1 Feb 2011

...performing with Lee Noyes at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 28/1

























"Lee Noyes and Sally Ann McIntyre performed first. Sally had amassed a curious collection of items to toy with – and in a speculative facebook post early that day she mused over the outcomes of a meeting between “ a mini-FM transmitter, a bakelite valve radio, a homemade kitset theremin, six identical pocket size transistors, a 78rpm record from the 1940s featuring "master radio canaries" (a gift from John Demetrick), field recordings made in the grounds of seacliff lunatic asylum, and a small music box that plays edith piaf's l'accordeoniste...” . Noyes utilized his famous mini-sized kit, this time stripped back to absolute bare boner. What occurred was simply gorgeous – the FM and valve radios effervesced and tittered, radio emits a sound so archetypal to those of us with a penchant for information and paranoia, grey sound – empty fuzz such a narcotic delight in my childhood... Noyes mirrored the chatter and crunch of radio by stretching drum-skins, scraping and sucking, blowing and shuttling, his kit transforms into an ululating backdrop for McIntyres radio-orchestration. Melody enters as McIntyre spins the haunting 78 and manipulates music box, the evocative multi-verse of source materials create a new world. There is a delerium to this performance. The birdsong and field-recordings created a sense of the baroque and the oriental, like a scene from an islamic garden of delights... birds and warm sweet breezes, beneath which rivers flow. And so I attended my first improvised performance of radio and drum. And I don't think any one else would have had the imagination and responsive sensitivity to make it work. Bravo Lee and Sally."

- Matt Middleton, writing in his blog La Decennie Brut


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