Sky Needle
Sky Needle is a primitive rock band from Brisbane, Australia whose ‘musical’ instruments are handmade experimental sculptural objects conceived and built by the artists. These unique unstruments produce sounds that sometimes resemble traditional music, and other times birth a form of bizarre new music.
Joel Stern (latex pump horns)
Ross Manning (elastic dust shovel)
Alex Cuffe (bass speaker box)
Sarah Byrne (voice, percussion)
Sky Needle Video’s via Eternal Soundcheck
Stern, one third of the collective OtherFilm, brings his bag of cheap tricks from an experimental film and sound practice. “Rough diamond”, Manning takes a sidetrack from serious art shows at the MCA and Milani Gallery, playing with disposable objects of sound. Cuffe mutates together his love of scientific and artistic experiments, releasing the Frankenstein within. Byrne diverts from her outre video-pop experiments to scream and holler the band into primal action.
REVIEWS
“This Brisbane trio build their own sculptural instruments, and the results are full of thick string reverberation and other sounds whose source is not abundantly clear. But they are a rock group, in the sense that Theoretical Girls were. And indeed, their work has the feel of downtown NYC of the 1980s.” - Byron Coley in The Wire October 2010
“The music, well, let’s talk about the music. It’s stalking, eerie, the night stumblings of a pot addict; a literal time hammer bearing down the weight of its metronomic corrosive mechanism onto a skull that’s ready to step into flight mode. Oh, and the sweet meandering sounds of what could be a kids’ learners trumpet, but in fact… could be that tacky orange PVC piping? As Sky Needle say, “we are a couple of steps up from banging rocks together in a cave and a couple of steps down from modern music”. You can hear in there, the influences of the repetitive abrasion of late 80’s New York post punk/no wave, but it’s got more rhythm and more soul. Perhaps somewhere between post punk and free jazz. Hell, why not throw in a bit of African Folk, outsider noise and distortionist gregorianism? The one-liner describing their sound: Uncle Fester discovers alchemy.”
Sky Needle: Anxious Objects – Sarah Werkmeister (independent press, issue 1, summer 2009)
