Audible Edge is Tone List's annual international festival, with a focus on exploratory, experimental and non-normative approaches to making sound and listening to it. I initiated the festival in 2017 and have directed it since then with the help of the Tone List team and a number of other folks in our orbit - it's currently co-curated by myself and Annika Moses.
The festival initially started as a way of creating a Western Australian platform for the improvisers that passed through Australia every year to perform at the NOW now, MONA FOMA and SoundOut. Artists that visited during the first two years of the festival included Isabelle Duthoit, Mette Rasmussen, Sofia Jernberg, and Paal Nilssen-Love, amongst others. In 2019, we acquired a small grant from the Western Australian Department of Local Government, Sports and Cultural Industries, which allowed us to invite artists from Australia and south-east Asia to the program.
Since 2020, the festival has been more substantially supported by various funding bodies, and has attempted an expansive and eclectic curation which attempts to create contexts for radically different perspectives on sounding and listening to co-exist, or engage in agonistic exchanges. The festival hopes to have an active role in realising the full potential of exploratory sound practices in Western Australia whilst continuing to nurture international connections, predominantly via attending to artists based in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2021, the festival was supported by an extensive program of online commissions, including the collaboration Where and how to gather with Liquid Architecture, the NotNotMusic platform, and four new digital albums on the Tone List label.
Audible Edge was awarded an Art Music Award (State Luminary Category) in 2023 by APRA AMCOS and the Australian Music Centre, acknowledging more than five years of sustained contribution to art music culture in the state. Audible Edge 2021 was critically described as a "triumph", whilst individual concerts within the festival have been reviewed as being "an unqualified success", "meticulously crafted and flawlessly executed", and featuring "high calibre" music. In 2019, the festival was awarded 4.5 stars by Limelight Magazine and described as having "retained much of its rough-and-ready community origins, whilst growing in scale and significance." In 2022, the festival received 5 stars in Limelight Magazine and was described as a "must-see event on Perth's cultural calendar".
A YouTube playlist of past Audible Edge festival performances for which the artists have given sharing permission is available here.
ae.tonelist.com.au