various: wound without a tear-australian ambient & experimental music 1993-2008

Wound Without A Tear is a compilation of “Australian” Ambient and Experimental Music; an area so often overlooked and misunderstood because it does not easily fall into historical context. However, the fifteen years (1993-2008) the collection cites–a period of early 90s post-rave ethereality defined by pleasure-centred spaces (chill-out rooms) and the personal computer’s emergence as a popular tool for file-sharing and secondary-living in the 00s–is befitting of closer examination. The recordings were sourced from artists, labels, corrupted disk drives, CD-Rs, the WWW and archives of Melbourne’s 3RRR community radio station. During the 1990s, as new technologies emerged and mass digital culture flourished, artists explored the emergent possibilities of the Internet with a utopian fervour, viewing the web and its plethora of images and information as a site of boundless potential. In the 2000s, file sharing connected people around the world directly to one another, and this incorporation of online experience into material objects, meant there was an increasingly porous border between the online and offline worlds–if there remained a border, at all. What is remarkable from this collection is that so many people, working (mostly) on their own came up with such remarkably similar ideas. In most cases these similarities can be related to the inherent qualities of the medium, though often any distinction is decidedly blurred at the edges. The compilation seeks to make the works of these various artists available as a means of “demystification”. No specific destination is intended upon. Perhaps by the time you have reached the end, you will have forgotten where you began.