alan lamb/garry bradbury/david burraston/oren ambarchi/robin fox: wired open day 2009

Wired Open Day 2009 is a vinyl-only release documenting live performances by Alan Lamb, Garry Bradbury, David Burraston, Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox. Held outdoors during the evening of October 31st at The WIRED Lab, in rural South West, New South Wales, Australia, this 2LP is a document of the event; the result of an artist-in-residence program to explore the sonic possibilities of The Wires, landscape scale installations in rural NSW. The WIRED Lab is an artist-run initiative founded in 2007 to foster art/science collaborations in a rural environment. The initial focus of this project was to establish a site to preserve and expand on The Wires, a distinctly Australian invention that was pioneered by Australian artist Alan Lamb since the 1970s. Wiredlab.org notes that, "Lamb's formal investigations of The Wires started in 1976 with his discovery of a 1km stretch of abandoned telegraph wires on a farm in the Great Southern region of Western Australia ... Lamb learnt to record them and later devised compositions with these recordings. When these telegraph lines eventually decayed, Lamb commenced building wire installations primarily for recording. Like the scale of the original telegraph wires, these purpose-built wire installations were not of a domestic scale, they too had a deep connection with nature and spanned 100s of meters across the rural landscape. Although principally functioning like a giant æolian harp, it is not only wind that 'plays' The Wires, it seems that on their own accord The Wires often harmonically 'sing,' vibrate or roar as they react to environmental factors, thereby creating a unique and infinite instrumentation of itself and its surrounds, in the words of David Burraston 'they are nature's microphone.'" The four sides of Wired Open Day 2009 display the expansive range of the Wire installations built by The Wired Lab. Commencing at sunset, Garry Bradbury and Alan Lamb coax a gentle eco with acoustic recordings into deep and sonorous reverberations on side A. David Burraston and Alan Lamb focus on droplets of zaps and wire oscillations at twilight, with side B culminating in a downpour of crackling spray. At nightfall, Oren Ambarchi applies his mastery of condensed and layered tones on side C, with shuddering overtones, husky drones and rich clusters of sustain. Robin Fox concludes, in the dark, on side D, mashing off-kilter rhythms with a tumble of staccato bursts and fuzzy crunch. An edition of 500 double LPs in hand-numbered matte-varnished Stoughton tip-on gatefold jackets, Wired Open Day 2009 was mastered by James Plotkin, cut direct to metal and pressed on 200 gram virgin vinyl. This release features photographs from the site and text by Sarah Last, founder of The WIRED Lab and Curator of Wired Open Day 2009.