‘The Breath Becomes The Wind’, is a work in development which investigates the relationship between breath at the intimate scale of the body, and the ephemeral forces of the wind which have the power to transform landscapes over vast timespans.

The initial 30 minute exploration of the work explored the anatomy of my clarinets/winds/voice in relation to close and unusual mic placements to hear the instrument from different perspectives.

It was presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market (Naarm/Melbourne) in December 2024 and was winner of the 2025 AMC APRA AMCOS award for Excellence in Experimental Practice.

Sound Engineer and collaborator: Pat Telfer
Presented by Liquid Architecture at The Meat Market Dec 2024
Developed at Coburg Courthouse residency (Arts Merri-bek)

Liquid Architecture artist statement:
The Breath Becomes The Wind pushes my solo electro-acoustic practice into new territory, deeply interrogating the relationship between the body, the instrument, and the microphone, to reveal new instrumental and compositional possibilities. The first iteration was created for the cavernous space the Meat Market, but the work is also highly intimate, bringing the listener into a close proximity to my breath, wind and the anatomy of the clarinet.

The invitation to be a featured artist for Liquid Architecture’s program, was an ideal opportunity to showcase what is unique about my practice. It took some time to identify what this was, and I decided to focus on the relationship between microphones and my instruments (which I often disassemble, or extend with additional tubing). This is an area I have played with in improvised projects (for example waving pipes across a microphone to create pulsing and panning effects), but I felt I had not yet explored the full potential of this approach. I explored various microphone setups in a process that exposed the way the microphones and speakers colour the sound. I played with giving audiences different perspectives on the placement of microphones, as though their ears were right up close to isolated parts of the instruments, and then talking their ears outside of the performance space, into the environment surrounding the venue. Originally limiting the work to no FX, I decided to permit the use of live recording and playback as a haunting of the space, lingering on beyond the performance of the original sound.

I worked closely with sound engineer Pat Telfer, which allowed me to push into possibilities of gain, feedback and resonance that would otherwise be impossible, which also freed up my physicality on stage to be able to work with swinging, hanging and moving mics.

Winner ‘Best in Music’ Melbourne Fringe 2025

Lung Swara is a new musical collaboration between world renowned Indonesian artist Cahwati Sugiarto (voice/dance/percussion) and celebrated Australian experimental musicians Aviva Endean (clarinet/electronics) and Matthias Schack-Arnott (percussion/electronics). The group combines Javanese song and dance with visceral sonic textures to create music that is hypnotic and transformational.

At its core Lung Swara is working with three elemental musical forces: voice, percussion and wind. Cahwati’s singing has an extraordinary range of both colour and pitch – in turns snarling, warm, hushed, full bodied or resonant. She draws on her encyclopaedic knowledge of Javanese and Balinese song as a jumping off point for expansive improvisational forms. Cahwati Sugiarto’s background in Javanese dance and her effortless movement imbues the music with a ritualistic quality. Aviva Endean’s approach to clarinets and aerophones is startling in its originality, often deconstructing her instrument to create entirely new musical worlds. Her use of electronics allows for a lush layering of air sounds that is able to move from a single breathy tone to a blizzard of harmonics in a matter of moments. Matthias Schack-Arnott’s practice combines percussion with found objects, using electronics to create a depth of resonance not possible in purely acoustic instruments. These musical elements come together in Lung Swara to create a visceral musical world that is fierce and raw.

Presented by Chamber Made, at Now or Never Festival and Melbourne Recital Centre as part of ‘Listening Acts’ | Friday 22 August – Saturday 23 August 2025

Green Room awards finalist “Outstanding Sound Work” & “Outstanding Technical Achievement”

Tactile Piece for Human Ears by Aviva Endean creates an intimate listening experience, capturing sounds through binaural microphones which are designed to replicate the acoustic properties of human hearing. Working with sounds which are on the edge of human perception- wind currents, pipe tone and vibrations heard through bone conduction, Aviva builds acoustic landscapes shaped in real time to feel like they’re happening just for you – immersive, strange and quietly communal.

Tactile Piece for Human Ears is a strangely intimate listening work, using multiple instruments and technologies designed specifically for the shape and acoustic properties of human hearing. 

A binaural dummy head “listens” to sounds created through bespoke ‘Hear Muffs’- which filter, extend and transform the acoustic properties of our hearing, before the resulting sounds are funnelled out to each audience member’s ears via bluetooth headphones. 

But are we all experiencing the same thing? How do the anatomical differences in our own makeup, and our unique set of desires, memories and associations filter our experience of the sound?  

Throughout the performance, I weave together small and intimate sounds, almost tangible in their immediacy. The gestures become layered and disassociated from their original performance, playing with our sense of proximity and spatial awareness, as well as toying with our sense of reality, our intimacy with technology, and the perceived “truthfulness” of binaural recording technology.

