AUDIO ART
Earfest 2020
earfestival.com September 1-30
Intimate communion is no festival's strong suit. The rumble of the throng might have its appeal but at any stage, the sound of a pin-drop is unlikely. Enter Earfest: a COVID-inspired headphone experience with all the strange variety of the Fringe and none of the sideways scowling.
Ian Moss contributed a performance to EarfestCredit:Daniel Boud
The hypnotic power of the uninterrupted close-up is key, whether it's in the jaw-dropping soul of Ian Moss singing Shipbuilding against the creak of double-bassist Phil Stack, or Jean Kittson's tragicomic poetic dialogue between three generations of women dealing with the many insults and (fewer) rewards of old age.
They were days one and two of the month-long program that whispers another surprise every morning until September 30. What they share is the glorious purity of silence and the exquisite texture and expression of the human voice in utter command of it.
The spoken words can be as funny as cartoon voice actor Rupert Degas brainstorming impromptu personalities for unsavoury farmyard characters (14 depraved animals, seven minutes) and Grace Rouvray's brutally true monologue about what it means to be a bridesmaid.
They can be enlightening too, as in sound artist Bridget Chappell's mini-cast about the pre-colonial history of the Yolngu people of Arnhem Land and the seafaring Makassan of Indonesia. AFTRS graduate Nicola Sitch offers a casual suburban vignette of life and death with a lyricism that belies her 23 years.
There's less literal storytelling as well. Beat boxer Thom Thum, Mongolian throat singer Bukhu Ganburged, singing saw maestro David Splatt and theremin ace Miles Brown are among the performers who bring video accompaniment, the better to prove the seeming impossibilities of their highly textural crafts.
But most of these daily panoramas are conjured in pure sound, often with enveloping binaural technology. On day 10, the audio verite birth of baby Darcy: a hubbub of hospital banality woven with the breathtaking magic of first love. On day 22, Julian Wessels gently buried us under a tinkling ocean, then raised us to an ecstatic birds' chorus.
There's a theme, "Pearl", to mark the 30th anniversary of Eardrum, the Sydney-based creative agency "with a peculiar obsession for audio" whose brainchild this is. It turns out to be a metaphor with many lustrous layers in transporting poems about farmers and night, then stripped of its pretensions in Phil Wilcox's unsentimental invocation of "oyster bone shit".
That thread aside, it's only the medium that these tiny stages suspended in the dark of space-time share. As we sink into the guided meditation of therapist Mary Huang or lean into the uneven rhythmic rap of Grey Ghost, the unifying message is one of unlimited connection, imagination, diversity and possibility. And for one precious month, at least, the end of "Shhh!"
Michael Dwyer is the Financial Review's foreign editor.
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