Friday 28 December 2012

28th Dec - Tune or stream into the final installment for 2012 of ABC Radio National's Sound Quality hosted by Tim Richie.  Featuring a host of great music including Masonik.

Sunday 16 December 2012

Swim in the ABC Radio National Sound Quality audio stream, hosted by Tim Ritchie, to hear Masonik remixing Aussie freakout wordsmith... Yilton Kreen.

Saturday 15 December 2012

Masonik/Pax Assembly live in Sydney. A free-jazz improvisation. Music transcending generations....
Paul Pax Andrews - Alto Sax
Basil Psanoudakis- Turntables
Wheldon Thornley - Keyboards
Fredrick Hill - Flugelhorn
Steve Harris - Drums
Mark Martin - Guitar
Patrick Harris - Bass

Friday 7 December 2012

Stream ABC Radio National's Sound Quality, hosted by Tim Richie, to hear Masonik's Base Ascension.  This track comes from the limited edition Rising Lotus - the Soundtrack to the sculptural work by Swiss artists Maschi Fontana (Tom Muller & Jt Vannotti). This was performed at the Fremantle Arts Centre for the Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) in 2011.

.... At the Fremantle Arts Centre courtyard a key element of the Rising Lotus project is a large-scale outdoor sculpture standing sentinel in the courtyard. Variously resembling a survey marker at the summit of a mountain, a satellite or perhaps a watchtower, this structure became a type of ‘temple-site’ for artistic revelry on the opening night of the exhibition. Animated by a spectacle of smoke and light effects and the pulsating soundscape of the ambient ensemble Masonik, the totemic form served as a conducting device for the energies of the collaborators and the artistic faithful..... essay extract by Melissa Keys


Thursday 6 December 2012

Masonik's Paul Pax Andrews Australian jazz icon battled heroin addiction & came back to music - his memoirs recently published.

THE TASTE, 2000 by PAUL PAX ANDREWS
The best heroin was in Cabramatta, a suburb forty minutes south-west of Sydney. The early-morning trains were full of junkies, mostly sick and hanging out, checking each station and counting the seconds until our collective nightmares would end for a moment, any relief. For just one minute. A rolling sick car of very strange community, huddled, ticket-less. Each of us with our last twenty-five or fifty… Eager to spend it on the only thing that matters. None of us were making eye contact but each is keenly aware of the other. The heroin-dealers were often Vietnamese or Chinese, trying to make a living in their newfound freedoms, yet mostly didn’t use H themselves. That is why the deals were consistent. Sometimes we could get a half a gram for a hundred bucks that would hold us for a day, or twelve hours at least. We’d knock on a garage door and a hand would come out from underneath, take the hundred and subsequently push out a tiny foil wrapped cube of white heroin.


Tuesday 4 December 2012

NEW YORK CITY, 1978 by PAUL PAX ANDREWS
Masonik's Sax Player - Published!
In New York, the sax-quartet stayed in a fifteen dollar a night dive on Broadway (the Times Square Hotel-Motel) and Forty-First Street. Because of the recently changed U.S. mental health laws, most patients not considered dangerous had been sent back into society, duly medicated and left to their own devices. The top three floors of our Hotel were home to a hundred of these lunatics who constantly rode up and down the elevators or paced the lobby and corridors. Zombies, doped and weird yet mostly they were pleasant and chatty. Whispering. Muttering. Some were very polite and greeted us each time we returned.