Philip Samartzis

Current Review(s)

Echoes

Philip Samartzis at Iziko South African National Gallery

The democratic ethos of Australia is epitomized in the person of the renowned musician and academic, Doctor Philip Samartzis. Although a denizen of the groves of academe, steeped in learned professorial concerns with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse and Iannis Xenakis, Samartzis, who exudes the matey, blue-collar charm of some smiling mechanic or helpful plumber, could not be more dinky-die. Best known as a composer in the tradition of musique concrète, Samartzis is also an exponent of funk, punk, hip-hop, pop, krautrock, heavy metal and jazz. Make no mistake, the doctor is hip, and his album Twenty years in Blue Movies and yet to fake an Orgasm was certainly not cut by Oxford University Press.

Musique concrète originated in the 1940s when two Frenchmen, Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, started to replace orchestral music with the sounds of real life – the clang of a saucepan lid, the clickety-clack of a passing train, the cry of a baby or the squeal of brakes. By manipulating their original tape recordings - speeding them up, slowing them down, playing them backwards, looping the tape, filtering the sound, and splicing different tracks together – they gave their compositions formal structure, transmuting them into music.

Although Samartzis still employs this modus operandi, field recordings made in the grueling far-away are the core of his practice, and the raw material for his two SANG pieces Peninsula and Crush Grind was gathered in the distant hinterland of Western Australia and Antarctica. The two works are antithetical. Crush Grind is descriptive and naturalistic, while the more enthralling Peninsula is far more complex, intricate and challenging.

The composer’s goal of evoking place through a soundscape, turn his creations into modernist re-workings of programmatic tone poems like Respighi’s Pines of Rome or Gustav Holst’s Egdon Heath, except that the focus shifts from the couth, domesticated landscape of Europe to the savage wilds of Terra Australis.

08 October 2010 - 31 October 2010

Listings(s)

'Echoes'

Philip Samartzis at Iziko South African National Gallery

'Echoes' is a sound art cultural exchange project between Australia and South Africa, in which leading Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis will spend time in Cape Town producing a surround-sound installation at the Iziko South African National Gallery. Samartzis uses recordings of natural and constructed environments which are arranged and mixed to reflect the acoustic and spatial complexities of everyday sound fields. Samartzis' installation will invite gallery visitors to enter a vast sonic space that brings awareness to sound's impact on our daily surroundings and lives.

Curated by Jared Davis

08 October 2010 - 31 October 2010