“Humbuckers”
Tim Catlin, David Brown and Bonnie Mercer
15 Oct → 15 Oct 2009

Invented way back in the 1950s, the humbucker is a guitar pickup that reduces hum and noise from electromagnetic interference. Ever since then guitarists have been finding ways of adding noise back into the signal. Feedback, distortion, altered tunings, guitar preparations, live-sampling, electronic modification and customised effects are some of the ways in which players have sought to circumvent guitar orthodoxy. Humbuckers showcases three local guitarists employing different strategies for extending and transcending the limitations of the common electric guitar.

Tim Catlin is a Melbourne-based guitarist and composer. His practice is primarily focused on extending and re-investigating the sonic possibilities of the guitar. Centered around drone-based and immersive methodologies his music uses a combination of both traditional and extended guitar techniques. These include guitar preparations, customised playing devices and string exciters, home-built electronics, live-looping and modified guitar design.

Over the last 10 years he has been active at various festivals, galleries and clubs such as Activating the Medium (San Francisco), Liquid Architecture (Brisbane), What is Music and Articulating Space festivals (Melbourne), The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, West Space and Bus galleries (Melbourne), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Australian Centre for The Moving Image (Melbourne), The Totally Huge New Music Festival (Perth), Immersion Surround Sound Concert Series (Melbourne) and The Blue Door (Hong Kong). He has performed or collaborated with Jason Kahn, Jon Mueller, Otomo Yoshihide, Phill Niblock, Machinefabriek, Mike Cooper, Candlesnuffer, Philip Samartzis, Tarab, Rod Cooper, The Wall of E Guitar Ensemble and many others.

David Brown has been involved in the Melbourne experimental, art rock/punk rock scene since the mid-seventies. The focus of his solo project ‘candlesnuffer’ has increasingly centred on the development of composing techniques which meld opposing streams like conventional electro-acoustic methods with noise and rock and also the development of a vocabulary of tiny acoustic sounds enlarged outside their normal context. He has continued to develop a vocabulary that runs the gamut from rock bassist through experimental guitarist to sound artist.

Bonnie Mercer garners the most attention for being the guitarist of three-piece psych-sludge rockers the Grey Daturas. Outside of the activities of the Grey Daturas, Bonnie has been keeping herself busy with a range of solo and collaborative projects in which she further explores the worlds of unrestrained depraved feedback, hullucinatory white noise and hypnotically evolving sonic guitar experiments.

$10 entry.