Oral Histories - Warren Burt

video upload by Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS)

"Warren Burt arrived in Australia in 1975 and the landscape of Australian electronic and experimental music changed forever. An encyclopaedic repository of works and theories in the field - Warren has been educating and inspiring generations for half a century. His work spans almost all conceivable genres and modalities ranging from his Aardvarks series of pieces (that are also devised instruments) to works exploring incompetence as a paradigm and even compositions designed to propagate in gasses other than oxygen! Since his arrival he has been an almost constant agitator and organiser, creating new performance contexts and ways to educate people both within and outside of the institutions that have been lucky enough to have him on staff.

About Oral Histories:

Storytelling is an essential part of what it means to be human. When we share our stories we create space for real exchange and a deeper sense of empathy toward one another. At MESS we are conscious that so much of what has happened in Australian electronic music was never written down. Even when things are documented formally in books and journals - that very process can create an orthodox history which is inevitably incomplete and riddled with unconscious bias. So what we are doing is sitting down with the people who have made a lasting contribution to the form and asking them to tell us about their experiences in their own words.

The Oral Histories project was funded initially by a local histories grant from the Public Record Office of Victoria.

Filmed and produced by Jonnine Nokes

Find out more at http://mess.foundation"