Australysis
Creating composed and improvised musics and intermedia.
'Makes music on more technology than the Navy possesses', Sydney Morning Herald, 2000.
'Those doyens of computerised music', Sydney Morning Herald, 2008.
'One of the best improvising bands in the world', austraLYSIS has developed unusual techniques for control of rhythmic, timbral and harmonic interaction, and since 1995 has used computer interactive and networked technology in the austraLYSIS Electroband. 'Incredible interaction', said the Wire (UK); 'eclectic and consummate', said BBC Radio 3. Formed originally by Roger Dean in 1970 as the innovative European group LYSIS, austraLYSIS has played in 30 countries, and made more than thirty commercial recordings.
Since 1970 austraLYSIS has evolved continuously from an ensemble focussed on commissioning and premiering new compositions, and presenting contemporary classics, together with improvised music; to one which creates real-time computer interactive work, and elaborately composed acousmatic music, often in intermedia contexts involving real-time image manipulation and text presentation and generation. Most work is created by members of the ensemble, often collaboratively.
Australian novelist and poet David Malouf has written of austraLYSIS' Tall Poppies CD Moving the Landscape: 'Track after track commands our attention, not just with the drama of what austraLYSIS can do, but with the variety of means, instrumentally and rhythmically, and the degree of emotion they are prepared to risk. What I liked best of all was the inwardness these performers develop, the sense we get of their moving off alone, without compromising the drama of interplay; most of all, without ever releasing tension. This is improvisation that offers increased pleasure at every hearing... Moving the Landscapes is a real coup.'