Hamilton Fringe Festival: Paving the way for musical expression
A Hamilton musician, Kent Macpherson creates music with no vocals, rhythm or even melody for the upcoming Hamilton Fringe Festival.
A Hamilton musician is happy to have no control over his music at an upcoming Hamilton Fringe Festival performance.
Kent Macpherson’s group, The Unseen Mechanised Eye, creates drone sonic art that is organic and spontaneous.
Drone has no vocals, rhythm or even melody and uses hypnotic sounds that are repetitive.
“We’ve had one rehearsal and we are only going to have one rehearsal. We wrote out a graphical score and completely ignored it.” This is because music is all about losing control.
analog synthesizer connected to his laptop to
play music. Photo: Sharnae Hope
Macpherson is pushing people’s understanding of music by taking the simplicity of space and time, and showing it through alternative forms, like sound through industrial pipes.
Although the group has structured the layout of the performance and can fall back onto old systems of music if everything fails, each performance will still sound entirely different from the next.
“There is a structure, we just don’t know what it will be. I like not knowing what the music will be like.”
Macpherson also plays in another band, Heartbreak Kids, that is more structured, but enjoys the freedom that he gets from sonic art.
He believes the best part about producing sonic art is the lack of control and the ability to just be in the moment.
The Hamilton Fringe Festival runs from March 3-14 and The Unseen Mechanised Eye’s performance will be on March 11 at 7.30pm. Tickets will be available to purchase at the door.
Macpherson also has a solo sonic art exhibition, called Absent Sense, from May 23 at Ramp Gallery.
