arc05: 'ARE YOU HERE FOR THAT ART SHIT?' - Truncated reviews of Sound Summit 2012 & 2013 (Mess+Noise)
From 2000-2013, the Sound Summit event featured a packed bill of bands and conference talks/panels billed as “a festival of independent and innovative music.” It was very very good, and was tied for much of its history to the This Is Not Art event in Newcastle, NSW on the October long weekend (hence the timing of this post). In 2013, Sound Summit was moved to Marrickville for ease of logistics, and then it disappeared after a mysterious internal review regarding the festival’s future bore no fruit. I’ve tidied up as many of the painful 2010s music writing elements of the below two reviews as I could: it covers the final Newcastle event in 2012, and last ever event in 2013 (Marrickville), both published at the time on Mess+Noise. Two things about these feel particularly bonkers to me on re-reading: 1) That the DIY community had an influx of dosh from state and national government to help tour international bands of little esteem like Home Blitz and Blues Control, and; 2) That I made barely a mention of the counter-festival held across the road from Sound Summit at DIY space The Pharmacy, which I reckon says a lot about ~my journey~ through the co-optable as anything. The writing below isn’t particularly strong, so I’d say get ready to skim!
Sound Summit 2012 - Newcastle, NSW
Outsiders can view Newcastle as little more than a country town, a glorified suburb by the sea, lorded over by an indecisive mining magnate who owns their sporting teams. From the inside, Newcastle’s youth seems fed up with limited options: either self-deprecatingly referring to the town as a hole or desperately trying to convince you it has more to offer than what you thought. Meanwhile, an older contingent grows disgruntled by a council directing public funds to the arts as a strategy to battle the city’s aging population. So it's a dynamic city, as friendly as it can be seedy. On the same night I'm taken off-route by a bus driver in order to help me find the Croatian Club (the central venue for the 12th annual Sound Summit), I walk past a street brawl supervised by four security guards waiting for the punch-up to run its course. So maybe Newcastle has an image problem.
This is a city of contradictions, and it’s amongst this turmoil where the festival's co-directors, Brooke Olsen (Dirty Shirlows), Daniel Gottlieb (Ad Hoc) and Nic Warnock (RIP Society) assembled some of the country's most innovative DIY artists, given strength by the billing of overseas acts curated as reflections of what's happening locally. For Newcastle, it is with no irony lost that very few of the artists on the bill have ties to the festival's hometown.
“A festival of independent and innovative music” is Sound Summit's tagline, and for the artists assembled this tends to vaguely define a coming together of DIY scenes. Punk, garage, noise and electronic communites (all insufficient descriptors) assemble on the Croatian Club stage. Early on in the first day, the sense of occasion overpowered any curiosity for fringe genres, clusters of ported-in Sydneysiders sitting cross-legged on the club’s bowling green with half-litre cans of Zamkowe (the Croatian beer of choice) while the bands played inside.
The only Newcastle act on Friday's bill, The Gooch Palms reputation preceded them with, “I don't need to see that guy's dick again” one dismissive assessment from the green.
Secret Birds' guitar loops bled into the cosmic atmosphere of Rites Wild.
Cleveland's Radio People meshed 16-bit synths with Kraut jams.
Twerps’ appearance brought a full crowd inside for the first time, with arm-in-arm anthems, shifting receptions from audience curiosity to all-in sing-a-longs.
Saturday afternoon began with the premiere of the feature-length DIY film Autonomy and Deliberation by Melbourne band The UV Race, which aired in-between a number of well-attended panels. The appearance of characters from Melbourne's latter-day music mythology (many of whom appeared in the film) dotted the crowd across the weekend, proving that Saturday belonged to the Victorian capital.
Eastlink were an early slice of aggression and were one of the best examples of the incestuous nature of the weekend's bill, with Al Montfort moving from drums to guitar for Lower Plenty's ensuing set. Timetabled almost perversely to clash with the AFL grand final, the band’s members were forced to peer over the heads of the crowd for score updates, and cut their set of downer folk short to be followed up by The Cannanes.
Mad Nanna brought a dose of almost painful lethargy (a compliment), immediately obliterated by the cocksure thunder of Primitive Calculators.
Blues Control were a US duo with an ethos of experimentation and deconstruction: including a live pulling-apart of Wolfmother's 'Joker & the Thief' that wasn’t as baffling as that sounds.
It was the end of both nights that brought out the chaos of Newcastle. Beyond the bar brawls that litter the walk back to the CBD from the city's outskirts lies the confusion of the city's 1am lock-out (2022 note: the Newcastle lockouts that were used as a test case for the Sydney lockouts a few years later). What do you do at the end of the night in Newcastle? That's when the rumours started spreading. Rumours of a Royal Headache secret show, a Straight Arrows appearance at the Pharmacy (one of Newcastle's premier DIY venues) or a house party at The Nugs' or Gooch Palms' house (both dwellings apparently housing half the festival's out-of-town band members.) While the house parties did exist, they were made up of confused out-of-towners standing awkwardly in a pack waiting for the fun to start while the hosts looked on nervously.
