Atom Bomb

Don Campau's excellent website The Living Archive of Underground Music recently published a historical overview of cassettes in Australian underground music, written by Artefacts compiler, Clinton Green. Amongst other things, the article discusses Ron Nagorcka's tape recorder opera "Atom Bomb" as a key event in the development of tape music (where tape recorders are the primary generators of aural and/or compositional materials) not only in Australia but internationally as well. "Atom Bomb" is essentially a dialogue between performers and several domestic tape recorders, where sonic materials (vocals and keyboards) are generated during the performance, sampled, played back and resampled by the tape recorders. In composing "Atom Bomb", Nagorcka recalled a statement from Jean Charles Francois earlier in the decade to the effect that ‘all electronic music is a distortion of music’s reality’; "Atom Bomb" is essentially an exploration of this concept with cassette tapes.

First performed at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in 1977 by Nagorcka and Warren Burt, "Atom Bomb" will be performed for the first time in thirty years by contemporary New Music trio, Golden Fur, at the launch for Artefacts volume 2, on 27 November 2010 at the Iwaki Auditorium in Melbourne. Don't miss this one-off re-imagining of a key work from the Australian experimental music canon.