Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Robbie Avenaim  
© Anne Moffat

I first encountered Robbie Avenaim's machine augmented percussion at the now legendary Lanfranchi's Memorial Discotheque in Chippendale, Sydney. It was sometime in the early 2000's and Robbie was drumming. As a failed drummer myself, I'm always drawn to percussion and Robbie has long been one of my all-time favourites. But this time he seemed to be eclipsing even my high expectations. He was playing with what appeared to be superhuman, effortless speed. His signature long cooking chopsticks zinging across skins and rims in what I thought was the most astounding display of virtuosity. As it happens, he had attached vibrating motors to the bottom of the sticks (they were hidden in his hands) and he was in fact guiding them. What I had perceived as super-human technique was an extra-human kinetic mechanism.

Since that time, I have followed with great interest as Robbie's work with robotics and kinetics has taken two quite distinct paths. On the one hand, he has developed his highly sophisticated S.A.R.P.S (Semi Automated Robotic Percussion System) which is a software driven collection of servo motors with beaters attached, these are applied to various percussive surfaces: predominantly kick-drums. The system is capable of a wide array of rhythmic articulation from four on the floor bangers to hyper complex quasi random and stochastic 'improvisations'. Robbie often 'faces off' with his robotic creations. Playing with and around the automated percussion, while tweaking its parameters in real time and creating a human machine feedback circuit that is both iterative and recombinant. The S.A.R.P.S system has been in development for well over a decade and has become highly refined from an engineering and software perspective. It is simple enough to keep increasing functionality, however what Robbie is after is behaviour. It's as though he is seeking to create a robotic musical consciousness that is equally at home in silence as it is in play. Telling a machine what to do is one thing, wanting it to know what to do is another.

In stark contrast to this digitally mediated system, is the set of works built around what he calls the Motor-Stick. This device is a direct descendent of the hand-held stick mentioned earlier and has evolved from those nascent tests into a gravity-determined (let's call it the universe's 'software') mobile, a system capable of generating extraordinary complexity from a simple chaotic physical system.

Robbie Avenaim live at Jolt Arts, 2022 from Liquid Architecture.

The sticks in his kinetic sound installations are suspended in a Calder-esque mobile with carefully counter balanced weights. Once activated, they move through space with their own logic, propelled by the vibrating motor. The system is completed by a constellation of objects arranged on the floor. As the sticks float above, around and in between these objects, the occasional contact (a percussive hit) will change its trajectory. What emerges is a music that evolves in endlessly novel ways. As the sticks glance across the objects - each thoughtfully chosen for their resonant properties - patterns seem to emerge. I have sat with these works for hours, mesmerised by the way the phrases never repeat. Occasionally, the stick will literally get stuck between two objects. Caught momentarily in a physical gridlock that results in a staccato roll of indeterminate length and then breaks free and travels again in an arc towards its next point of contact. What unfolds is nothing short of astounding to me. Its complex iterative and unfolding form is deeply musical. It is a process-based music; analog algorithmic music of the highest order. The balance between order and chaos is close to perfect. My broadside about this work, the revelation that hits me afresh every time I walk out of a room where one of these systems has held me captive, is that it essentially solves music. If music is a cryptographic art for which there is a one time pad designed to unlock all of it's mysteries….this system may be that pad. What Avenaim creates is akin to weather. It is a chaotic system, not random, with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. One minor shift of any of the objects in the system will completely change the unfolding trajectories and events.

So how has Avenaim, who is not an engineer or scientist, so successfully articulated Edward Lorenz's theory of strange attraction?¹ The answer, I think, is because he is made of music, musicians will understand what I mean by this. There is no border between Avenaim's life and his musicality. Over the past few decades he has honed an instinct for improvisation; pursuing that fine balance between pattern and departure from pattern… expectation…release. Avenaim breathes that honed sense of improvisation into these systems. He creates mechanised and kinetic versions of his musical self in all of its complexity. This is how these systems (and particularly the Motorised-Stick mobiles) appear to be making decisions like a human musician. The works are not simply demonstrations of Newton's clockwork universe, but instead seem to reference quantum entanglement or panpsychism. When the systems, these kinetic sound sculptures 'play,' Avenaim is there. They are embodiments and extensions of him. They truely play like him.

The complexity from simplicity that forms the basis of these works is a testament to the power of intuitive creative inquiry to unlock and make visible the mechanics and fluidities of the natural world. Avenaim's works are instructive without being didactic, revelatory without the need for proselytising. They message to us that not everything needs to be harnessed, conquered and controlled. That if we in fact tune into our environment (our own initial conditions), that we will come to slowly notice how balance, contingency, and flux are central to our day-to-day existence. Whenever these works are shown, I sit with them for long periods. I leave them buzzing with possibility, and the desire to create something.

¹ James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking Penguin Inc, 1987)

Editor: Liang Luscombe

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Co-published by Liquid Architecture and the Australian Music Centre, 'Robbie Avenaim: A Complex Warmth' presents four accounts from close peers and collaborators Oren Ambarchi, Ernie Althoff, Clare Cooper, and Robin Fox of the artistic practice of experimental percussionist Robbie Avenaim. The editor would like to thank the writers for their contributions, Robbie Avenaim for access to his extensive archive, and Joel Stern for editorial support.