2024-06-01 about 1 month
Mel (they/she) is a flautist and composer working with electro-acoustic sound extension and conceptual mixes in installation and performance.
Their commissioned work is in an audiovisual alcove in the Goldcoast Exhibition Centre and her solo sound installation, Days of Our Lives was represented in Contemporary Composition: From Avant-Garde to Experimental curated by Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe in Now Hear This, part of Melbourne Now at the National Gallery of Victoria. Mel’s sound work MCVox, published by Winchester University Press, is archived in the British Library.
They have a PhD in film and communication studies where she inquired about the relations between gender, the flute and the epileptic body. Mel’s music explores a tension between interruption and a desire for continuity. Their recent work engages with emplaced improvised flute.
I have been playing flute and making recordings in different places at Hub Feenix. I have a background playing many styles of music, but in recent years I primarily improvise on the flute as a way into music composition and sound design. In general I love improvising because, not only does it help me to be more present, but its fleeting nature reminds us that status quos are not inevitable, and are changeable.
I'm also playing with the idea of proximity and distance in the spaces of Hub Feenix. I've been interested in how closeness can imply a range of colours from confinement to intimacy, kinship, love, family and solidarity. Similarly, distance can invoke aloneness, separation, to silence/the unknown, to dreaming and space. This led me to creatively questioning how I could follow these concepts in my audio work and I got interested in combining different spaces, and using natural and simulated reverb.
