Report: Sound Summit 2013

Relocated from Newcastle to Sydney for the first time, last weekend Sound Summit balanced its keystone focus on innovation with esoteric rock and punk dynamism. MAX EASTON reports.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.] Between the Red Rattler, Marrickville Bowling Club, and Soundworks Studios sits a skip bin overflowing with garbage bags that pile onto the footpath; a minor obstacle that slightly alters the paths walked between venues on the side-street that was the focal point of 2013’s Sound Summit. Despite the presence of over 80 artists from across Australia, the US, and Germany, Marrickville continued its operations unabated. The functioning warehouses, mechanics, and factories all churned away in the surrounds and the Bowling Green hosted an inter-club meeting as 15 bands played inside. Perhaps in line with the independent culture that Sound Summit aimed to herald, Sydney’s inner-west carried on as though the festival weren’t even there.

Until this year, Sound Summit was set in Newcastle over the October long weekend, one that we described last year as an uncomfortable fit. If shit always runs downhill, the question was asked why Music NSW and the Australian Council had been funding the uphill battle and in 2013, for financial and logistical reasons, the decision was made to fund and grow where the shit settles: in Marrickville, in Redfern, in Sydney’s fringes, where the bulk of the music culture it aims to represent resides. Questions about who is to then pick up the slack for the cultural growth of Newcastle may have been left unanswered, but a move to Sydney at least made sense in organisational terms, where a major event was run at its base rather than two hours north of it.

“It more or less fell into three variations on a theme: electronic artists, conventional guitar music, and the more outlandish experimentalists.”

This year’s Sound Summit was again focused around the curation of its co-directors, with Liza Grace joining the continuing Daniel Gottlieb and Nic Warnock. While its tagline aimed to be a celebration of independent and ‘innovative’ music, it was just as much about drawing together artists from disparate locales and placing them into a singular hub to highlight trends or movements. While a number of these were left out (there were no acts that really represented hardcore, rap, or folk, for example), it more or less fell into three variations on a theme: electronic artists, conventional guitar music, and the more outlandish experimentalists.

The festival’s early focus was on exhibiting subversive electronic music in its various forms, in ambient constructions, left-field techno, or its crossover towards other realms. The common theme here was its admiration for equipment, linking together synths and effects pedals in extended arrays supported on stacked milk crates. Flat Fix in particular exhibited a love affair for analog synths and effects, the duo of Cooper Bowman and Nick Senger crossing each other’s paths to the daisy-chained parts across their bench, working tentatively toward dance anti-anthems. Four Door explored similar territory with a song-driven rather than exploratory focus, allowing just-intelligible vocals to be heard above passages of clipping sounds.

For the more insular acts, Brisbane’s Primitive Motion drove subtle melodies between textures and jagged-edge rhythms, while Angel Eyes too was about evoking imagery, only briefly touching on album tracks with snippets that cascaded into voids quickly filled. Acts who dabbled in multiple elements were also prevalent in the form of M.O.B., who aggressively took synths and clashed them against alien guitar tones and bitter vocal touches, or Multiple Man, who fetishised sci-fi scores with a playful brutality. In the case of Germany’s Oval, the glitching set’s beauty was distracted from by the performance’s reliance on a laptop, whereas America’s Container blew out the subtlety shown elsewhere on the bill with a shamelessly over-the-top techno set.

For another subset of acts, their alignment with the festival’s tagline as ‘innovative’ was abundantly clear. Duck whistles capping the ends of foot pumps made up part of Sky Needle’s rhythm section, which hinged on a meeting of tribal and industrial influences at Sarah Byrne’s wildly operatic vocal performance. Sharing Glan Schenau on off-kilter percussion, Andrew McLellan’s Cured Pink was similarly minded, venturing into territories of noise fraught with damaged sound that worked around the repetition of the band’s spine.

“Sound Summit’s tagline as a celebration of the innovative was muddied where the rock acts dominated the back end of the festival.”

That concept of innovation, or exploring outer territories, was touched on in different ways across the festival. For an act like Making, obliterating volume from guitar and bass was underscored by closely guarded structural shifts. Similarly structurally inclined were Bushwalking, who spent their energies immaculately marking points in time with vocal harmonies and drum patterns in efforts to stray from the conventional, even though the sounds at large were reminiscent of recent indie massives. Alternatively, a complete sidestep from structure was present in performances by James Rushford & Joe Talia, in carefully assembled electronic ambience, or the improvised collaboration of Wadley/Hopkins/Blachford/Denley. After a half-hour of the latter’s sparse exploratory chaos, they stripped back to the common members of Exhaustion, who thundered through the just-created abyss with white noise wrapped around structured anthems that were ostensibly rock songs.

