Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Pan Sonic at What is Music? Festival 2001  
© What is Festival? archive

Robbie Avenaim and I attended the same high school, he was in the year below me. We met when I was fourteen and I was the hotshot drummer of the school. He was this young guy (he was thirteen, in my mind at that moment, this was a giant difference) that used to ask me about drums and records all the time. But sooner or later, we became great friends, in fact inseparable, both obsessed with music, mostly free jazz from listening to John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. We started playing together, he had a spare room with a drum kit in his parents' home. We'd put our drums up against one another, the two bass drums facing each other and play along to Tony Williams records obsessively. When we seventeen or eighteen we started playing shows ourselves. We got involved in a free jazz outfit with this older saxophonist, Eddie Bronson. He was a Russian immigrant who I met while studying Jewish mysticism in a rabbinical college. Robbie and I were both on drums and an old friend Max Lyandvert played piano. That was our first group where we started playing live at Sydney Improvised Music Association events.

And around that time, I was living in New York, going to see lots of gigs as an audience member and was introduced to American experimental composer John Zorn. We had this extensive conversation, really hit it off, and he gave me his fax number. A year later, in 1993, I was back in Australia and Robbie had heard of John Zorn's fortieth birthday celebrations at the Knitting Factory, New York. So I faxed John Zorn, explaining who I was and that we'd met and said, 'Hey, me and my friend are thinking of coming to your festival. If we came for the whole thing [because it was thirty days] do you think we could get a discount?'

I got a fax back within a minute. It was in point form:

'1. Of course, I remember you!

2. You are insane.

3. How would you and your friend like to play at my festival?'

And it was unbelievable because he hadn't heard what we did.

So, we went to New York City and we ended up playing a trio show with Japanese bass player Kato Hideki. I remember when we finished, I thought, 'Oh, that was really terrible, we had been so nervous and didn't play well.' However, all these people that I had seen play in New York years before all came and hugged us and were just super excited about our set. Later, we were packing our gear up to leave and Zorn said to us, 'Why are you packing your gear up?' And we said, 'Because we're finished.' He said, 'oh, no, no, no, you're playing tomorrow night as well.' And we both looked at who was on tomorrow's improv line-up: John Zorn, Fred Frith, Ikue Mori, and Arto Lindsay, just the who's who of downtown New York scene, it was really such an incredible and generous opportunity for us both.

Later, Robbie had the idea to play John Zorn's improvisational game piece Cobra back home with an Australian ensemble. At the time there was this jazz club called the Harbourside Brasserie, it was in The Rocks. The guy that ran it, Glenn Wright, let us put on experimental gigs, so What is Music? Festival began as a five-night event in Sydney in 1994. It expanded very quickly. We wanted to include everything from super highbrow compositional works to outsider artists. Introducing under recognized artists who has been working for a long time in this country such as Machine For Making Sense, The Mu-Mesons, Louis Burdett, Daevid Allen, Lucas Abela, Greg Kingston, Joyce Hinterding, Gary Butler, and Amanda Stewart.

And we would do pretty off the wall things. One year, Robbie had this idea to get the Hard-Ons to play live but their entire mix go through the Viennese electronic group Farmers Manual's computer systems so that the Hard-Ons songs would be completely unrecognizable. All these Hard-Ons fans came to the gig didn't know what was going on! It was a very irreverent festival, not precious. We were young, keen, and embraced chaos. We embraced things that could completely blow up in our faces.

What Is Music? Festival from Liquid Architecture.

After that first year, we got more confident, Keiji Haino, Whitehouse, Voice Crack, Sachiko M and Pan Sonic were some of the artists we brought out to Australia for the first time. All these people that we loved and wanted to hear play. Many international acts just wanted to come during summer in Australia so they weren't fussed about receiving the same fees that they would get in Europe. We also encouraged a lot of locals to play with international acts, a lot of great projects came about through this exchange. It really put a lot of Australian experimental music on the map. It was a community, grassroots project but it injected a lot of excitement in the scene in Australia. The What is Music? festival came from a place of being absolute fans and wanting to share it with other people. That's literally the only reason why Robbie and I did the festival.

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.