Unsettling Scores is a three-part online program curated by Liquid Architecture for Monash University Museum of Art in conjunction with the exhibition Samson Young: Real Music. Unsettling Scores will be distributed as newsletters, with works also appearing on our journal platform Disclaimer.

Bringing together artists, musicians and writers from around the world, the program examines how experimental and political sound and acts of listening—grounded in the language of musical scores—become vehicles of unsettlement, disrupting logics of settlerism, extractivism, expropriation and appropriation, while at the same time offering powerful assertions of sovereignty, resistance, and futurity. Unsettling Scores will comprise texts, videos, audio, notation, transcripts, proposals and documentation, collated in the form of an expanded dialogue between contributors.

Unsettling Scores begins on 2 September, with Quandamooka artist Megan Cope presenting collected materials and notation from her recent work Untitled (Death Song), commissioned for the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Comprising a suite of sound sculptures constructed from discarded mining equipment, Untitled (Death Song) is a meditation on the ghost-like call of the yellow-eyed Bush Stone-curlew, a harbinger of death in Quandamooka culture. Complimenting Megan, Xwélméxw (Stó:lō) writer and curator Dylan Robinson will share readings from his groundbreaking book Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, exploring Indigenous relationships to the lives of songs and the resonances between listeners, sounds, and spaces.

In part two of the program on 16 September, Navajo Nation sound artist Raven Chacon and Carcross/Tagish curator and writer Candice Hopkins will present a new collaborative work in the form of an expanded propositional score, drawing from their experiences of the struggle for cultural preservation and defence of Indigenous sovereignty at the Standing Rock Reservation Water Protector encampment in 2016, in the context of their broader research into practices of decolonial listening.

Concluding Unsettling Scores on 30 September, Māori composer, performer and anthropologist Rob Thorne (Ngāti Tumutumu) will present a new sound work continuing his exploration of stone, bone, shell, wood and other materials resonant with connection to land and culture, while experimental composers Nick Ashwood, Johnny Chang, Megan Alice Clune, Andrew Fedorovitch, Sonya Holowell, MP Hopkins, Shota Matsumura and Alexandra Spence, collectively Proposals from the Future, will share a suite of text-scores made in recent months to bridge the isolation of lockdown through moments of collaborative and speculative listening.

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