New Mountain is a three channel live video work by Rachel Peachey and Paul Mosig, exploring human/environment relationships in the context of deep time with accompanying sound by Gail Priest, Chris Caines, Benjamin Ward and Tilman Robinson.
Dream Alley Dream is a conscientiously curated exploratory and experimental music series occurring across venues within the Blue Mountains, on Dharug and Gundungurra Country, coordinated by Brett Thompson, Eloise Maree and Robert Frost.
6.30pm
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Doors open
Drinks & snacks
8.15pm
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Break
Drinks & snacks
Funding
New Mountain is supported by the Blue Mountains City of the Arts Trust Grants Program 2023/24.
The City of the Blue Mountains is located within the Ngurra (Country) of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples. New Mountain + Dream Alley Dream recognise that Dharug and Gundungurra Traditional Owners have a continuous and deep connection to their Country and that this is of great cultural significance to Aboriginal people, both locally and in the region. For Dharug and Gundungurra People, Ngurra takes in everything within the physical, cultural and spiritual landscape – landforms, waters, air, trees, rocks, plants, animals, foods, medicines, minerals, stories and special places. It includes cultural practice, kinship, knowledge, songs, stories and art, as well as spiritual beings, and people: past, present and future. New Mountain + Dream Alley Dream pay respect to Elders past and present while recognising the strength, capacity and resilience of past and present Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the Blue Mountains region.
Rachel Peachey & Paul Mosig live and work on the land of the Dharug and Gundungurra people in the Blue Mountains. They have been collaborating for 20 years using field studies and play as research tools to create mixed-media installations and internet based art works. They have an ongoing interest in human/environment relationships, which they try and understand from a range of perspectives. Their process is centred around collaboration, often working with their two children and practitioners from a range of other disciplines They use movement, photography, video, sound, sculpture and textiles to document and respond to particular landscapes. Their work has recently been included in the 17th Athens Digital Art Festival, Cementa 22 and the Melbourne Art Fair, with recent video installations in Ireland, France, Melbourne, Canberra and the Blue Mountains.
As a mainstay and central figure in the Australian underground scene Manek uses a wide range of electronic and improvised techniques to create time-dilating folk-jazz romanticism, dream(pop) (post) punk and syncopated rhythms. He explores clarinet and bass clarinet with field recordings and complex digital compositions in a live setting utilising the Eastern European and Roma sonorities of the artist’s heritage. He has released several albums on the highly respected European avant-garde label Blackest Ever Black and has toured extensively throughout Eurpoe and Australia. He also also created soundtracks for short films and installations and has co-produced and mixed numerous albums for artists including; Jonnine Standish (HTRK), Carla dal Forno and YL Hooi.
Gail Priest is a sound artist and writer based on Dharug and Gundungurra land (Katoomba, NSW). Her work spans soundtracks for dance, theatre and video, solo electro-acoustic performance as well sound installations for gallery contexts, both solo and in collaboration. She has performed her live compositions and exhibited sound installations nationally and internationally including in Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, France, Norway and the Netherlands. In 2015-16 she was awarded an Emerging & Experimental Arts Fellowship from the Australia Council. She has undertaken numerous radio commissions and releases music on her own label Metal Bitch Recordings as well as Flaming Pines, Endgame Records and room40. She curates events and exhibitions and writes fictively and factually about sound and media art, working for RealTime magazine for over 15 years. She has just completed a PhD in creative sound theory at UTS.
Chris Caines is an artist living on the land of the Dharug and Gundugurra peoples in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, Australia. Producing films, articles, book chapters, site-specific media installation and mobile/locative media alongside regular music releases and performances.
Caines’s studio practice embraces the linkages between media and location across multiple modalities in video, sound, live performance and network media. For three decades he has pursued and developed a sustained meditation on media as live archive to be continually re-composed as a way of revealing new knowledge about the constructions of history, embodied place and the ephemeral nature of our understandings of the past.
Ben is a musician, working predominantly on the lands of the Gadigal and Bidjigal, whose practice has recently focussed on altered tunings, texture and improvisation. Outside his work on the double bass with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra he is inspired by the wonderful community of musicians in Sydney. Place and history is currently an important foundation of his artistic thought. A recent highlight is an ongoing collaboration with cellist Freya Schack-Arnott which has produced an album “in landscape” (2020) and which has a set of upcoming releases for nyckleharpe, synthesised sounds, double bass and cello.
Tilman Robinson is a composer, producer and sound designer. He creates maximalist electro-acoustic and dark ambient music drawing on a wide range of genres. Tilman’s diverse output focuses on the psychological impact of dense sound incorporating acousmatics and psychoacoustic principles. Tilman has received major work commissions from genre diverse sources and accolades including nominations for the Melbourne Prize in 2016 & 2019. From 2019-21 he was the Artistic Associate of Australian experimental music group, Speak Percussion. He has released three solo albums including CULTURECIDE on Icelandic label Bedroom Community. It was described by The Wire “...there’s a lingering sense of bleak romanticism here, a deliberate and human design that leaves the natural world as a beautiful and separate image.” The Wire, on Culturcide.
Photo: Jared Leibowitz
Mara is a composer and curator based in Eora / Sydney. She plays the viola and collaborates with her laptop to create live performances and recorded pieces for film, dance, and gallery spaces. Informed by interactions and perspectives within environments, her work questions the coexistence between those who inhabit these spaces.
Photo: @phoenixcentralpark
Megan Alice Clune is a musician, artist and composer based on Gadigal and Wangal lands (Sydney, Australia). Her work explores the dynamic relationships between music, technology, the body and temporality through composition, performance and installation. Described as ‘visionary ambient’ (Rockerilla), ‘breathtakingly intimate’ (Bandcamp Daily) and 'a pristine exercise in precise simplicity' (boomkat.com), Megan’s music portrays an emotional depth through a minimal sonic palette, delicately balancing textures that are at once rich and sparse. Drawing from a unique combination of techniques and processes, she has also collaborated with leading Australian film-makers, visual artists and choreographers to create music for film, dance, video and performance art. All of these diverse elements have correlated in releases Furtive Glances (Room40), Digital Auras (Longform Editions) and If You Do (Room40). She has performed and presented work across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America, including VividLIVE at the Sydney Opera House, 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Tokyo), Performa15 (NYC), Institute of Modern Art (Meanjin/Brisbane), Substation (Naarm/Melbourne) and more.