Sainty
A slowly unfolding relay of land and sea signals echoes across our fair island, opening and closing the festival. Foghorns streamed from Low Head, boat horns, sirens, experimental intonarumori instruments, palawa kani (the language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people), bagpipe streamed from Queenstown, and other sound-making apparatus call each other over land and water, and ask us to reflect on where we are. From wukalina / Mount William and pilawaytakinta / Low Head, to Queenstown, Launceston and nipaluna / Hobart.
You will hear the work projected from a moving vessel meandering close to shore. In Launceston, listen from the banks of kanamaluka / Tamar River around Riverbend Park, Royal Park and Seaport. In Hobart, listen from the banks of the Derwent around the Hobart foreshore, to Long Beach, Sandy Bay, and on the eastern shore between Howrah and Bellerive.
Below is a small section of one of the performances
Personal
Created by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey with Theresa Sainty.
Collaborators: Zoe Rimmer, Merinda Sainty, Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, Ron & Zanette Crowden - Foghorn Volunteers Low Head Pilot Station Support Group, Andrew Bell, Rona Hollingsworth and Mike Webb and the Maritime Museum of Tasmania
Band: Mat Ward, Julia Drouhin, Dylan Sheridan, Dylan Banks, Phillipa Stafford, Emily Sheppard,
Remote site managers: Dan Rawlins, Chris Burton
Vessels and crew provided by the Australian Maritime College and Pennicott Wilderness Journeys.
Produced by Alison Wilkes and Bureau of Works
Technical manager Tom 'Billy' McKeand
Production support Rory Cadman
Videography Gabe Commerford
There is a wealth of detailed information about this project on the relay website. The project encompassed not just live music but pre-recorded indigenous poetry, live streamed instruments and sounds from across the state of Tasmania. The music reverberated off the hills of Hobart and Launceston as the vessels slowly meandered down the rivers creating a work that spoke to and incorporated the country it was written for. There are interviews, video link, translations of text and much more in the link below.
Boatcam - Hobart performance relay//country remembers her names MONA FOMA 2021
The Smiling Madame Beudet
New Expanded Cinema performance from Dani Kirby/Mat Ward. Premiered 22nd January 2021 at MONA FOMA festival Hobart, Tasmania.
Kirby/Ward present the the latest chapter in their ongoing investigation both the history of sound in the era of silent cinema and the pioneering role female artists played (most often overlooked) in the avant garde.
The Smiling Madame Beudet is credited as the first Feminist movie. The protagonist Madame Beudet is trapped in a suffocating marriage with her only escape being music and the fantasy that she lives in a different world. Her husband is domineering, boorish and frequently pretends to shoot himself (sometimes in front of guests) to taunt and belittle her. Far from portraying Madame Beudet as a victim it casts her as a heroine who, rather than submitting to a life of cruelty, seeks to assert her desires and free herself from the bonds of domestic misogyny.
Dulac uses groundbreaking cinematic artistry to embellish and add detail to both the narrative and the investigation of sexism and gendered roles through techniques such as super-imposition, ultra contrasting of focus, slow-motion, repetition of shots, abstraction and extreme camera angles. These techniques powerfully enforce the Dulac’s desire to show both the oppressiveness of the situation and the absolute need for an imagining of a better life.
The compositional approach focuses on highlighting the sub-text and philosophical underpinnings of the film with emphasis on the meta-narrative behind the protoganist’s story - which is a timeless critique of marriage, gender and sexism. Cinematically this is expressed through Dulac’s focus on Madame Beduet’s internal world as she moves between the disparity of escapism and reality. It is her complex voice and thoughts, as a metaphor for the broader issues of the film that Kirby/Ward bring to life through a dynamic score that incorporates multiple genres ranging from ultra minimalist melody all the way to deafening sub-bass drone.
A Trip to the Moon
As part of the 2020 Unconformity Festival based in Queenstown Tasmania Dani Kirby and I, along with 8 artists from around the globe were asked to re-score a collection of old Sci-Fi movies as part of Unconformity's UNTV live night. Naturally enough all festival activities were via the Internet this year and the show was broadcast on October 17th 2020 There is almost no info about the 1926 film Dani and I were given other than the year it was made. I cant even find any info on the production company etc. Its called Trip to the Moon and is an animated/ modelled 12 minute movie that goes through a fictional history of people’s attempts over the centuries to reach the moon culminating in a successful 1999 voyage. The unconformity festival is a wonderful arts festival held in the remote town of Queenstown on Tasmania’s west coast every two years. You can find out more about the festival below as well as. a link to other expanded cinema projects I have been involved in.
