Shane Fahey (The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast / Social Interiors / Scattered Order / Frosty): Shane was part of the emerging electronic & industrial music scene in Sydney. He played & recorded in The Makers of The Dead Travel Fast from 1979-1982 & then Scattered Order from 1982-1984 on legendary post-punk label M Squared. In 1984 he & Rik Rue co-founded Social Interiors who released 3 cassettes of cut-up, turntables & environmental recordings on Pedestrian Tapes. They continued crafting their aural narratives soundscapes in 1990’s with Julian Knowles; releasing 3 CD albums on Extreme & 1 CD album on Endgame. In 1986 Fahey designed & built Megaphon Studios in Sydney with Guy Dickerson and ran the studio for 26 years, engineering & producing scores of rock, prog, psych & punk bands, jazz outfits and film soundtracks. Shane’s background in acoustic design & sound engineering has evolved into composition & sound design work for installation, theatre & performance art works for various musicians, performance artists, video makers & composers – including Jamie Fielding, Sherri Delys, Machine For Making Sense, Tess de Quincey (Body Weather), Linda Wallace (Machine Hunger), Internalised Cities (Anna Sabiel & Sarah Waterson), Azeruz (Stevie Wishart & Chris Abrahams), Andree Greenwell, Virginia Hilyard, Tegan Northwood & Honi Ryan. His solo works ‘The Slated Pines’ (Endgame - 2010) & ‘Twin Korg: Water Drip Code’ (Iceage Productions - 2012) are experimental albums using field recordings, samples & routing C.V. analogue synthesisers with an emphasis on the stereophonic image of the source sound field. He is currently playing chaos pads, Arp odyssey & EMS VCS III synthi with Mitch Jones & Michael Tee in Scattered Order returning from a successful 2012 European tour taking the band through France, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria and Spain as well as collaborating with Michael Tee in the electronics/beat project Frosty. _____________________________________________________ Recorded 1996-7, Fahey mans two Korg MS-20 synths triggered by a dripping tap and contact mics secured to the sink, for a double-barrelled analogue attack that ranges from industrial to noise to organic sound pieces. Clinton Green (Shame File) _____________________________________________________ You might be aware of Shane Fahey via his role in Australia’s experimental and post-punk past, having delivered synthetic analogue textures in projects as diverse as experimental rockers The Makers Of The Dead Travel Fast in the late ‘70s/early ’80s; Scattered Order between 1982 and 84; and Social Interiors in the ‘90s (with sound artist Rik Rue on Melbourne’s iconic Extreme label). An accomplished experimental musician, he is also an acoustic engineer, and it’s difficult not to hear these two worlds colliding on Twin Korg. It’s no surprise that the music here is quite experimental; bleak rashes of noise, oscillating pitches and bubbling drones prevail, but it is surprising the degree to which it feels organised, perhaps composed. This is far from unrestrained noise or bluster. Fahey’s decades of experiments with analogue synthesis have resulted in a rare kind of control over the savage beast. He works carefully with tone, frequency, dynamics, panning and volume, articulating sounds slowly, evolving into different parts of the stereo field. Feedback systems come hand in hand with synths, where explosive frenetic noise can occur one track, only to be followed the next by gentle acoustic drones that may or may not be field recordings. Perhaps the best way to highlight the accomplishment of Fahey is to point out the diversity of approaches on these 13-odd tracks. It’s all dark electrics, but within each piece he finds something new, whether it’s structural, textural or even bombast. His electronics alternatively sound like field recordings of the interior of a synthesiser when everyone goes to bed, the world coming to an end, or the sweet scattered purr of electrics under stress. It’s a strange, challenging and beautiful journey into the bowels of non-narrative electrics that’s so joyfully exploratory that it sounds like it was made 20 or so years ago. Bob Baker Fish (The Music)
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 02:25:42 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015