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Universe of Tones
Audio Foundation is thrilled to present a stunning concert of new sonic compositions alongside legendary sound works, performed by local artists & our special guest - Anthony Pateras.
Australian composer/pianist Anthony Pateras premieres two new works - a piece for electronics & viola performed with Johnny Chang, & a piece for drum machine and four handed organ performed with Hermione Johnson.
Local composer Antonia Barnett-McIntosh premieres a new vocal/text work, and the programme is completed by two famous works of sonic art - 'Having never written a note for percussion' by James Tenney performed by Alan D. Jones on tamtam, and 'Two Blooms' by Phill Niblock performed by Johnny Chang on viola.
Programme
Anthony Pateras - New work for drum machine & four hands pipe organ (2025)
Hermione Johnson, Anthony Pateras, pipe organ
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh - new work
Phill Niblock - Two Blooms - for viola & pre-recorded instruments
Johnny Chang, viola
Anthony Pateras - New work for viola & electronics (2025)
Johnny Chang, viola
James Tenney - Having never written a note for percussion
Alan D. Jones, tamtam
Anthony Pateras (b. 1979, Naarm/Melbourne) is an Australian composer, pianist and electronic musician. He works across many contexts: modern classical, acousmatic diffusion, film soundtrack, free improvisation, experimental rock and various mutations of electronica.
Performing hundreds of concerts worldwide, Pateras has co-founded the Pateras/Baxter/Brown & North of North trios, the piano-drums duo PIVIXKI, the electro-acoustic ensembles Thymolphthalein & Twitch, the abstract hip-hop quartet Beta Erko & the bands Sulla Lingua & tētēma.
Completing a PhD in 2008, he has written for leading ensembles & avant-garde musicians, composing a 90+ catalogue of pieces which combine instruments, electronics, improvisation and notation in idiosyncratic ways.
Pateras has over 50 releases on international labels including Tzadik, Editions Mego, Ipecac, Another Timbre, Futura Resistenza, Shelter Press, Cave 12 & Hallow Ground. From 2012-19, he produced & edited his own Immediata text/music project.
Anthony has lived in Melbourne, Perth, Brussels, Sydney, Berlin, Stuttgart & Vevey, and is now based in Castlemaine, Australia.
Phill Niblock (1933-2024, USA) was an artist whose fifty-year career spanned minimalist and experimental music, film and photography. Since 1985, he served as director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a branch in Ghent, and curator of the foundation’s record label XI. Known for his thick, loud drones of music, Niblock’s signature sound is filled with microtones of instrumental timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. In 2013, his diverse artistic career was the subject of a retrospective realised in partnership between Circuit (Contemporary Art Centre Lausanne) and Musée de l’Elysée. The following year Niblock was honoured with the prestigious Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award.
James Tenney (August 10, 1934 – August 24, 2006) was an American composer and music theorist. He made significant early musical contributions to plunderphonics, sound synthesis, algorithmic composition, process music, spectral music, microtonal music, and tuning systems including extended just intonation. His theoretical writings variously concern musical form, texture, timbre, consonance and dissonance, and harmonic perception.
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh is a composer, performer, sound artist and freelance curator with an interest in working across disciplines, particularly with speech and language. She has collaborated extensively with musicians, theatre and filmmakers, dancers, visual artists and poets. Antonia's compositional concerns lie in the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations.
Violinist-composer Johnny Chang engages in extended explorations surrounding the relationships of sound/listening and the in-between areas of improvisation, composition and performance. Based in Berlin from 2009 -2020, Chang relocated to his home country Aotearoa New Zealand in 2020.
Johnny is part of the Wandelweiser composers collective and in 2018, initiated a new framework for the presentation of creative research and performances, Partitions & Resonances, aimed at encouraging collaborations between the varied disciplines of composition, musicology, historical research and performance. He currently collaborates with: Peter Ablinger, Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger, Sam Dunscombe, Keir GoGwilt, Catherine Lamb, Klaus Lang, Mike Majkowski, Phill Niblock, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Derek Shirley, Germaine Sijstermans, Taku Sugimoto, Eric Wong.
Hermione Johnson is a classically-trained pianist, composer, and free-improviser from Auckland, New Zealand, who focuses on extended and prepared piano techniques. She investigates the timbral qualities of the piano and expanding its range of voices with contrasting patterns and phrases in different registers. Johnson not only explores the highly resonant, percussive qualities by attaching objects to its strings but she inserts tiny sticks at diverse angles between the strings - as can be seen in the attached video clips - and by caressing gently this ticks transforming the piano into an altogether new delicate and ethereal entity. She is a key figure in the New Zealand experimental music scene, moving freely between genres. She composes music for films, theater, and dance, and has collaborated with such innovative musicians as Peter Brötzmann, Magda Mayas, The Thing, and Jon Rose.
Alan D. Jones is a drummer & sonic artist based in Auckland. His work ranges from maximalist noise epics to absurdist theatre, visual art, and recorded media. His most recent work 'Mass Pointillistic Triptych' was premiered at Silo 6 on Auckland's waterfront and featured 100 pingpong balls, 80 balloons, 6 snare drummers & 4 bicycles.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia.
