Music
Synths and sensibility: The story behind Melbourne's MESS
Get to know the sounds (and smell)s of Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio with Andras and Byron J. Scullin.
In the lead up to Red Bull Music Festival Melbourne, MESS resident artist Andras joins MESS co-director Byron J. Scullin in conversation to discuss all things synth.
Andrew Wilson (Andras): MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio) is a great acronym.
Byron J. Scullin: It is! We had the acronym, almost before anything else.
Andras: How’d you get started?
Byron: The origin of MESS came from Robin Fox (MESS co-director) and my discussions around the culture of electronic music in Melbourne— how we met hanging out at places like Synesthesia Records and Peril Underground.
Andras: When are we talking here?
Byron: Around the early 2000s. Though my introduction to electronic music was a decade earlier through a store called CDs (whose claim to fame was that it only sold CDs—no tapes or vinyl). The guy behind the counter asked me what I was listening to. I’d been playing Peter Gabriel’s Passion: Music for the Last Temptation of Christ a lot. He said ‘Oh, if you like that, you’ll love this…’ and gave me Bloody Tourist by Shinjuku Thief. Guess who Shinjuku Thief was? The guy behind the counter, he sold me his own record! I got friendly with him (Darrin Verhagen), and he just kept recommending records. You know when you find a great record store guy, they become selectors for you. Mark Harwood is like that. Chris Gill is an important cat in his circle. So we really wanted MESS to be like that.
Andras: Was that the kind of model you had in mind for MESS—something like a record store?
Byron: It was a desire to avoid the cycle of creating experimental art, do a PhD, become a lecturer and disappear into an institution. We wanted MESS to be a means to stay dynamic and vital and encourage others to come into this scene and grow it. A: So MESS is a congregation point, and technology archive?
Byron: Yes. In the 1990s, we could see people re-engaging with electronic music through dance culture, but the original musicians and machines of the scene from the 1970s, and earlier, were no longer around.
Andras: This is what I found fascinating from being an artist-in-residence at MESS—there’s something powerful in having all those machines, from these key times, in a single room. You have the ability to connect different eras of equipment.
Byron: The thing that is interesting about electronic music is that each generation discovers the technology that came before them, and then fuse it into whatever the zeitgeist of the moment is. That’s MESS—all these machines create a physical embodiment of infinite possibilities.
Andras: What was the story with the Serge Paper Face System, which is at MESS?
You become aware that each machine has its own unique personality.
Byron: It was originally bought for La Trobe University. Serge kept the cost down by providing the design, instructions and all the parts, but you’d have to solder it all together and build it yourself. The boxes are generic, you build into it what you want. Within about 10 years the Serge went from being the centrepiece of La Trobe’s equipment to being completely outdated and off in a store room. Then the whole music department was shuttered, the Serge was packed up into boxes and bought by one of the staff members. Years later it was rediscovered in a garage (covered in bird shit), given to Serge authority Ken Stone, and he had it restored and handed to MESS.
MESS
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Andras: So are most of the machines in MESS on loan?
Byron: Yes. We have two major collectors that are behind the organisation, who are both interested in pursuing ‘unicorn synthesizers’. Tony Osmond and Wally de Backer Gaultier (Gotye). Both these guys have the resources to acquire collections of electronic musical instruments—and their tastes are quite complementary. Wally’s is quite esoteric, he’s interested in the ‘dead ends’ of electronic music, the Muse, Theremins, weird rhythm machines like the Wurlitzer Sideman. And then Tony’s taste is polysynths, big vintage modulars and the classics of electronic music (from the 1970s-80s) and modern incarnations of those. So between these two, the MESS collection really does cover the entire history of electronic music. There are pieces in the collection from the 1920s to today.
Andras: And the MESS collection is open to a much wider audience than you’d imagine. One day I was there, and a school group was working on one of the Fairlights, which is an Australian instrument, built in a garage, right?
Byron: The Fairlight CMI was built by Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie, they wanted to make more of a ‘modelling synthesizer’ which is a form of synthesis that seeks to create the subtle harmonic structure of any instrument—requiring thousands of oscillators working in concert to create a waveform that is based upon how an acoustic instrument would behave. The concept they had, but the computing power wasn’t there at the time. So Peter and Kim’s ‘plan B’ was to create a machine that could record the sound of an acoustic instrument, and extrapolate it out onto the keyboard. Today we know this as sampling, but it was an entirely new concept at the time. A: Peter Vogel’s influence is also felt today in the sample libraries he created—such as the Orchestral Hit...
Byron: Absolutely. Peter used the start of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite to create that hit. Who knows why he chose that? This is why the machines in MESS make the space feel like a toy shop. When Alessandro Cortini (of Nine Inch Nails and SONOIO) was here, he said he thinks about synths as toys to play with and explore, muck-around on, until something develops.
Andras: Often whole albums are created from just this kind of ‘play’ that we’re talking about.
It’s a synth gym.
Byron: For sure. Jump on a machine, start dialling things around and see what happens. Electronic music is so beautiful like that—entire tracks and albums can come out of having no expectations, just sitting behind a machine and creating a sound. And that sound leads to others, and so on. Being able to do that now at MESS on equipment that is decades old is important. Using something old to make something new. You are a different person, with different influences, at a different point in history than anyone else who has used that machine before.
Andras: Walking around inside MESS, you become aware that each machine has its own unique personality, design and the way they’re used.
Byron: Even the smell of them! When they warm up, they each have a unique scent.
Andras: Ha! And it’s the space itself, the collection of all these instruments together, that makes MESS one of a kind.
Byron: Yes. And like record stores, there’s also the chance of meeting new people and learning from how they are interacting with MESS. You can listen to works being created by others, which might inspire you to make something different and new.
Andras: MESS runs as a not-for-profit. How do people access it?
Byron: We took a lot of direction from how radio stations in Melbourne like 3RRR were run, so we resource MESS and provide access via memberships. It’s a synth gym—you pay an annual membership and then you can come down anytime to work out on the machines. These individual memberships allow MESS to remain independent and open to anyone. MESS is messier—just jump on a synth and make some shit!
Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio—MESS—is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the creation of electronic music, established by by Robin Fox & Byron J. Scullin. Andrew Wilson (Andras) has been a resident artist at MESS in 2019.
Andras is appearing at Red Bull Music Festival Melbourne: Synthesis Live on October 16 at Melbourne Recital Centre with Suzanne Cianni and Hiro Kone. Tickets and full details here.
This article originally appeared in The Note, Vol. 4 Issue 1.