FEATURING

THE BOLT ENSEMBLE & THE JOLT SOUND MACHINES 

Where: forty-five downstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne 3000

When: Alien Nation (concert one): Sunday 20 December 5pm (runs for 1 hour)

  1835 (concert two): Sunday 20 December  9pm (runs for 1 hour)

Cost: $20 full / $12 con to attend one concert only 

OR

  $25 full / $17 con to attend both concerts

Bookings: TBA

(call 0431 678 164 until announcement is made for enquiries)

ABOUT GOTHIC SONICA

JOLT will present two inter-linked sonic performances clustered around the theme of Gothicism in Australia, and titled GOTHIC SONICA. Some of Melbourne's more celebrated musicians will be performing in BOLT, namely percussion guru Peter Neville, sax and woodwind giant Adam Simmons, flute dynamo Belinda Woods, clarinettist Martin Mackerras, bass meister Anita Hustas, and violinist extraordinaire Andrea Keeble to name a few. 

These performances involve traditional instruments, played by the BOLT chamber ensemble alongside a selection of mechanical instruments built by James Hullick, Richard Allen and Ketil Bedford. Through this event we will explore the relevance of Gothicism to Australian culture. Is our colonial past a Gothic cultural driver that informs Australian culture today? Is the collision between the first nations and the subsequent settlers of Australia also something that provokes a Gothic outlook?

In his text The Fatal Shore (1987), Robert Hughes writes:

To most Englishmen this place seemed not just a mutant society, but another planet - an exiled world, summed up by the popular name, "Botany Bay." It was remote and anomolous to its white creators. It was strange but close, as the unconscious to the conscious mind...In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century's vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag. No other country had such a birth (Hughes 1987, 2). 

Australia remains a fatal shore today, with so many asylum seekers either being lost at sea or finding themselves in tragic circumstances. For many people, throughout settlement history, the act of immigrating to Australia is synonymous with trial and tribulation. And the reality remains that most of the non-indigenous population, that they are boat people or descended from boat people. Does the pot call the kettle black?

THE SHOWS

CONCERT ONE: ALIEN NATION

This show will feature  a range of works for solo instrument, with some of these works also engaging the JOLT sonic machines. These works explore dislocation as a feature of Australian identity. The final work in the performance will be a larger chamber ensemble work titled OPIUM, which engages with issues of decadence and addiction that have mapped through Melbourne's cultural landscape - at least since the mining booms of the mid to late 1800s. Performers for this concert are: Belinda Woods  (flute), Adam Simmons (reed instruments), Jason Bunn (viola) and Anita Hustas (bass).

CONCERT TWO: 1835

The second show involves a set of chamber orchestra works that are a response to the infamous Batman Treaty of June 6, 1835, and the iniquitous purchase of land form the first Australians that ultimately lead to the rise of the City of Melbourne. These works are less aimed at the specific events, and attempt to engage with the psychological states that might have produced the treaty, and the psychological states that the treaty induces in a modern context. 

About the BOLT ensemble

BOLT is an ensemble of musicians that performs the music artistically directed by James Hullick.  The BOLT ensemble has participated in well received in performances: The Whiteness (2005) Liquid Architecture Festival, Sk-eye-Like Mind (2007) JOLT concert series 2007 and Shimmersong (2007) JOLT concert series 2007.