180º is a new group formed in August 2018 - Nick Ashwood acoustic guitar, Jim Denley bass flute, and Amanda Stewart voice and text.
Amanda and Jim first met in the late 1980s founding Machine for Making Sense in 1989, as well as performing numerous duos over the years — a long and fruitful association. They’ve always been interested in what their music instinct can learn from language and vice versa.
Nick is from the southern tip of Tasmania. Jim and Nick have been developing a strong association together the last 3 years, despite the distance from Hobart to Sydney, mainly listening, playing and recording in outdoor spaces.
Nick Ashwood. Using a diversity of tuning systems and ranging from unique, tonal, geometric clusters to limitless fields of noise, percussive and timbral strategies, Nick extends the guitar and the way we experience it into new modes of being.
Jim Denley's approach to the bass flute reimagines the instrument, sometimes pushing it over an octave below its normal range, sometimes incorporating and abstracting approaches from his research into historical traditions from Pacific, Japanese and European trajectories. He also uses the full 180 degrees of the stereo spectrum to create new forms of listening.
Amanda Stewart is one of the few contemporary vocalists who is also a writer. Her unique approach draws on her own poetry and texts, abstracted 'extended language' techniques, philosophical and linguistic research as well as a diversity of experimental, extended vocal techniques ranging from tonal to noise-based strategies. Her use of live stereo creates a split voice, a split subject, where the full potentials of the voice are released into sculptural abstraction.
with
Rachel Shearer (NZ) - Rachel Shearer's history in a range of sound practices contributes to her approach to art making. As an artist she has been exploring the spatial and temporal aspects of sound design through site-specific sound installation practice. She has worked professionally in live sound and postproduction audio for film and television. She has sound designed and composed for a number of NZ award winning feature films, documentaries and short films. As an active recording and performing experimental musician for over two decades she has released material and performed both internationally and nationally with well-known New Zealand and US music labels. Rachel has recently completed a Masters of Art and Design (Spatial Design) at AUT University of Technology.
entry by KOHA
