Articles

Morton Subotnick is a name synonymous with the evolution of electronic music. In 1963, he began collaborating with inventor Don Buchla in San Francisco to develop what is widely regarded as the world’s first analog synthesizer. His groundbreaking 1967 album, Silver Apples of the Moon, was the first music commissioned specifically for the LP format. In 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Subotnick appeared on Paul Holdengräber’s podcast, The Quarantine Tapes, to reflect on his life, work, and how he was navigating the challenges of the time. The conversation is now available to read online.

Robert Ashley is widely considered one of the great American composers of the post-Cage generation. Ashley created radical new forms of opera, incorporating electronic music and pioneering the use of opera in television. His multimedia projects expanded upon the form in surprising, often perplexing ways. Kurt Gottschalk spoke to Ashley in 2013 for a major feature in the 13th issue of White Fungus. At the time, Ashley was working on his opera Quicksand, which he completed before his passing in March 2014. The article can now be read online.

Bruce Russell writes about the history of New Zealand DIY electronic music, which he argues sprang from a strategy of “mis-competence”. That is a deliberate misuse of instruments and audio equipment to achieve a sound beyond the machinations of the music industry. Misuse, Russell says, is the defining feature of New Zealand sound work. This article was originally commissioned in 2012 by White Fungus for the first issue of its sister publication The Subconscious Restaurant.

Roger Boyce explores through lucid, evocative prose the photographic still lifes of New Zealand artist Fiona Pardington. Casting an eye back across the history of painting, Boyce addresses the rich pathos of Pardington’s photography and its visually arresting forms. He describes in them an audacious “through a glass darkly” veneration of things and their inviolable circumstance, an amor fati.

Yao Jui-Chung is one of Taiwan’s most prolific and esteemed contemporary artists. In 2020, White Fungus editor Ron Hanson interviewed Yao for a major profile on the occasion of the artist’s mid-career retrospective, Republic of Cynic, at C-LAB in Taipei. The feature was to be published in a new online Japanese art magazine commissioned by a Tokyo art collector. After the project was aborted due to a clash over the publication’s title, this profile sat dormant in our archives for almost four years. It has now been published for the first time.

Sydney noise musician Lucas Abela, AKA Justice Yeldham, is one of the avant-garde's most electrifying performers. Playing music by orally manipulating mic'd-up shards of glass, he employs a range of unusual vocal and rhythmic techniques. His performances can be extreme, even bloody, but are also notable for the rich diversity of sounds he achieves through this rudimentary instrument. White Fungus editor Ron Hanson spoke to Abela about his unique musical trajectory and how a pandemic-enforced break from the stage altered his approach.