BANANA (MP HOPKINS & ALEXANDRA SPENCE / BREDBEDDLE / SUNNY VOWLES

BANANA (Alexandra Spence & MP Hopkins)

Using foil, flutes, tuning forks, tones, tapes, tiny bananas, stones, mouths + more, Banana explore the spatial and sculptural elements of a practice in experimental sound.

In 2020 they presented an online video performance for Make It Up Club in Melbourne, and a release with Greek record label More Mars, receiving a Bandcamp Best Experimental Music recommendation, June 2021. They have performed and exhibited work together as part of Score club at Firstdraft Gallery and Frontyard; the Unsettling Scores publication with Liquid Architecture and Monash Museum of Art; Nights at Tempe performance series; and SoundOut Festival, Canberra.

BREDBEDDLE is Rebecca Lee, an artist, composer, and musician based in Nottingham, UK.

Across two albums as Bredbeddle, ‘Steps on the Turning Year’ (Bezirk, 2021) and ‘Stackes’ (Fractal Meat Cuts, 2017) her work merges composition and collage. Fragments from her record collection, found sounds, and diaristic recordings become parts of a score, building blocks to be written onto a timeline to create something new. While perhaps reminiscent of plunderphonics aesthetically, there is a musicality and narrative coherence to her songs that is distinct from an aleatoric or poetic montaging of sounds.

Strands of harmony and melody, of similarity and juxtaposition, are pulled from unexpected places. Held up for contemplation and then strung together into intricate pieces. Often manifesting as long-form, durational compositions, Bredbeddle’s process is rooted in seeing archives as a launching-off point. Recorded material as a site of potential rather than an endpoint frozen in time and context.

SUNNY VOWLES is a multidisciplinary artist whose work often involves collaboration across the fields of art, science, and agriculture. Working primarily in Sculpture, their practice also comprises writing, installation, drawing, sound & movement/performance. Vowles is interested in materiality, subverting connotations around rigidity in sculpture and art practice, the sharing of agency, and working-class & lesser-listened-to histories; particularly in relation to the environment. Present collaborations include ongoing research with dance artist Inari Hulkkonen, echome with Dr. Maria Kapsali; using movement sonification as a way of listening to environments and working with scientists to make bioinspired composites as green alternatives to building materials.