Nice Music presents its first printed book release, Telematic Music – an ecstatic documentation of the Melbourne-based Isolation Improvisation Collective's ongoing remote studies, presented through visual art and writing.
Led by composer/sound engineer Patrick Telfer, IIC periodically engages over 30 of Melbourne's brightest improvising musicians and performers, 27 of which feature on the delicately assembled recordings accompanying this publication in digital format. The results are often in turn startlingly ornate, melodically tantalising and subtly permeable in their occasionally self destructive dissonance. Rather than presenting as hosting movements or cues, the four pieces all seem powered simply by fluid swathes of their collective transmutable energy – no small triumph whilst conducted via the imperfect teleconferencing technology thrust upon us in 2020.
Briony Barr's molten visual scores and abstract illustrative interpretations couple with crisp, keen art direction to act as a pivotal aesthetic and functional framework for how IIC's output is presented – both to the observer and to players within the collective alike.
The publication is bookended with short essays on improvisation and the climate/setting for IIC's work, contributed by writers Caitlyn Lesiuk and Tim Deane-Freeman, plus an insightful manifesto from Telfer himself. All purchases of the limited edition printed book edition of Telematic Music also come with a digital download of the album.
16 pages, publication + digital download, Nice Music (Melbourne).