The Listening to the Archive website is a collection of music performances, along with associated recordings, posters, and publications, from events held regularly at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) between 1976 and 1983. Also known as the Organ Factory—named after the community-run building that housed the centre—CHCMC became a space for experimentation in music, sound, film, and other time-based art forms.
The Clifton Hill Community Music Centre was a lively place where young performers from two distinct generations created, performed, debated and occasionally confronted each other in the dark grungy spaces of an ex-organ factory in inner-suburban Melbourne. Events were free and artists received no payment. Importantly, the performers and audience were deemed to be on an equal footing, where anyone could be–and was encouraged to be–a performer, often utilising cheap technologies (cassettes, toy instruments and super-8 film) and readymade performance materials (objects of any variety) rather than traditional instruments.
I coordinated the Centre from 1978 to 1982, with innovative posters designed by Philip Brophy that gave a distinctive look. Although it began in 1976 with a community-based focus encouraged by experimental music composers Ron Nagorcka and Warren Burt, CHCMC soon became a space where emerging, intuitive, and as-yet-unnamed postmodernist narrative deconstructions of younger generation artists rubbed up against the countercultural yet still modernist methodologies and aesthetics of their slightly older counterparts. Here was a place where the boundaries of performance, music making, filmmaking and installation making were dissolved: musicians made films, visual artists made music, critics and theorists performed. Performers included Peter Tyndall, →↑→, The Connotations, Maria Kozic, Jayne Stevenson, Essendon Airport, John Nixon, Ros Bandt, Ernie Althoff, Chris Mann and Tom Ellard and myself, among others. Paul Taylor, who founded the art journal Art & Text, became a frequent visitor, even performing at one event. Later, Paul Taylor's breakthrough ‘Popism’ exhibition at National Gallery of Victoria would feature many CHCMC artists (1).
Prior to the Organ Factory in the early 1970s, some jazz musicians dabbled with unconventional approaches drawn from outside the genre. However, performative explorations were often viewed through a surrealist lens—think chicken suits, top hats, and tails. CHCMC provided a space where a truly local experimental music practice developed its own identity. Performers and audiences provided nurturing support for exploring new ideas and aesthetic possibilities, including in film, video and performance practices. This nurturing environment had never existed before. While the work produced was diverse and defied collective characterisation, it fostered a fresh set of alternative performance values that continue to shape the experimental music scene today.
It’s now possible to hear and try to make sense of the place. In 2020, during lockdown and as a post-doctoral researcher at RMIT, I had an opportunity to create listeningtothearchive.com – an online archive of 50 recordings of works performed at the Organ Factory along with images, posters and both historic and recent writings, inviting new audiences to see what still resonates and what it might tell us.
The 50 performances were recorded on cassette tapes using binaural microphones by CHCMC artist Ernie Althoff between 1976 and 1983. His tapes then sat on a shelf for 40 years before being digitised for this archive. It is not a complete archive, rather, it reflects Ernie’s personal choices. After all, no one asked him to make these recordings—he simply took it upon himself to attend performances and record them. Recordings of a single evening were sometimes spread across several cassettes, as Ernie wanted to fill up any available space. After stitching the music back into single events and correcting some pitch differences, it was amazing how vivid and spatial the cassette recordings sounded. Other people’s recordings have also surfaced, adding to the rich collection.
We used (and misused) cheap accessible technologies; dissected existing musical structures; developed minimalist and tape-based cut-up processes (digital samplers had not been invented yet), and repurposed old analogue techniques using newly emerging digital technologies. This approach emerged at CHCMC through varying degrees of performance competency, producing unintended yet often engaging sonic qualities which inevitably celebrated the non-expert artist and their DIY approach to creativity. For instance, artists used multiple cassette recorders in performances to copy sounds from one device to another while simultaneously recording new layers. This process gradually built up dense, distorted, and evocative soundscapes from simple recorded sounds including the voice—a technique employed by artists like Plastic Platypus, Ernie Althoff and Ron Nagorcka. Others experimented with innovative tunings, timbres and pitch sets, as exemplified by Warren Burt and Ros Bandt. Performers were also influenced by other artists they heard and witnessed at CHCMC, which generated an ongoing dynamic exchange of ideas within the community.
One aspect that appeared to unite all performers at CHCMC was an aversion to displays of personal expression. In the mainstream music business that saturated radio and TV in the 1970s, earnest, expressive gestures had been overused to the point of exhausting any genuine meaning. Expressive qualities were certainly present in music created at the Organ Factory, but they tended to emerge as by-products of structural processes and conceptual explorations. Overt displays of human emotion and associated choreographies were discarded as excess baggage or were imbued with irony.
With this in common, performers developed new ways to explore ideas and themes, ranging from intuitive experiments with the properties of sound to approaches grounded in philosophical precedents, including variants of Marxism, American composer-philosophers (such as John Cage, Kenneth Gaburo, and Joel Chadabe), the French New Wave, Post-Structuralism, Semiotics, Burroughs-inspired cut-up techniques, and performances aimed at deconstructing prevailing structural and expressive tropes.
Darren Tofts, in his discussion of the work of → ↑→, suggests:
"→ ↑→ signaled the presence of an altogether different kind of cultural attitude, committed not only to the production of art but also to drawing attention to the spectacle of culture—to culture as spectacle—its disguised modes of construction, assumptions, and concealed meanings"(2).
