History / Methods

The members of Audible 3 each have extensive backgrounds in experimental
and improvised music. When the group formed in 1999 they were all playing
electronic instruments - exploring a broad palette of sound materials
and approaches to music, with drum machine, sampler and synthesiser.

Marc and John had just completed performances of The Drums and Machines
Project. This “post-techno” percussion venture explored fluid integrations
of electronic and acoustic percussion, including the use of samples and
“recycled” performance sounds. [Recordings: “Drumsmachine” (Is Land, Is L002)
and “Portal” (Is Land, Is C003)] Paul played a vital role in this project as
sound engineer and third ear. It seemed a natural progression to play some music
with Paul and a nice change to move to an entirely electronic basis.
[The Drums and Machine Project included two drum kits numerous other drums,
record and tape players, multiple speaker systems and a slide show.
The prospect of working with only 1 or 2 (relatively lightweight!) electronic
instruments per person was irresistible.]

Audible 3’s music is performance-based. Specific sounds and music-making
processes are designed and prepared for each concert. This includes making
a creative response to the physical environment of each performance, which
has lead to an installation-type approach. The group use many methods:
recognisably “interactive” improvising; “re-mixes” of a source material
from a gallery-based sound installation; a piece where the entire sound
is reprocessed by customised digital effects. Their more pulse-based music
explores the possibilities of ambiguity and fragmentation in rhythm, as
well as its potential to move sounds into uncharted terrain. Layering
sounds of machine, human and natural origins leads to a more “environmental”
impression. Their basic intention is to create a played music with minimal
boundaries, and to involve listeners on that level.

People / Instruments

Rather than “electronic musicians” it’d be more accurate to say that Audible
3 are improvisers who have gravitated to electronic instruments.
[The musical experience of the group members has collectively encompassed
various shades of rock, jazz, country and western; dabblings in non-western
cultures; associations with film, theatre and dance; as well as a long-standing
involvement in more experimental musical forms. Members also continue
to play acoustic instruments in other settings.]

What began from a liberating process of stripping back on equipment has
become a consistent, distinctive instrumentation. Drum machines, sampler,
synthesiser and turntables are primary sources for a vast amount of contemporary
popular music, but Audible 3 take these same instruments and create something
entirely different. “Samplers and drum machines are employed extensively
in contemporary popular & dance music, but they’re not usually thought
of as instruments. We take the technology and literally play with
it.“ John Kennedy.

Going beyond the basic pre-programming and multi-tracking methods that
produce most electronic music, each group member has developed a personal
performance style for their chosen instrument/s which has enabled fresh
variations of sound to be organised for their performances. Each concert
and cluster of recordings reflects a coming together of various individual
threads of research, trial and error, current enthusiasms, and new discoveries.

John utilises the full range of a drum machine’s timbral modification
and programming functions [particularly in the “real-time” of performance]
to create restless, distinctly contemporary progressions and stately textural
loops, bringing subtle time markings and grand transitions to the group
sound.

Playing and programming of drum machine in a live setting is not unheard
of, but it is rare. John has developed his music through much solo
experimentation/exploration. [Solo recordings: Slow Learner (Is Land, Is L C002)]
Consequently his playing has found a personal, self-sufficient area that blends
freely with other sounds partly because it works well on its own and is
rhythmically sophisticated enough to often be the sole pulse interest. Audible 3
has provided a very liberating environment for John’s rhythmic interests and often
he is free to stay entirely removed from a pulse-keeping role. At other times
everyone provides a kinetic menagerie - aggregations of rhythmic cycles without
fixed points of convergence.

Like John, Marc’s musical background includes playing drum kit. Drum sounds
remain part of Marc’s soundscape within Audible 3, turning up within a
wide-ranging archive that he accesses through the sampler.
The first Audible 3 performance included a revised version of Marc’s “Never
Look Up”, originally an installation at Lopdell House Gallery [“Never
Look Up” (Is Land, NLU 001)] A later performance, at The Space was
the most successful realisation of this process.

Marc's methods include utlising long samples to define space ¯ literally
placing the listener in different environments through field recordings
and simulations of unplaceable locations [Well documented on his solo
CD [“Music in the World of Digital Sampling and Editing” (Is Land, Is L003)]
This may include sounds relative to the particular performance venue and
last minute location recordings. Audio verite has been a feature of avant-garde
classical music since the invention of sound recording. The notion of
incorporating recognisable sounds to simulate environments or suggest
an object has come to every composer that wishes to highlight a theme
with an associated sound. And the taping of natural sound, electronically
altering it to form new sounds, then incorporating these into structures
is the basis of the still evolving genre of musique concrete.

Marc’s offerings: audio verite, concrete, mysterious tonal simmerings,
smuggled melodies, phantom percussion, fragments of earlier Audible 3
music; all these are projected into the music, lending dramatic plateaux
and surreal textures to the mix.