This new piece emerges out of several pre-existing works. Since 2013, I have been performing ‘Intimate Sound Immersions’, a form of solo performance for one blindfolded audience member at a time. I use the fragile sounds of everyday objects alongside the extremely quiet possibilities of the bass clarinet played in extreme close proximity to the listeners ears. The Intimate Sound Immersion occupies a space between experimental performance and sound therapy, the intensity of the one-on one experience transporting listeners into the depths of their own imaginations, and often eliciting an experience described as at once challenging, soothing and intensely intimate. Tactile Piece for Human Ears builds on this form and queries the potential for intimacy when mediated through technology.

The ‘Hear Muff’ instruments used in this work have come out of many years of play and experimentation, including the development of ‘Sonic Labyrinth’ created with Justin Marshall and children at Art Play (which is reimagined as an installation work for Now or Never). In Sonic Labyrinth, children used various sets of Hear Muffs to listen to the push of pull on underwater gurgling, to hear the sounds beneath their feet as they walk blindfolded and barefoot along a pathway of various surface textures, and to lie down and be played a a bone-conduction lullaby. The Hear Muffs designs were later developed with designer Tahl Swieca for participatory installations at M Pavilion Parkville, and Music Meeting (The Netherlands), with new iterations of the Hear Muffs developed especially for Tactile Piece for Human Ears. 

REVIEWS/FURTHER READING

Listening with Discomfort and Possibility by Josephine Mead in Art Guide

‘Chamber Made craft moments where sound pulses inside us, not just into us.’

‘… an exquisite meditation on sound and perception.’ [Tactile Piece for Human Ears]

‘… a fluid, thought-provoking journey through acoustic textures that pushes the boundaries between audience and performance.’ ‘Chamber Made craft moments where sound pulses inside us, not just into us.’

‘… an exquisite meditation on sound and perception.’ [Tactile Piece for Human Ears]

‘… a captivating choreography of space, objects, and bodies.’ [sounding forms / forming sounds]

‘… a fluid, thought-provoking journey through acoustic textures that pushes the boundaries between audience and performance.’

MY MELBOURNE ARTS

CREDITS

Hear Muff concept and design: Aviva Endean 

Hear Muff design and fabrication: Tahl Swieca

Sound engineer: Patrick Telfer

This production was initially commissioned as a 20 minute work for the 2022 Keir Choreographic Award by Dancehouse, the Keir Foundation, and Australia Council for the Arts, with presenting partner Carriageworks. A further development was supported by Lucy Guerin Inc ‘Moving Forward’ Residency. This project has been supported by the Chloe Munro Fellowship.

“An imaginative and beautiful sonic vision of a truly original composer-musician.”- Salt Peanuts

“Aviva Endean has proven time and time again that she is an expert of the aural adventure.“
–Loud and Quiet

Australian composer and clarinetist Aviva Endean has developed an impressive capacity for creating work that merges intense control (of breath, of instrument, of composition) and a willingness to allow the music to lead. On Moths And Stars, her second solo work, she charts out a sound world that is equal parts timbre and tone, placing sounds relationship to space as a paramount focus for her pieces.- Lawrence English (Room40):

“Rich worlds revealed in slow motion”– Brad Rose (Foxy Digitalis)

“Breathtaking innovation in woodwind technique and sonic vision” – Martin Ng”

“(Aviva’s) expressive spatial variation becomes both polyphonic as well as multiphonic with the use of electronics” (The Wire)

From Aviva Endean: Coming from a background as a performer and clarinet player, the opportunity to record my own music opened up a whole new context to think about music. Sounds are freed from being con-fined to one place, one time, or even one perspective. I wanted the recording to have a right-up-in-your-ear kind of intimacy – so close, that you could hear the beating of a moth’s wing, but I also wanted the listener to experience the expansiveness of the recorded space, like the vast night sky. The microphones became extensions of my instruments, getting right up close to capture the microscopic, creating tones of feedback which captivated me, or zooming out to capture multiple acoustic spaces. My recording and composing process became more intuitive and explorative, another form of play. I could start creating and see where the piece would take me, and notice how new relationships were formed as I folded multiple time/spaces in and over each other. Sometimes I would begin by gleaning sounds from my archives, and listening to how they could be reimagined and transformed alongside the discoveries my microphones and instruments were finding. In ‘Nightwork’ I wanted to find a way to revisit some microtonal humming that I had recorded for a sound design project, and then discovered the Leslie speaker as a way to spin my bass clarinet sound around the microphones, creating bass tones emerging as waves out of the densely layered pitches. Sometimes a new instrumental fascination, such as the e-bows and magnets on ‘Mirror Signals’ or the binaural microphone feedback on ‘Moths & Stars’ would call for me to find further layers of clarinets and field recordings to be woven into their story.

Read this if you would like to hear about the process and inspiration behind each track in more detail.

Recorded and composed by Aviva Endean, on unceded Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Djaara Lands.
Field recording on What Calls in the Quiet made with Justin Marshall. Strands of Same River, Twice recorded by Bob Scott, and Leo Dale.
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative SpaceThank you to Room40, my friends, family, and community.
This project was supported by The Australia Council for the Arts and the Peggy Glanville-HicksComposers’ House.