Ensemble Offspring invite you to embark on a multi-sensory exploration of sacrosanct sounds, charting your own path through a catacomb of music, performance and installation in The Secret Noise for three performances at Arts House: 14 & 15 October 2016.
There are sounds that exist on the other side of silence: music that has been deliberately kept from public ears. From forbidden airs to censored songs, retracted tunes and intimate odes intended for just one listener, the history of music is haunted by these secret compositions.
Lifting the veil on secret music, The Secret Noise poetically and playfully explores the threshold of music-making as a public and private exchange – from the sacred forms of ceremonial music and legally extinguished compositions to ‘backmasking’ (playing an LP backwards to reveal a subliminal, satanic message), private love songs and the proliferation of personal music players.
Staged throughout Arts House at the North Melbourne Town Hall, Ensemble Offspring will guide and seduce audiences through a series of surreal, intimate scenes that hover somewhere between music, dance and live installation.
Composer Damien Ricketson’s striking, other-worldly soundscape, where he combines traditional instruments with fantastical fricative objects and whirling devices of his own design, is beautifully realised by musicians alongside a cast of dancers and an actor.
A pioneering and genre-bending force in Australian new music, Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring’s recent collaborators include fellow free radicals Mike Patton, Speak Percussion and composer-inventor Jon Rose. Virtuosic and visceral, The Secret Noise continues the ensemble’s exploration into emerging music practices, inviting everyone in as voyeur and accomplice.
“Ensemble Offspring are pioneers and with this production they have left the first footprints in the sand of an exciting new territory for Australian performance.” – Limelight Magazine
Director: Carlos Gomes Concept & Composition: Damien Ricketson Devising Performers: Narelle Benjamin (dancer) Katherine Cogill (dancer) Katia Molino (actor) Jason Noble (clarinet) Claire Edwardes (percussion / artistic director) Bree van Reyk (percussion) Lighting Design: Fausto Brusamolino
The Secret Noise
Arts House – North Melbourne Town Hall, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Performances: 14 & 15 October 2016
Bookings: www.artshouse.com.au
For more information, visit: www.ensembleoffspring.com or www.melbourne.festival for details.
Image: Ensemble Offspring presents The Secret Noise at Arts House as part of the 2016 Melbourne Festival (supplied)