Lying down in the gallery, be transported to a dreamscape with Sleep Cycle. This new project by acclaimed Australian jazz bassist and composer Claire Cross, seamlessly inhabits the worlds of ambient music, free jazz and minimalism with a score informed by graphs of human brain waves recorded during the various phases of sleep.
Surrounded by Arthur Boyd’s dawn to midnight series, the blended electronics and acoustics create a deeply textured sound world. The ensemble traverses the patterns, peaks, troughs and rhythms of brain wave activity as they move through the movements of the sleep cycle, from wake to REM.
Performed by Claire Cross with acclaimed improvisers Reuben Lewis (trumpet/effects) and Kyrie Anderson (drums).
“It’s nothing short of breathtaking existing somewhere between new music, jazz, chamber music and ambient – never really settling in any one place.” – Cyclic Defrost
“Claire Cross is one of the most restless creative people…she will blow your mind” – australianjazz.net
Claire Cross
Claire Cross is an electric bassist and composer who has established herself as an exciting and versatile performer, as well as a dynamic leader within the Melbourne music community. Her compositional work focuses on forging immersive and evocative worlds, drawing on folk, minimalism and jazz influences, to create deeply textured and transfixing landscapes.
Kyrie Anderson
Kyrie Anderson, hailed as “mesmerizing to watch” by Global Media Post, is a top Australian drummer renowned for her dynamic live and studio performances. She has collaborated with artists like Basia Bulat, Pussy Riot, Julia Jacklin, and Emma Donovan. Kyrie regularly performs with Sam Anning, the Australian Art Orchestra, Andrea Keller, and others, and co-leads ensembles Aura and ThenNowWhen.
Her global tours include major festivals and roles as Musical Director for notable productions. A participant in the Banff International Jazz Workshop in 2019, Kyrie is a leading figure in the Australian jazz scene, earning a Freedman Fellowship nomination and performing at top jazz festivals. She is also committed to mentorship and education with organizations like Girl Rock! and Gender Defying Jazz.
Reuben Lewis
Reuben Lewis’s practice is both singular and eclectic. As an award-winning trumpeter, composer, improviser, bandleader and producer he has refined a diverse electro-acoustic language that has been lauded as “a vivid listening experience that gleams with sinister detail” (The Wire). Devised through trumpet alongside live processing with pedals and laptop, his music plays on our expectations and unravels all semblance of familiar form to create a new musical narrative that is “beyond category” (The Australian).
Wilder Times
Wilder Times sees the return of a series of Shoalhaven landscape paintings by Arthur Boyd to Bundanon for the first time since their creation in 1984 as a commission for the new Arts Centre Melbourne.
The exhibition also brings together over 60 works by seminal Australian artists from the same time Boyd created this momentous body of work. The exhibition provides a window into a period of cultural dynamism in Australia, when ideas of landscape, land ownership and environmental protection were actively interrogated.