Sound Summit’s tagline as a celebration of the innovative was muddied at the point where the rock acts dominated at the back end of the festival. A panel on the Sunday morning (preceding a day that dealt mostly in the conventional) discussed the validity of rock music as a subversive medium, and perhaps that was the goal of the day’s showcase: to pose the question of how boards of analog synths, spare-part percussion, or free-form structures are any more important for cultural development than guitar, bass, and drums. In the words of musicologist Nicola Morton, the behavior of an outsider isn’t necessarily that of form, but of “a consistent cycle of reacting against what you think is prevalent,” and Sound Summit was unfazed in showcasing both.

In the common friendship circles of those in showcases by Popfrenzy and Newcastle label Y202, the growth of local communities was highlighted over subversion or reactionary activity, with interstate and international analogues placed alongside as mirrors. For the Popfrenzy showcase, the common sounds and reference points of droning guitars and a simplicity of structure existed to allow brush-strokes of personality to take the fore. Mope City and Destiny 3000 took nervous energy into reserved insularity washed over with lethargic guitars, while the duo of Unity Floors had any withheld agitation thrusted outwards. Contextualised by the guitar-pop of Melbourne’s The Stevens, the development of communities and sounds through common inspirations was made clear. Meanwhile, US imports Real Numbers were included as a reflection, with bubblegum garage supplemented by members of Royal Headache on drums and second guitar, but in this bubble of worlds and commonality, Real Numbers stuck out as relatively disparate.

A reaction to apathy and reservation appeared on Sunday’s bill. Red Red Krovvy’s Ashleigh Wyatt’s intimidating ferocity was welcome after what had been four days of mostly mild-mannered internal adventuring, their juvenile dark turns on minimalist punk following on from Housewives’ blending emotions of disinterest and unsettled anger. It was only really the subverts of M.O.B. and Multiple Man who most closely paralleled these rough-edged ends of the spectrum, while the rest of the Sunday traded off on enthusiasm and exuberance. Ausmuteants’ schoolboy synth-pop was a nice match to that of Ooga Boogas, who riffed on similar themes despite members probably nearing 20 years their senior.

Festival headliners Tyvek (US) existed as the main example of innovation lying in the norm that Sound Summit was pushing. Speaking on the topic, Tyvek’s Kevin Boyer struggled to articulate exactly what made them any more subversive or worthwhile than their more celebrated contemporaries, but a set of cloying guitars and indirect riffing answered the question for him. It comes from the ignorance of image, hype, or extraneous factors. In contrast to ambient electronics, or improvised collaborations, where the audience is completely left out of what occurs on stage, Tyvek and bands like them seem to exist primarily to elicit audience reception. It may not be innovative in the traditional sense, but it’s certainly a declaration of independence from the norm.

“The festival feels more comfortable in its new home.”

Sound Summit finished at 2 a.m. on a Monday morning, sending a crowd tired and limping into rain-soaked concrete surrounds. Here, Marrickville’s gunk-ridden side-streets hosted pocket-loads of people hailing taxis under torrents of overflowing storm-water channels, with the reality of the next day’s work settling in almost immediately. For a festival highlighting the strange and otherworldly, it made sense for a Sydney local to be placed in unfamiliar, alienated surrounds, away from the social, domestic, and work commitments of home. Yet, the festival itself feels more comfortable in its new home.

Ultimately, a conflict exists between the goals and aims of Music NSW, Sound Summit’s directors, and the desires of the vast circles of people who attend the festival. As a music conference, it was forced to cancel three panels due to a lack of attendance. In reality, it acted as a means of touring international artists who couldn’t afford an Australian visit, support for ailing local music communities, and above all else a rock show and dance party. Until Sound Summit, its artists, and its attendees can reconcile these conflicts, there will always be confusion or complaints, but the fact that people complained at all only goes to show how much those who respond to outsider culture value its celebration.

It’s clear to me that Sound Summit is among this country’s most honest, legitimate, and important cultural events; that it remains largely ignored by the bulk of its citizens only enforces that fact.

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