A distinct critical edge permeated both the creations and the audience's responses. New works were created each week—often in critical response to prior performances. We published a magazine, New Music (1978 to 1980) edited by Philip Brophy and myself, that would attempt to critically evaluate CHCMC performances. Perhaps criticising this criticality, the then ever-present popular music press often had a dig at the supposed uptight seriousness of the Organ Factory crowd. So, in line with this critical chronology, web designer Paul Mylecharane proposed that the new website embrace its role as an archive by adhering to a simple list of all performances, allowing listeners to explore the centre’s development over the five years during which the recordings were made.
Now that we have this archive, how should we engage with it? Should we dip in randomly, listen to snippets, or is it best to experience the recordings in full? Should the listening be unfiltered, or should listening contexts be provided? Just as there is no such thing as a perfect archive, there are no firm rules for how to engage with it. One might consider the cultural, social, technological, and political dimensions of the musical content, but one can also explore the ontological aspects of the archive, contemplating its inductions and traces of vibratory matter—where the focus shifts to the fundamental nature of recorded sound, independent of its cultural context (3).
Similarly, there are no rules when it comes to listening to the everyday sounds in the world around us where we constantly engage with a vast archive—our personal mental archive—that we’ve come to know and understand. Yet, there are always some sound events we don’t immediately grasp, where our curiosity is sparked as we try to discern their context and meaning, and ultimately, whether the sound signals something threatening. As Deleuze (after Bergson) tells us, this is the zone where real thought occurs: in our case, in the gap between the incoming perception of sound and the affect, thought, and musical meaning it generates. In the archive, we are listening to musical performances, so things are relatively safe for us, though we might still encounter acousmatic confusion when the source, cause, and effects of what we’re hearing become untethered. In such moments, it pays to keep listening—hearing a work in full might trigger new thoughts and insights that fast-forwarding through could never allow.
Listening to an archive is, of course, not like being there. Archive listeners are removed from the situatedness of the original performances that once took place in the old organ factory. Back then, surrounded by the audience–sometimes just a few people, but eventually as many as 80—you would have enjoyed the full ‘milieu-specific’ experience, physically immersed in the atmosphere as the performance unfolded before you. Here, you would have seen technologies and various sonorous objects being manipulated and combined in unexpected ways. Guitars, small synthesizers, and classical instruments also made appearances, often with postmodernist twists on conventional usage and staging (→↑→, Essendon Airport). Some performances took place within the audience, breaking down the audience/performer division (Institute for Dronal Anarchy, Rainer Linz). There was even an old upright piano on wheels available for use (John Crawford, Les Gilbert). In contrast, today’s listeners to the archive encounter the recorded sonic traces of these past events as they unfold, but now it is the listener who controls with a mouse click how much of the listening experience will unfold in their presence.
To guide the journey through an archive, items are often tagged with words or short phrases to help categorise them. This has created difficulties in describing the music at the CHCMC, as the artists aimed to challenge and disrupt such normative classifications. Tags typically consist of nouns describing discrete things—yet to which part of the potential listening experience should those tags apply? Are they tied to materials, structures, performers, instruments, or to “less nouny” concepts like style, moods or feelings?
As Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen note in relation to the use of tagged images in ImageNet in their essay Excavating AI: "Nouns occupy various places on an axis from the concrete to the abstract, and from the descriptive to the judgmental... Everything is flattened out and pinned to a label, like taxidermy butterflies in a display case."
Following the CHCMC period, the 1990s saw a growing tendency among DJs, music stores, and the internet to categorize music by tags and genre. New Music was a single all-encompassing term used in the late 70s to generally describe contemporary music that had not become commodified nor adhered to conventional styles or structures. This term has been replaced by a wider use of the term Experimental Music –now an overused term–a label that once signalled the risk of a music’s potential for success or failure, hopefully in front of a sympathetic audience.
What might constitute musical failure? Audience boredom, lack of purpose, incomplete structures, cliché sounds? These terms were actually all enthusiastically employed as tools by CHCMC artists ––especially those working in post structuralism and deconstruction–as devices to confuse or counter musical expectations: to disrupt but also to contribute to new insights for both creator and audience. The archive is full of these gestures which, like the aesthetic appreciation of musical competency, are a challenge to discern some forty years later.
On April 11 -12, We Called It New Music will take place: a two-day celebratory performance event featuring experimental artists who performed at the artist-run Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) between 1976 and 1983, alongside contemporary musicians responding to its legacy. Produced by Astra Music and Liquid Architecture.
Listening To The Archive website created by David Chesworth
Web designer – Paul Mylecharane, Common Room
Digital transfers – John Campbell
Original recordings – Ernie Althoff and others
With thanks to everyone who contributed to the archive.
- 1. Popism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 1982: https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-moments-popism/.
- 2. Darren Tofts, Diacritics for Local Consumption, published in Meanjin, Vol.60 No.2 Melbourne, 2001.
- 3. For more on acousmatic listening versus ontological listening, check out Brian Kane, Sound Unseen Acousmatic Sound, Music Theory Spectrum, Volume 38, Issue 1, Spring 2016, Pages 118–121.
- 4. For more on affect and thought, see Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image, 1983.
- 5. For more on situatedness, please check out Melody Jue Scuba Diving Praxis: A Field Guide to Underwater Orientation, in Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, ed. Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton, 2023.
- 6. Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, Excavating AI, The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets, 2021.
David Chesworth is an interdisciplinary artist and composer. Together with Sonia Leber, he has created a series of sound and video artworks, such as Zaum Tractor exhibited in the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and This Is Before We Disappear From View commissioned by Sydney Biennale (2014). Known for his experimental and at times minimalist music and sound, he has worked solo, in groups (Essendon Airport, Whadya Want?), electronic music, contemporary ensembles, experimental opera and performance. His practice-led research explores ontologies of engagement.