Chamber Made will transform Melbourne Recital Centre into a sonic playground with Listening Acts – a bold takeover of its public and hidden spaces for the Now or Never festival.
Listening Acts isn’t a typical concert or exhibition – it’s a portal into the unheard and unexpected, featuring three live performances and six sound installations that intersect sound, technology, memory and identity.
Grounded in the artists’ lived experiences, personal histories and cultural perspectives, the works create sensory encounters that are both solitary and shared, blurring the boundaries between hearing and feeling.
Chamber Made Artistic Director, Tamara Saulwick, invites audiences to experience this multi-artform sonic inquiry – one that reframes how sound is perceived and encourages listening in entirely new ways.
“Listening Acts transforms everyday sounds into something profound, strange and moving. How do we hear ourselves and each other through the layers of technology, trauma and time?” asks Saulwick.
Over three days in August, surrender to sound in unexpected ways. Listening Acts is a moment to hear hospital machines sing, watercoolers gossip and ancestral voices reverberate through the walls.
The intimate live performance features three acoustic works:
Song to the Cell by Biddy Connor is a haunting duet between a live vocalist and a hospital IV machine. Featuring hums, beeps and mechanical rhythms, it’s a transhumanist song cycle exploring healing, dependence and human–machine connection.
Tactile Piece for Human Ears by Aviva Endean offers a subtly communal binaural experience. Audiences wear headphones to enter a surreal soundscape shaped by wind currents, pipe tones and underwater vibrations – altering their sense of acoustic reality.
sounding forms / forming sounds by Alexandra Spence begins as a solo and evolves into a trio with Connor and Endean. Using resonating sinewaves, custom-built perspex instruments and drum skins, the work reveals the physical presence of sound in space and the body.
Six free installations guide audiences on a sonic journey throughout the venue:
Accordion Without Organs by Rebecca Bracewell is an unfolding work of sonic archaeology centred on a single accordion recording. Played through multiple cassette players with amplifiers, each iteration adds acoustic layers while partially veiling the last.
Cathedral Reverb by Hannah de Feyter invites one listener at a time into a sculpted sound space. Inspired by classical mnemotechnics – ancient memory techniques – it conjures imagined architecture through reverberant sound and image.
With Ghosts: A Choreography of Presence by Anna Liebzeit centres on a thirteen-foot plait of hair suspended on a wall, paired with an educational video. Activated by movement, the plait becomes a vessel of cultural knowledge and a powerful symbol of connection to the Stolen Generation, embodying both the physical and metaphysical presence of Indigenous identity.
Chit + Chat by Monica Lim eavesdrops on the uncanny, AI-generated conversation of two water coolers. This playful installation explores human–machine interaction and invites audiences to listen, interject and consider the surveillance capacities of everyday devices.
Myself in That Moment by Tamara Saulwick with Peter Knight is a 39-channel audio-visual installation. Within a dark semicircular space, fragmented voices and images echo across a constellation of networked tablets, asking: What happens to our identity once our voice is digitised, distorted and dispersed?
In Silence by Thembi Soddell is a deeply personal, one-on-one audio-visual experience that grapples with family history and the intergenerational impacts of war. Through the act of ancestral listening, the work reveals fragmented echoes of trauma, identity and emotional inheritance.
August 22 – 24
