The austraLYSIS Electroband
Creating Australian Improvised Musics

"makes music on more technology than the Navy possesses" (Sydney Morning Herald, 2000)

"those doyens of computerised music" (Sydney Morning Herald, 2008)

"one of the best improvising bands in the world" (Time Out, Sydney, 2009)

Go here to see austraLYSIS' Current and Recent activities.

austraLYSIS has developed unusual techniques for control of rhythmic, timbral and harmonic interaction, and since 1995 has used computer interactive and networked technology in the austraLYSIS Electroband. "Incredible interaction" said the Wire (UK); "eclectic and consummate" said BBC Radio 3. Formed by Roger Dean in 1970 as the innovative European group LYSIS, austraLYSIS has played in 30 countries, and made more than thirty commercial recordings.

The Electroband repertoire is based around free and process/interaction improvisation and comprovisation, using compositions of Roger Dean, many written in the programming platform MAX/MSP/Jitter.

Australian novelist and poet David Malouf has written of austraLYSIS' cd 'Moving the Landscapes':

"Track after track commands our attention, not just with the drama of what austraLYSIS can do, but with the variety of means, instrumentally and rhythmically, and the degree of emotion they are prepared to risk. What I liked best of all was the inwardness these performers develop, the sense we get of their moving off alone, without compromising the drama of interplay; most of all, without ever releasing tension. This is improvisation that offers increased pleasure at every hearing...Moving the Landscapes is a real coup."

EDUCATIONAL and RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

The austraLYSIS Electrobnd offers performance masterclasses, and also lecture/recital/workshops on jazz and its development; 20th century developments in improvisation and composition; and process and computer interaction in improvisation. The research of leader Roger Dean concerns music cognition as well as computation, and from 2008 has included an empirical project on interpersonal interactions during small group improvisation, correlated with ongoing computational and musicological analysis of the resultant works.

BOOKINGS and Enquiries to : austraLYSIS Productions, PO Box 225, Milperra, NSW 2214. Telephone : + 61 406 175543. email : dr.metagroove@mindless.com.

Go here to find some sound samples of the austraLYSIS Electroband.