Playing Outside
Mitchell Whitelaw

Catalogue essay for Sound Particle, an event held at Particle Gallery, 
Annandale, in April 1998. Sound Particle featured performances by Australian 
and New Zealand musicians Kazumichi Grime, Mute Freak, Shane Fahey and 
Parmentier.


Whenever we see a group, a multiple, a set, we like to form an identity:
itÍs tempting to identify a field here, to invent an identity to contain the work of 
the artists here and others making similar music. Trying to locate it might work 
by elimination, describing what itÍs not: not-rock, not-dance, not-classical, not-
sound-art. It might eventually get squeezed into a kind of absolute "outside" - 
a space apart. This sounds familiar; a margin, or an underground, or the 
romance of a lonely, unloved avant-garde whose innovations will eventually 
be hailed in the mainstream. But the outside that this practise inhabits isnÍt "out 
in front", but more immanent, in the cracks, and in the present, rather than the 
future, and it doesnÍt seem interested in producing an identity for itself, unlike 
many avant-gardes of old. One of the carts on 2SERÍs Audiodaze, trying to 
describe the show, parodies this process of identification by elimination, finally, 
in frustration, coughing up a decoy label: "itÍs music for vegetarians." In a 
similar way I want to resist the temptation to play pin-the-identity here. The 
diversity of the networks involved in events like Sound Particle, their multiple 
affiliations and alliances, the multiple cultural streams involved (including all of 
the not-categories earlier eliminated), the crossover points they generate, are 
fostering interesting things, things that seem to proliferate in an equilibrium of 
deliberately suspended identity-formation. Trying to define the field would be 
missing the point.

This reluctance about identity, or adoption of an identity only in negation, 
carries across into the work itself. Not that itÍs is negative, more that itÍs in 
tension between a kind of denial or refusal to play, and the concrete production 
of its own, contained aesthetic. ItÍs refusing to be hi-fi, or refusing to be 
consonant, or refusing to "go anywhere", or refusing to groove "properly" or 
refusing to be performative. At times it toys with complete autism, 
annihalating itself and its listener with raw noise or raw repetition, trance, 
absence. Getting "out" of itself, getting the listener out of it. But despite this, 
sound material happens, aesthetic choices are made, and explorations and 
constructions take place, however tentatively. ItÍs slight, wary of anything that 
might coalesce into identity; it dodges the cultural redundance of style but its 
fascination with sound and process, the immersive aural feedback of live 
electronic impro, keeps it going. Innovation, creation, invention, the new, are 
suspect - these categories got swallowed by advertising years ago - but the 
process, and the material, wonÍt let go. New tools, collaborations, potentials 
appear, and are investigated, sounded out. We still want to play: add another 
pedal to that well-connected floor mulch: now it sounds like.... download 
another pirate audio processor...  

Maybe this work provides an answer to the question of how to play without 
playing, how to invent, perform, construct or create, without participating in 
the games of cultural identity, redundant style and ubiquitous commerce. Or 
how to go outside and play.