Zero Day to Zero Night

Max Eastley is an artist whose work combines kinetic sound sculpture and music to produce a unique art form. Since the late 1960s, Eastley has been fascinated by the relationship of chance to music and art, and in environmental forces such as wind and water. He began to investigate this relationship in his work, using kinetic sound machines and the natural forces of the wind, streams and the sea. As a consequence, his career opened out into new areas of creative and philosophical exploration. Eastley is an important and innovative figure in the field of sound art. He often works in collaboration with other artists from a range of disciplines. He has exhibited his sound installations internationally, and worked closely with a wide range of artists, musicians and filmmakers, including Brian Eno, Peter Greenaway, Evan Parker, Thomas Köner, Eddie Prévost and The Spaceheads. Exhibitions of his installations in 2000 included Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery and Sound as Media in Toyko. In 2002 he composed the music for Plants and Ghosts by Siobhan Davies Dance. He has worked with musician and writer David Toop to produce the critically acclaimed albums New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments 1975, Buried Dreams 1994 and Doll Creature 2004. For The Ship Eastley has produced a sound sculpture installation which incorporates found sound recorded during Cape Farewell expeditions. 'I'm a musician and a sound artist, and I'm here on the boat to collect as many different sounds as I can: sounds the ship makes, water sounds, birdcalls, seal songs, that kind of thing. I do an awful lot of recording all over the place and I've never heard anything like the sounds I've heard on this voyage. We went to a kittiwake colony - a huge city of seabirds all nesting on the side of a cliff - and that was absolutely fantastic.' (Max Eastley, Cape Farewell 2003 Voyage). Peter Cusack is a sound artist/recordist and musician with special interests in environmental sound and acoustic ecology. Current activities range from song writing, through improvised music, to research on how sound contributes to our sense(s) of place and recording projects which document areas of special sonic interest - most recently Lake Baikal, Siberia, and the Azerbaijan oil fields. He is particularly interested in global patterns of sonic change created by migrations of people who make and create them and by new technologies. In 1998 he initiated the on-going 'Your Favourite London Sound' project, which aims to find out what Londoners find positive in their city's soundscape. Currently he is involved in 'Sound & the City' the British Council's sound art project for Beijing, October 2005. Active as a performer he has played 100s of concerts at home and abroad. Musical collaborators include Clive Bell, Nic Collins, Alterations, Chris Cutler, Max Eastley, Evan Parker, Hugh Davies, Annette Krebs and Viv Corringham. He was a founder member, and director, of the London Musicians Collective and frequently collaborates with artists in other fields, especially film/video, installation and 'public art'. In collaboration with Isobel Clouter he produces 'Vermilion Sounds' , a monthly radio series on environmental sound for Resonance FM, London, now approaching 50 shows.

Cfr. nn. Arch. 183.14, 183.21, 184.15, 184.24 ZERO is a limited edition collection of one-minute soundworks by international sound artists, experimental composers, noise makers and other audio creators. Contributors were invited to create an original recording of one-minute duration for the CD on the theme of ZERO – whether through their stripped-down, low-tech aesthetic or a focus on themes of absence, abstraction, distortion or a sense of thereshold between one state and another. The CD contains a broad variety of one-minute soundworks and presents the results of artists working thematically in chance juxtaposition. By bringing together this calibre and range of contributions, ZETRO aims to stimulate further interest in the artist work and practice, debate and dialogue surrounding sound art. The artists on ZERO range from well known world figures, to individuals and groups making their first wirks in this field. ZERO was commisioned by the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology (FACT) and was published with the support from Liverpool Art School.