The Amplified Elephants

“they taught us all how to listen,” The Age

Australia’s leading sound art ensemble featuring artists who identify with intellectual disabilities. Works such as SELECT NATURALIS have consistently received high praise: 

“As the voiceover says, ‘meta-listening,’ a biological feature perhaps developed by our distant ancestors, involves just such a process of shining awareness on the functional, and the willingly unseen or unheard. Select Naturalis seeks to metaphorise that awareness and, it seems, achieve real social affect: community, inclusion, technological progress and ever-better names for things.” Realtime 2015 

The Amplified Elephants artists describe their sound as:

Daniel Munnery: “Glitch, drone stuff”

Robyn McGrath: “Noisy”

Megan Hunter: “R2D2”

Natalie Walters: “cars revving up the engines”

Jay Euesden: “like getting on a train”

Teagan Connor: “melodious”

Helen Kruljac: “it’s better”

Kathryn Sutherland: “spaceships”

Esther Tuddenham: “like dreaming”

The Amplified Elephants are an ensemble for sound artists produced by JOLT Arts since 2008 and incubated until 2019 as part of the ArtLife program at the Footscray Community Arts Centre. In 2015, The Amplified Elephants performed in La La Lullaby at Federation Square (Lights in Winter Festival) and SELECT NATURALIS at Bendigo International Festival of Exploratory Music, as well as touring Asia with JOLT and performing in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Macau.

Mentored by leading sound artist James Hullick and in partnership with JOLT, many Elephants’ projects have been presented internationally and in prominent Australian venues. Since 2007, these projects have been increasingly ambitious in scale, often featuring sonic technology: MachiNATIONS International Tour (London, Edinburgh, Tokyo 2014), RE:EVOLITION (Melbourne Festival 2014), SELECT NATURALIS (BIFEM 2015, RMIT 2018), LA LA LULLABY (Federation Square 2015), SELF SEEKERS (Tokyo, Hong Kong, Macau 2015, Festival of Live Art 2018), SHHHH (Meat Market 2016, Hangzhou, Hong Kong 2017).

The Amplified Elephants co-curated and performed in the JOLT Sonic Festival 2019. In 2021 the Elephants completed the new work Deep Creatures for Flash Forward and the City of Melbourne, and released the work on Heavy Machinery Records. In the same year the ensemble performed the live stream event Hagoromo as a collaboration with Noh Singer Ryoko Aoki and supported by Slow Label, Japan, Ritsumeikan University and RMIT University.

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