Newcastle locals The Nugs kicked off the conventional guitar night with a grinning ferocity, a stark contrast to Constant Mongrel's grunting brand of seedy thrashes.
Straight Arrows drew the crowd from chin-scratching to the frivolous, and if disproportionately enjoying Straight Arrows over the noise acts felt like rockism at its worst, by the time Royal Headache arrived on stage, any sense of guilt was lost.
New Jersey’s Home Blitz were unfortunately placed last on the bill, leaving a contingent to head off for the last train back to Sydney after Royal Headache's set to miss one of the festival's highlights. Home Blitz play scrappy power-pop full of rapid-fire riffs and whining anthems, but there's a sense of experimentation too: building clever pop songs before pulling them through odd shifts of noise.
Sound Summit deserves praise for their unique approach to the independent festival meets conference. The bill is locally focused, with internationals flown in not for pulling power, but as reflections of what is happening locally. They're showcased, not sold, with the line-up curated to inform and stretch the limits of the imagination. Sound Summit is a highlight of the Newcastle arts calendar, a step alongside new council policy to make available vacant spaces for galleries and performance spaces. It seems, too, that there is encouragement (or maybe just tolerance) of existing DIY spaces like the Pharmacy (which featured punk and noise shows across the long weekend) to prevent the exodus of youth. It's just questionable as to whether Newcastle really wants it. (“Are you here for that art shit?” one local asked me.) But none said it better than an operator of the Pharmacy on the final night, impatiently addressing a mass of post-Sound Summit attendees who loitered out front to see if some kind of rumoured event was about to kick off at the venue, yelling: “Who the fuck are you!? Why are you here!? I don't know you! Go the fuck away!”
Sound Summit 2013 - Marrickville, NSW
Between the Red Rattler, Marrickville Bowling Club, and Soundworks Studios sits a skip bin overflowing with garbage bags that pile onto the footpath; a minor obstacle that alters the paths walked between venues on the side-street that was the focal point of 2013’s Sound Summit. Despite the presence of over eighty artists across Australia, the USA, and Germany, Marrickville continued its operations unabated. The functioning warehouses, mechanics, and factories all churned away in the event’s surrounds, while the bowling green of the host venue ran an inter-club meeting while a dozen bands played inside. Perhaps in line with the independent culture that Sound Summit aimed to herald, Sydney’s inner-west carried on as though the festival weren’t even there.
Until this year, Sound Summit was set in Newcastle over the October long weekend. If shit only runs downhill, the question was asked why Music NSW and the Australian Council had been funding the uphill battle, so in 2013 the decision was made to fund the site where the shit settles: in Marrickville, in Redfern, in Sydney’s fringes, where the bulk of the music culture it aims to represent resides. Questions about who is to then pick up the slack for the cultural support of Newcastle may have been left unanswered, but a move to Sydney at least made sense in logistical terms, where a major event was run at its base rather than a couple hours north of it.
This year’s Sound Summit was again focused around the curation of its co-directors, with Liza Harvey joining the continuing Daniel Gottlieb and Nic Warnock. While its tagline aimed to be a celebration of independent and ‘innovative’ music, it was just as much about drawing together artists from disparate locales to highlight trends or movements.
The festival’s early focus was on exhibiting subversive electronic music in its various guises: in ambient constructions, left-field techno, or its crossover towards other realms. The common theme early on in the festival was an admiration for equipment, linking together synths and effects pedals in extended arrays supported on stacked milk crates:
Flat Fix exhibited their love affair for analog synths, the duo crossing each other’s paths to the daisy-chained parts across their bench, working tentatively toward anti-anthems.
Four Door took a song-driven rather than exploratory focus, allowing just-intelligible vocals to be heard above passages of clipping sounds.
Brisbane’s Primitive Motion drove subtle melodies between textures and jagged-edge rhythms, while Angel Eyes too was about evoking imagery, with snippets of album tracks cascading into voids quickly filled.
M.O.B. aggressively took synths and clashed them against alien guitar tones and bitter vocal touches, and like Brsbane’s Multiple Man, fetishised sci-fi scores with a playful brutality.
Germany’s Oval performed a set of glitching beauty while Rhode Island’s Container blew out the subtlety shown elsewhere on the bill.
A subset of more obtuse experimental acts aligned with the festival’s tagline as ‘innovative.’ Duck whistles capping the ends of foot pumps made up part of Sky Needle’s rhythm section, which hinged on a meeting of tribal and industrial influences at Sarah Byrne’s wildly operatic vocal performance. Sharing Glen Schenau on off-kilter percussion, Andrew McLellan’s Cured Pink was similarly minded, venturing into territories of noise fraught with damaged sound that worked around the repetition of the band’s spine.
