Live Review: Mono 18 & 19

It's been 15 years since Lawrence English launched Room40 in Brisbane and, over that time, the label and its associated events have helped define the city's experience of sound art. So it's fitting that the label's birthday celebrations feature some of the biggest names in the field — those who have helped shape modern minimalism and those who are helping to create its future.

Makino Takashi's Space Noise 3D begins with the audience donning 3D glasses with only one eye in place. The resulting visuals are beautiful: a blanket of stars forms the background, while above it red lines flicker frantically, shattered glass swirls, and slow moving clouds drift somewhere in between. Covering either eye creates an entirely new experience, and gives a sense of the complexity of the visual composition. The music is even better, cleansing washes of noise with bursts of glitch and a slowly emerging bass which acts as a counterpoint to the highly-pitched white noise. Both the audio and visual are busy, but there's enough stillness — in the clouds, in the bass — to keep the piece from feeling overwhelming, simply leaving the audience absorbed.

Jim O'Rourke doesn't venture out of Japan these days, so his composition is diffused between the room's speakers by Lawrence English. O'Rourke's piece is the most natural of the festival, featuring quiet bird calls, rustling leaves and an arrhythmic heart-beat just loud enough to impact the listener's body. The sound, spread out as it is between four speakers, breaks down the distinction between the performed work and the room, so that falling bottles and the loud footsteps of late guests become indivisible from the composed piece.

A single loop played over and over again, triggered at different intervals and slowly overlapping, so that the final sound bears little resemblance to the original — it's one of the defining ideas behind William Basinski's minimalism and tonight the audience are treated to two separate pieces, a piano melody and an orchestral phrase. It's meditative and relaxing, encouraging the mind to wander, and what begins as simple and discrete becomes something much more complex. The only problem is the physical space, which is too cold and uncomfortable to allow for complete immersion in the sound.

Ross Manning sets up wooden boards covered with bells and nails. In front of the boards is a series of loosely stretched strings, controlled by simple machinery. As Manning swaps boards in and out and moves his contact mics, the sound modulates. It harks back to the days of Small Black Box, 15 years ago, both in Manning's use of unusual self-made instruments, and in its humanity. Where the other performances embrace perfection, Manning's allows for the possibility of error, and sometimes those are the greatest moments. When the strings get tangled in nails and need to be released, the consistent strumming pauses and creates an unexpected structure to the sound that keeps it fresh. A wonderful trip down memory lane, and a reminder of the potential of the accidental.

To close off the festival, Grouper (Liz Harris) and Paul Clipson join forces for Hypnosis Display — a feature length film and sound collaboration about the American landscape. For Clipson, the dominant theme seems to be motion: everything is in transit. This is literal for much of the film — people walk across bridges, travel in trains, speed by in cars; but it's also figurative: the film is composed of a constant stream of transitions, overlays, and scene-changes, never content to settle in a single place.

Grouper, by contrast, creates a still, dream-like ambience. Continuing her work with tape-loops, she stretches out field recordings of machinery and trains into unrecognisable static. Voices appear out of the fog, distant and occasionally threatened — snatches of conversation from the other side of a brick wall at night. The mood shifts across the 75-minute performance, but the tone remains consistent throughout: low, resonant, and entirely enveloping, so that when the sound does fade, the return to silence is an almost disorienting sensation, the absence of sound a loss.

Fifteen years in, Room40 continues to showcase the possibilities of sound. And while he didn't perform his own work this time, Lawrence English deserves to take a well-earned bow.