Lucas Abela

Lucas Abela’s work, all of it as far as I can tell, walks a tightrope between the profane and the profound. I’ve known and loved his work for 20 years now, from live shows with the Freddy Krueger–style record-needle glove mashed onto vinyl, spinning at impossible speeds on an industrial motor, through the merciless onslaughts of the Dynamic Ribbon Device (a piece of glass played, smashed and, at times, it seems, consumed) and on to the more recent ingenious installations including Vinyl Rally (2010) and pinball projects, Pinball Pianola (2012) and Gamelan Wizard (2015).

All these manifestations and countless others in-between play on an immediacy of impact; a high-octane, adrenalised danger in the early performance works and a provocative employment of cognitive dissonance in the latter interactive installations. All the while, though, there is virtuosity and depth, or at least a nod to it. Abela’s facility with his glass instrument developed into something quite spectacular and he became quite musical with it, a fact that is often overlooked amid the gore and noise. And there is a seriousness to the bizarre musical instrument hybrids and game-based pieces. A real attempt to forge a new music, a new way of expressing the sonic.

A classic autodidact, Abela once made the excellent point at a panel discussion on experimental music that it is completely unnecessary to know anything in the formal sense in order to make great work. From the audience he pointed out that the difference between the experimental scenes in Melbourne and Sydney was easily reducible to liquor licensing laws. Both observations were made as he lay on the stage of the North Melbourne Town Hall Arts House like the Cheshire cat, the panel arranged at floor level below. He cut through the academic clamour from the panel with the razor blade of lived experience. His voice carries weight because the proof is in his output. This pragmatism and the DIY mindset that gave rise to Dual Plover (the record label Abela founded) and Lanfranchi’s Memorial Discotheque (a now legendary collective venue that ran out of his Sydney warehouse) are threads that run through his work and provide an anchor for the profanity and profundity that issue from it in equal measure.

It’s easy to be profane. The establishment is easily shocked and the homogeneity of the mainstream makes it pretty easy to be ‘radical’ or to offend the majority understanding of what constitutes ‘music’ or ‘art’. What’s harder is to be profound. Abela’s work is imbued with the irreverent recklessness of punk, but it goes much further than that. His performance works argue with materials, with physics and ultimately with him, with his body. Abela puts everything on the line when he performs. He shows us risk and danger and, above all, the sheer energy and joy of live music (and of being alive). His installation works are subtler but no less effective. Frankensteinian works of free-association genius. Instruments from another world.