Tectonica

Tectonica (2018) is the second part of a trilogy of works created by Martyn Coutts and Ian Pidd for the Unconformity Festival’s Opening night. The brief for these works is that they needed to be free, accessible, draw deeply from the culture of the West Coast of Tasmania and include a spectacle. After the success of The Rumble in 2016, for the following biennial festival in 2018, Martyn Coutts and Ian Pidd decided to focus on the aural worlds of the west coast, from glacial cracking in the primordial past, meteor strikes, through indigenous chatter around a fireplace, to underground explosions of extractive mining. Composer and Sound designer Dylan Sheridan was engaged again to create a rumbling, cracking soundscape that was then delivered to the Main Street of town and played continuously throughout the festival. The massive festival speaker array was reminiscent of a famous ACDC concert which took place in 1976. In the last hour of the festival in homage to this event an hour of ACDC was played in a street party that brought many residents and festival goers onto the streets. Tectonica provided the soundtrack to the Unconformity in 2018, no matter where you were within the valley of the town you could hear the cracks, groans and rumbles of the environment echoing out across the landscape. This work was part contemporary sound work, part festival programming - showcasing the sensitivity of the curatorial vision and art-making.