For more than a decade Paul has been utilizing a variety of methods to
produce and direct sound. Most often he has used a bass guitar as a trigger
for synthesisers and samplers, but also percussion, turntables, tape and
close microphone techniques have been employed to achieve new sounds.
[For Paul’s music while living in the US, see “Artificial Subterranne”]
One consistent aspect is the use of an extensive multi-effects processing
system to create long loops, rich and complex treatments, and expansive
moving stereo images. Often sounds will start as samples from, or as mimicry
of, John or Marc’s sounds and this begins a strange dialogue between one
sound and clones of itself.

By playing the bass, Paul has the only conventionally melodic instrument
in the group. Chords, scales and melodies are not integral to the success
of the music and perhaps the most effective use of harmonic technique
is in the mere implication of notes related to a certain key. A vague
waft of melody, a shimmer of a chord that dissolves into hovering feedback
is suggestive enough to trigger the listener’s inner catalogue of music.

Sound / Locations

In so far as the perception exists that "electronic music" is technocratic,
abstract and impersonal, Audible 3 music makes an alternative proposal -
that electronic instruments have unique strengths and capabilities;
well-beyond their usual role as stand-ins for real instruments and devices
to access and simulate musical forms. (Forms that are often well past
their use-by-date.)

While individually the members of Audible 3 have developed their own personal
approaches to electronic music-making, collectively there has been a strong
convergence of interest in sculptural approaches to sound: real-time sound
re-processing, speaker placement and the making a response to the sonic
and affective characteristics of particular venues.

In conjunction with their instruments, a wide range of electronic effects
are used to modify and manipulate sounds. These include reverberation,
echo, digital delays (which, in the manner of an echo, can take a small
fragment of sound and repeat it on demand), equalisation (emphasising
of certain frequencies), pitch modulation, sound distortion and stereo
imaging (manipulating how the sound appears in the stereo field). “Mixing”
(determination of the relative volumes and placements of individual sounds)
is another necessary process that the group remain hands-on with during
performances. Rather than leaving this task to a mixing desk operator
(essentially working “for” the music but “outside” of it), each player
takes charge of their volume and actively adjusts and merges sounds into
the total audio field as the music develops.

There is some affinity with the genre of “dub”- a medium that developed
from experimentation with the spatial characteristics of sound. But where
the forms of dub tend to be rhythmically stable, and transparent in layering
of sonic parts, Audible 3 music tends toward instability, rhythmic heterophony
(many pulses at once), and blurring and bleeding of layers.
The dissolution and re-formation of soundscapes and musical passages is
a vital thread in the group’s improvisational approach - playing sounds
and playing with sounds. “Using whatever is on hand”. This slant on the
“dub” approach strongly reflects the concern for process rather than a
neatly defined end musical product. Because Audible 3 use mostly non-acoustic
sound sources, this has lead them to explore and question the role that
loud speakers play in mediating their performances. (Another tie in with
dub, where the “sound system” is a vital performance component.)
The use of individual speaker systems by each performer has provided a
highly directional sense of who has been playing what sound. (Engaging
the audience more directly in identifying players with instruments overcomes
a barrier that is endemic of electronic music. Of course there is also
the contrasting view that the anonymity of electronic musicians is liberating -
but this is more often espoused in relation to the highly functional
context of dance music, the rave etc.) Speakers have included small walkman
speakers, outdated home stereo systems, ghetto blasters etc. Visual cues such as
small blocks have been used to signal different roles for each performer.
Audiences spend time looking at the mass of wires and the various instruments
before and after concerts - suggesting an appreciation of a visual, sculptural attribute.
Toy trains and cars, Lego and other objects have been brought into the concert
environment to provide additional points of breakdown for the cool, impersonal exterior
of electronic music.

Each Audible 3 performance has occurred in different and distinctive settings.
A record shop, an old church, an art gallery, a café, an experimental
music venue, outdoors or a community hall. Never the same venue twice.
The nature of these environments and the people in them is another element
that the group are able incorporate into their music.

Audible 3 music is deconstructed, filtered and reconstructed, resulting
in reorientation of somewhat familiar components over elongated, abstracted
beds of sound. As improviser’s the group remains constantly alert for
passages where disparate elements converge; a process of sifting layers
to reveal affecting aural residues. Far from abstract, the trio’s music
abounds with user-friendly concrete sound, absorbing pulses and humble
tones woven into an organic and subtly narrated continuum.

Audiences have not been alienated by the strangeness of the music but
seemingly relate to it on several levels, enjoying the stimulation and
challenge to convention that it brings.

"despite its apparent randomness (Audible 3’s music) is incredibly
considered.....sound which is exciting because of the inability to anticipate
it.......a representation of pure anarchism, in which control is seamlessly
transferable." Review in Loud #4