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Jon Rose & Hollis Taylor
Great Fences Of Australia

Album AU 2002 on Dynamo House label
Spoken Word, Folk, World and (Field Recording, Experimental)

Many people look at fences and see not much; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor look and see giant musical string instruments covering a continent. The strings are so long that they become the resonators as well as the triggers for the sound. On straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of meters. The music is ethereal and elemental, incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound); the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world. The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance, boundaries and borders. This, however, is not the songlines, or even the white fella's ironic version of it, but the unexpected and elegiac music of the Australian landscape 'sounding' it's recent history. All the tracks were recorded on location in Australia using a combination of transducers and mini-microphones usually placed within the holes of the fence posts. The recordings were edited and mixed in Paris June 2002 (post production has been kept to a minimum, the exception being track 16 which utilizes some simple sampling techniques). A total of 64 concerts were performed on the Melba Fence which was specially constructed for The Bowing Fences installation at The Melbourne Festival; otherwise all the fences were played as found objects in their original condition. CD packaged with barbed wire.

Musicians

	Jon Rose vn, *1951 AU album by
	Hollis Taylor vn, US album by

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