Sisters Akousmatica

Sisters Akousmatica is the collaborative project of Julia Drouhin and Phillipa Stafford. Together we create expanded radio projects. We produced large-scale public transmission projects, a retreat for women and non-binary artists, workshops and commissions with organisations such as Mona Foma, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave Festival, Hobiennale, The Channel, Signal, Radiophrenia, Australia Council for the Arts and Arts Tasmania. Sisters Akousmatica and 3CR were awarded the CBAA Excellence in Music Programming award at the 2017 Community Broadcasting Association of Australia Conference.

Performing

CHAPTER 3: EARTH_MOON_EARTH

Sisters Akousmatica will perform a remote live radio play based of their third chapter of SK, Earth-Moon-Earth, followed by a Q&R discussion, from the island of Tasmania where the artists live. Set up on the longest possible terrestrial journey between shortwave radio stations, SK is a score for Sisters Akousmatica to examine further the phenomenon of anonymous/clandestine radio broadcast as a vehicle for rewriting/reimagining women and non-binary people's role in radio arts, explored broadly through “The Silent Key”. “The Silent Key” generates its own content and also uses other events and projects as a interrogative, parasitical way of creating and collecting content.

Seeding investigations of The Silent Key was developed with funding from South Australian arts organisation Vitalstatistix, through their national hot-housing project Adhocracy. Sisters Akousmatica was awarded the WISWOS commission to perform their first live remote broadcast for the International Women’s Day event, Celebrating Women in Sound 2018, at the Goldsmiths University, London. They performed in Hobart, walked in Hong Kong, radio played “Chapter One: Signal fantôme ~ Onde fantôme” in London, using field recordings, hurdy gurdy, pink noise machine, electromagnetic pick up, voice and radio broadcast. This piece took its script from the first chapter of SK to be published as part of The People’s Library in 2018. They played the CHAPTER TWO: Propaganda, from Bloemfontein, South Africa to The Gender Diversity in Music Making Conference, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in July 2018.