Some of us will be performing at the ReMix event for the opening of Ancestral Modern, a survey of Australian Aboriginal paintings. We'll be playing from 8:30 - 11 PM, tucked away in the small Aboriginal gallery in the northeast corner of the second floor (near the Native American gallery).
Aboriginal paintings are maps of land, conceptual representations of the mythological qualities of the landscape and the journeys of the Dreamtime ancestors, symbolizing their connections with distant places and beings. Unlike Western maps, there is no scale or compass orientation, and they do not necessarily show the "true" proportions or geographical relationships between features. A painting is often made on the ground with the artist moving around it, arranging the various features according to their present position and focus. Different views of the landscape and multiple perspectives may be superimposed on one another. Our own work often involves a similar kind of abstract "mapping." We move through the world, recording significant details of a given place or journey, mixing, rearranging, and overlaying multiple sonic perspectives in ways that often distort actual scale/volume or geographical relationships.
