SNAWKLOR (DYLAN MANTORELL AND NATHAN GRAY) are a sound-art duo that create unique experimental music with field recordings and acoustic sound that explore the sonic environments around them. With influences include Indonesian gamelan, Brazilian psych-folk and musique concrete, they recently performed on a tram in Japan.

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16 March 2007 photos Ceri Hann

‘Are you warming up, or is this it?’ one passenger asks of Snawklor. Two men and twenty metres of sound cables, pedals, trumpets, Indonesian string instruments and field recording samples drift in and out amongst passenger chatter and electrical hum of a tram lapping the city. Like an extension of environmental infrastructure, Snawklor build a soundscape experience that loops with echoes, overlaps and punctuations. The 50minute city circle lap falls into smaller sound patterns, loops and resonances. We move through three sections, somewhat evocative of, firstly, an urban pattern of technological habitation; secondly an animal-world habitation; and thirdly a contestation of sound patterning. On the last stretch of the city lap the ambience is ruptured: gunshot… gunshot… . the sound of human violence incorporated into a rhetoric of contemporary urban life, for better or worse, for parody or pleasure. This journey found a way to sound out something of ‘Melbourne-ness’ in the zoo of contemporary globalised cocophonies.