Profile

austraLYSIS incorporates LYSIS, the former European contemporary music group, also founded by Roger Dean (double bass, keyboard, composer, computer interaction) and Hazel Smith (violin, text-creator). austraLYSIS has premiered and/or commissioned more than 100 musical compositions and new media performance works from many countries. It has performed in most parts of the world, including Europe (UK, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany), Asia (Hong Kong, Philippines, Indonesia, India, Malaysia), USA, and Australasia.

austraLYSIS has made more than thirty commercial sound recordings, intermedia CD-Roms and web-pieces, and its broadcasts have been heard all over the world. It is committed to both composed and improvised new music, sound and intermedia work. austraLYSIS presented a concert devoted to Stockhausen on the South Bank in London in 1980, in association with the Philharmonia Orchestra and the composer himself and it has given many performances of his works elsewhere—it has similarly focused on the work of Xenakis, Cage and Reich in presentations in Australia. austraLYSIS has also placed particular emphasis on work from Australia and the UK. It has collaborated with some of the most imaginative performers involved with contemporary music, sound and new media, in Australia, including Simon Barker, Tony Buck, Ken Edie, Nick McBride and Daryl Pratt (percussion); Anthony Chesterman (oboe/cor anglais); Laura Chislett (flute); Elliott Dalgleish and Sandy Evans (saxophones, flute); Peter Jenkin (clarinets); Georges Lentz (violin); Martin Ng (computers); Stephanie McCallum (piano); Georg Pedersen (cello); Ian Shanahan (recorders); Phil Slater (trumpet and computers) and Greg White (computer interaction; sound design). Originally primarily a performance group, austraLYSIS is now primarily a creative group, producing electroacoustic and computer-interactive music and polymedia.

austraLYSIS is involved in sound, text and performance art and frequently relates its sound works and performances to other artistic media. For example in the case of the visual arts, it has performed compositions by the artist Tom Phillips (UK); collaborated with Alan Davie (UK); created music related to the painters Fred Williams and Michael Johnson (Australia) and Frans Widerberg (Norway) and collaborated with Australian 3D artists such as Sieglinde Karl and Darani Lewers. Similarly it has been been involved in developing music/movement works such as TimeDancesPeace with the theatre and dance group Kinetic Energy. austraLYSIS has also created a number of text and sound pieces which were commissioned by the ABC including The Erotics of Gossip (2001), Returning the Angles, Nuraghic Echoes (1996), and Poet without Language all by Hazel Smith and Roger Dean—Poet Without Language was nominated for the Italia Prize in 1992.
austraLYSIS’ breadth of style is illustrated on its several recordings and on the many recordings by its member musicians. The double CD Resounding in the Mirrors was released on the UK label Future Music Records (2001); the austraLYSIS Electroband’s Present Tense is also on Tall Poppies Records (Australia); another unusual double CD comprising two 60 minute improvisations, The Next Room, is available on Tall Poppies (TP 050) joining the earlier Moving the Landscapes (TP 007). In addition, Windows in Time (TP 039) represents a range of austraLYSIS’s work, with music from Xenakis to Cresswell, as well as by members of the group. austraLYSIS has also contributed to Hazel Smith’s sound and performance-text CDs, Poet Without Language (Rufus RF 005) and Nuraghic Echoes (Rufus). Amongst other releases are Walking the Faultlines, chosen for inclusion on the International Computer Music Association Cyberquilt CD-Rom, their first; ‘Hope’, chosen for CD-release and installation presentation at the 1998 Inter-Society for Electronic Arts conference in the UK; Wordstuffs : The City and The Body commissioned by the Australian Film Commission for their Stuff-Art site; Returning the Angles (CD-R of sound and 3D-interactive image, SOMA 787), and Evolution II, on the New Music Network CD (both released 2002). One of austraLYSIS’s recordings was listed as a Record of the Year, by Records and Recordings, UK, and several have been nominated for ARIA awards.

austraLYSIS also creates jazz and improvised musics. The austraLYSIS Electroband is our unique forum for computer-interactive and networked improvisation, using both acoustic and electroacoustic sound, compositional patches written in MAX/MSP/JITTER, and sound processing both live and mediated by such patches. The Electroband, a morphing combination of Roger Dean, Sandy Evans, Phil Slater and Greg White, is developing both as a single ‘hyperinstrument’ (in the terminology of Tod Machover), and as a polymorphic ensemble with orchestral and industrial sound capacities. The first austraLYSIS Electroband CD, Present Tense (TP 109) was released in late 1997; newer work is included on Resounding in the Mirrors. austraLYSIS made a major live webcast in the international ‘Cathedral’ 48 hour event, December 2001. Its most recent recording releases are included in the CDR released with Dean’s book Computer Interactive Sound Improvisation (A-R Editions, USA, 2003), and in a new album forthcoming on Tall Poppies in late 2005, PianoStones.

austraLYSIS undertakes commissions and engagements for arts centre, festival, broadcasting and recording work and for international touring. It has given seven batches of overseas performances since 1990, and in 1992-3 performed all over Australia. In one of its foreign tours, it was featured in three events at the leading new music festival in UK, Huddersfield, and on BBC Radio 3. It currently has the support of the Australia Council as a ‘Key Organisation’ for its creative and performance work, and much of its work is presented by the ABC or other international broadcasters, as well as in multimedia formats. austraLYSIS is also concerned with educational work and other means of fostering appreciation. An example of such work was the involvement of Roger Dean in the presentation of a radio documentary on improvisation.

• Works performed (3)
• Commissions (1)