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Tuesday, January 21, 2025 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

SoundOut – the music festival of art for art’s sake

SoundOut stars French quintet Hubbub… “Tremulous saxophones are punctuated by carefully placed deep thumps from a massive drum. This evolves into a texture of rapid, gentle flapping and scrabbling, the sax stuttering and snarling.”

When a festival director starts quoting the ancient Vedas, you know you’re in for something out-of-the-ordinary. 

So, it was when SoundOut music festival founder Richard Johnson texted me a line from the Upanishads reading: “Kill with the sword of reason all doubt born of fear, and arise great warrior, arise.” 

These are fighting words for the 16th iteration of an event aiming to “move sound mountains” with absolutely original music, albeit performed in a quiet room at the ANU, inspiring contemplation and reflection.

Johnson readily admits that his brand of experimental music is like caviar to the general public, a taste not always acquired. But as he has been explaining to the funding bodies for years, it’s not about attracting huge numbers; it’s about creating original music. 

And, indeed, in 2015 he won the Award for Excellence in Experimental Music at the ART Music Awards in Sydney.

With 15 years behind him, Johnson, a Canberra sax and wind player with big ideas, has been doing it tough for a long time, but this year with an ArtsACT grant of $43,296, he’s been able to double the fees for his guest artists and is looking forward to an exciting three days of music-making.

Top of his list for 2025 is the engagement of French quintet Hubbub, with whom he’s been negotiating for a full 12 years. As Johnson explains it, all the stars had to align – he had to get funding, they had to get funding and it had to happen at the same time. This time it did. 

It won’t be just a matter of listening to Hubbub’s “acoustic brouhaha”, which he’s been admiring from afar for a long while, but he’s programmed them to create new sounds. 

One critic gives a taste of the way Hubbub turn their instruments into almost human performers, saying: “Tremulous saxophones are punctuated by carefully placed deep thumps from a massive drum. This evolves into a texture of rapid, gentle flapping and scrabbling, the sax stuttering and snarling.”

Johnson himself has been around the music traps for a long time, arriving in Canberra at age nine, starting to play music at school and then seeking out his own training in music as an adult. He loved Jimi Hendrix as a kid, then turned to jazz, but he also likes West African bands and Kora music. He was for more than a dozen years a player with a local gamelan orchestra.

Nowadays, aside from performing, he has a few jobs, one at the ANU Drill Hall Gallery, a generous supporter of SoundOut for many years and the location of the event.

His taste is wide-ranging and his sources for finding artists are wide and varied, headed up by Bandcamp and Instagram, where he always has his ear to the ground for crossover experimental and electronic music with an international flavour.

A problem over the years has been that the announcement of the relevant arts ACT grants don’t come out until very late in the year – it was early December before he knew that he’d got 43K, just enough time for him to seal the deals and engage a marketing co-ordinator, a big help.

So, what’s on the menu this year apart from Hubbub?

One of his very favourite exercises is to mix visual art with sounds. This time, all eyes will be on Locust Jones, from the Blue Mountains, who will create a large-scale graphite work in response to the 24-hour news cycle. During his two 40-minute performances, Jones will be paired with drummer Maria Moles to create rhythms as he produces the artwork, which will go on display until the end of the festival. 

From the US comes Zosha Warpeha, a composer-performer working at the intersection of contemporary improvisation and folk traditions, using the bowed stringed instrument, the hardanger d’amore, alongside her own voice. 

Magda Mayas is a pianist and composer-performer living in Berlin who uses both the inside as well as the exterior parts of the piano, with amplification, preparations and objects that eventually become extensions of the instrument itself. 

“It’s the diversity of sounds that gets me excited, I describe it as a boutique festival because of what it does… this kind of music is art for art’s sake,” Johnson says. 

SoundOut festival, ANU Drill Hall Gallery, January 31-February.

Helen Musa

Helen Musa

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