Making took obliterating volume from guitar and bass was underscored by closely guarded structural shifts.
Bushwalking were similarly structuraly inclined, spending their energies immaculately marking points in time with vocal harmonies and drum patterns in efforts to stray from the conventional.
A complete sidestep from structure was present in performances by James Rushford & Joe Talia, in carefully assembled electronic ambience, or the improvised collaboration of Wadley/Hopkins/Blachford/Denley, who, after a half-hour of sparse exploratory chaos, stripped back to the common members of Exhaustion, who thundered through the abyss with white noise wrapped around structured rock songs.
Sound Summit’s tagline as a celebration of the innovative was muddied at the point where the rock acts dominated at the back end of the festival. A panel on the Sunday morning (preceding a day that dealt mostly in the conventional) discussed the validity of rock music as a subversive medium: posing the question of how boards of analog synths, spare-part percussion, or free-form structures are any more important for cultural development than guitar, bass, and drums. In the words of musicologist Nicola Morton, the behavior of an outsider isn’t necessarily that of form, but of “a consistent cycle of reacting against what you think is prevalent.” Sound Summit was unfazed in showcasing both.
Though the performances to come (in showcases by Popfrenzy and Newcastle label Y202) it was the growth of local communities that were highlighted over subversion or reactionary activity, with interstate and international analogues placed alongside as mirrors. For the Popfrenzy showcase, the common sounds and reference points of droning guitars and simplicity of structure allowed brush-strokes of personality to take the fore. Mope City and Destiny 3000 took nervous energy into reserved insularity washed over with lethargic guitars, while the duo of Unity Floors had any withheld agitation thrusted outwards. Contextualised by the guitar-pop of Melbourne’s The Stevens, the development of communities and sounds through common inspirations was made clear. Meanwhile, US imports Real Numbers were included as a reflection, with bubblegum garage supplemented by members of Royal Headache on drums and second guitar, but in this bubble of worlds and commonality, Real Numbers stuck out as relatively disparate.
A reaction to apathy and reservation appeared on Sunday’s bill. Red Red Krovvy’s Ash Wyatt’s intimidating ferocity was welcome after what had been four days of mild-mannered internal adventuring, their juvenile dark turns on minimalist punk following on from Housewives’ blending emotions of disinterest and unsettled anger. It was only really the subverts of M.O.B. and Multiple Man who most closely paralleled these rough-edged ends of the spectrum, while the rest of the Sunday traded off on enthusiasm and exuberance. Ausmuteants’ schoolboy synth-pop was a nice match to that of Ooga Boogas, who riffed on similar themes.
Festival headliners Tyvek (US) played as a key example of innovation lying in the norm that Sound Summit was pushing. Speaking on the topic, Tyvek’s Kevin Boyer struggled to articulate exactly what made them any more subversive or worthwhile than their more celebrated contemporaries, but in the ignorance of image or extraneous creation factors declared a certain form of independence that the rest of the bill adhered to.
Sound Summit finished at 2 a.m. on a Monday morning, sending a crowd tired and limping into rain-soaked concrete surrounds. Here, Marrickville’s side-streets hosted pocket-loads of people hailing taxis under torrents of overflowing storm-water channels, with the reality of the next day’s work settling in immediately. For a festival highlighting the strange and otherworldly, it had made sense for a Sydney local to be placed in unfamiliar, alienated surrounds in Newcastle, away from the social, domestic, and work commitments of home. But it’s hard to ignore that the festival itself felt more at ease in its new home.
Ultimately, a conflict exists between the goals and aims of Music NSW, Sound Summit’s directors, and the desires of the vast circles of people who attend the event. As a music conference, it was forced to cancel three panels due to a lack of attendance (which had never been the case in Newcastle.) In practice, the event acted as a means of touring international artists who couldn’t afford an Australian visit, support for ailing local music communities, and above all else: a show. Until Sound Summit, its artists, and its attendees can reconcile these conflicts, there will always be confusion or complaints, but the fact that people complained at all only goes to show how much those who respond to outsider culture value its celebration. Sound Summit is among the country’s most honest, legitimate, and important outsider events; that it remains largely ignored by the bulk of its citizens only enforces that fact.
2022 Afterword: Doubt we’ll see a return of Sound Summit proper, but something like it wouldn’t be outside the realm of possibility…does the underground music & arts missive have the will, unity, and time to lobby for anything like this in 2023? Probably! But for e.g., I'm workin’ six days this week while jetlagged and am more inclined to have a big fucken sook than organise!
+++other updates___
—back in sydney and posting out the one barely human zine/tape mail order that came in while away. (head here to peruse the web store.) i think a new zine/tape by end of the year and maybe a zine collection or something new before the year’s out too.