Infinite Enjoyment

Oliver Hextall is a Melbourne artist whose sound works have always seemed to me to be radical in their open endedness. He is a close friend of mine so when I conceived of using the Slide space at Gertrude Street to present sound works on an endless loop out into the street, I immediately thought of his work.

His performances seem to have no start or end. They are niether diminished nor enhanced by walking in or out of the room while he is playing. They seem to be perfect furniture music, whose aimlessness implies an author-less and therefore natural world. Though synthetic in quality there is something very naturalistic about his balance of repetition to change, heavy on the repetition but with elements sliding in and out of notice at a pace that though slow, avoids the previous uses of glacial-change-as-menace prevalent in the rigors of minimal techno or the machismo of The Melvins or Sun 0))).



This work "Medieval Geometric" was commissioned as the first of the SoundSlide works and is available free under a creative commons license (as I hope all the SoundSlide works will be). It is composed of unsyched tape loops (real ones) which slip in and out of phase creating distorted Angus Maclise like poly-rhythms, like "Thunderbolt Pagoda" in its evocative use of distortion this piece uses that lack of clarity to create a space to be filled by the listeners imagination. As a part of Slide it will be presented as a loop but here is available as a one hour slice, a metaloop perhaps to be played on loop once more for your infinite enjoyment.


Download Medieval Geometry