Free Range 7: Botborg, Owchi, Tistriallal Binds

Free Range sounds, sunny side up. Our Thursday night sound club returns — exploring the sights and sounds of the underground.

Botborg: a trans-continental franchise with its axis in Berlin and Meanjin/Brisbane. The 'borg' started life in the IMA's screening room in 2024 as key players in the fabled Small Black Box series. Welcome home Botborg! This iteration of the project will see local legend Joe Musgrove rewire heads in an alchemical demonstration—electronic signals leaping across the synaptic cleft to produce intense sound colour synaesthesia. It's bright, it's loud, it's utterly confounding. A true Free Range scramble.

Owchi: the dream duo of Nicola Morton (voice) and Skye McNicol (violin), two pillars of the Meanjin/Brisbane underground sound community with ties to the Breakdance the Dawn cabal and a lengthy list of essential outsider combos. In Owchi they ride an uneasy psychoacoustic pendulum that swings sound from the outside to deep inside the listener's head. With improvised violin bathed in echo and vocals transmitted from the other side of the wall, the subliminal Owchi omelette is equal parts playful and disturbing.

Tistriallal Binds: wilfully obscurest soundmaker Ben Haes has been mining the sub-strata of Meanjin/Brisbane sound for nearly two decades, both as pilot of the secret society cassette label Essential Minerals and in countless unnamed projects. Tistriallal Binds sees him operating damaged tape recorders and clapped-out playback systems to burrow into a deep seam of magnetic tape, resulting in recursive circuits of sound accumulation and collapse. At the end of the expedition, Haes often remains buried in a mound of decaying tape. Century egg.

Doors at 6pm.