Future-focused, thoughtfully curated and artist centric.
New Music Days is a burgeoning three-day festival and the latest offering in experiential programming, bursting forth into the collective sphere of the new and exciting.
Each performance at New Music Days presents budding ideas that facilitate broader social and political discussion. In its inaugural year, the festival focuses on the importance of First Nations composers, voices and stories, how musicians compose and respond to the environment, and the work of female composers in Australia.
Featuring five bold events across three days, audiences will have the opportunity to not only bask in the delight of live music, but to go deeper, engaging in public conversations through pre and post-concert talks.
Dr Louise Devenish is a contemporary percussionist whose creative practice blends performance, collaboration, and artistic research. Dr Stuart James is an award-winning Western Australian-based composer, performer, sound designer, audio engineer, and producer. Erin Coates is a visual artist and creative producer working across film, sculptural installation and drawing.
Their performance in Primrose Potter Salon as part of New Music Days 2023 presents Alluvial Gold, a work for percussion, sculptural instruments, field recordings, electronics and projection that draws audiences into the often-forgotten and changing worlds below river surfaces.
Alluvial Gold takes the histories, materials and ecology of our metropolitan rivers as a point of departure. Their performance explores the confluence of multiple narratives connected to rivers, from the phenomenological and structural aspects of river systems and water, the devastating impact of industrialisation after European colonisation, the sonic ecology and chemistry of larger river systems, and a musical language derived from transcriptions of sounds of the river system itself.
