Omniversal Hum: Bruce Russell (The Dead C)

Omniversal Hum presents the legendary experimentalist Bruce Russell alongside Sulla Lingua from Italy/Australia and local multi-disciplinary icon Mimmie.

Bruce Russell is a practitioner in sound from Aotearoa/NZ, who has been ruthlessly putting rock music to the question since he joined the Dead C. in 1987. His upcoming Australian dates are his first mainland shows since 2017 (not counting the Dark COVID Mofo of 2021). His solo guitar practice mixes rock, electro-acoustics, noise and improvisation in equal measures; reconfiguring the blues as a form of improvisational auto-destructive protest. Described by international experts as ‘the Jimi Hendrix of no technique’. His approach to working with sound is brutal, but guarantees results: ‘Eric Clapton sleeps with the fishes’.

He is also a public academic who has written a collection of essays on sound, Left-handed Blows (2010). He also edited Erewhon Calling: Experimental Sound in New Zealand (2012) and A Record Could be Your Whole World (2024). He has a doctorate in sound art from RMIT and coordinates creative research and post-graduate teaching in creative practice at Ara Institute of Canterbury. His next book is on the complete electro-acoustic works of Douglas Lilburn.

Sulla Lingua is the world’s only Australian-Italian electroacoustic noise rock trio, featuring Anthony Pateras (tētēma/PIVIXKI etc.) on electronics, Stefano Pilia (Zu, Rokia Traoré, Massimo Volume) on guitar and Riccardo La Foresta on drums and his own creation, the Drummophone.

Sulla Lingua in Italian means ‘on the tongue’ or ‘on language’, which summarises the band’s high/lo aesthetics – they could be referring to Roland Barthes or saluting Gene Simmons, but they still haven’t decided. Both seem fitting to their trance-y harmonics and heavy grooves mixed with psychoacoustic electronics and cinematic textures. Their debut album ON recalls the radical, contradictory first statements of music nerds’ past. It proposes invention, challenging yet weirdly catchy, as an energised salve for messed-up times. It recalls slowly moshing at a musique concrète diffusion, or perhaps being lost deep in philosophical thought at some kind of sludge rock fest.

Mimmie fuses sound, movement and various media to communicate alternate worlds and imagined vernaculars.