Overground is a four hour collaborative experiment featuring Australian and international musicians and artists operating across the lines of free improvisation, classicism, performance art, transgression, noise, poetry, comedy, conceptualism, despair and joy.

The Overground artists are organised into groups and ensembles that haven’t before, and may never again, perform together. Adaptability, attention, and the ability to listen, process, and respond are key. Not everything works and nor should it; risk and uncertainty are necessary ingredients for any experiment to be worthwhile. Some failures are more spectacular than any success. And how are we to judge anyway? The joy of experimental music is it’s fugitivity, it evades capture and is permanently on-the-run from those who would judge.

Overground is part of Supersense Festival and takes place at Arts Centre Melbourne, occupying various lounges, foyers, halls and stalls in this weird and opulent 1970′s building. So plush, velvety, uncanny, somehow out of time. A location ripe for a ritual (a cleansing, or a dirtying ritual?)

This is the third Overground, following the two intense and memorable iterations presented by Melbourne International Jazz Festival in 2010 and 2011.

The 2017 version is curated by Overground founder and Supersense curator Sophia Brous in collaboration with Liquid Architecture Artistic Director Joel Stern and founding director of Sydney’s legendary NOW now organisation Clayton Thomas.

For Liquid Architecture, Overground has been an opportunity to extend an invitation to artists whose works operate at the threshold of what is and isn’t (experimental) music, who disturb the conventions, even of a practice that understands itself as essentially unconventional.  We hold this maxim to be true: Truly experimental music should be performed against itself.

artists

Acid Mothers Temple, Ánde Somby, Andrew Harper, Arrington de Dionyso, Autumn Royal, Carolyn Connors, Clayton Thomas, Cleek Schrey, Dave Harrington, Deborah Kayser, Dylan Martorell, Erkki Veltheim, Felicia Atkinson, Freya Schack-Arnott, Fujui Wang, Hani Abdile, James Rushford, Jannah Quill, Jeremy Gustin, JG Thirlwell, Jim Denley, Jon Hunter, Jonnine Standish, Judith Hamann, Josten Myburgh and Michael McNab aka Tchake, Kane Ikin, Kusum Normoyle, Laura Altman, Laurence Pike, Lisa Lerkenfeldt, Lucy Cliché, Marcus Whale, Maria Moles, Matthias Schack-Arnott, Nick Tsiavos, Oliver Coates, Oren Ambarchi, Peter Knight, Rainbow Chan, Robbie Avenaim, Rohan Ribiero, Sage Pbbbt, Samuel Dunscombe, Scott McConnachie, Sophia Brous, Tarquin Manek, TBP, Ying Li-Hooi, Zeena Parkins.