CHRIS PIDCOCK and BEN CAREY play Ferneyhough + Funguszeit

SUNDAY December 7th at 7.30 p.m. [doors at 7]

Brian Ferneyhough - Time and Motion Study II (for cello and electronics) (1973-76)

Chris writes: On December 7th, I’m performing Brian Ferneyhough’s legendary Time & Motion Study II—one of the most intense and exhilarating works ever written for cello and electronics.

Ferneyhough took the idea of industrial “time and motion studies”—where workers’ movements were measured for maximum efficiency—and flipped it on its head. Instead of celebrating productivity, the piece reveals what it feels like to be a human pushed inside a technological machine. Every sound I make is captured, split, delayed and thrown back at me in real time, creating a kind of sonic hall of mirrors. The music becomes a drama of overload, resistance, and raw physical energy. I’ll be joined by Ben Carey, who handles the live electronics—splitting, delaying, and processing every sound in real time. His part is intricate, requiring constant attention and responsiveness, making him the perfect partner for this piece, not to mention, he genuinely loves it!

It’s demanding, unpredictable, and unlike anything else.

For the second half of the program, Chris is joined by long-time collaborator Jocelyn Ho on prepared piano and Mark Oliviero on modular synth. Together they perform as Funguszeit, an improvising trio that brings extended acoustic playing and electronic sound worlds into close, timbral and textural dialogue.

Jocelyn’s prepared piano uses a mix of rubber, metal, and wooden materials, giving the instrument detuned pitches, muted attacks, and unusual resonances. Chris responds with spectral tunings on the cello and varied bow pressures—including at times a double bass bow, which can draw out a stronger fundamental alongside a rougher spread of overtones.

Mark’s modular synth adds clear, voltage-driven gestures and responsive textures that the acoustic instruments move toward, away from, and through. The trio’s set looks at sound the way fungal networks behave—branching, connecting, and adjusting to one another in real time.

We would absolutely love to share this experience with you and hope to see you there!

Chris Pidcock became a member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2012 and has become one of the most distinguished and innovative performers in Australia.  He enjoys performing on both historical and contemporary instruments equally, exploring composer and performer relationships, and fosters the idea that improvisation is part of being a classical musician. Chris’s pursuit of discovery, by his audience and by musicians in the Sydney community, led to the creation of Opus Now, founded in 2016 by Chris with friends Freya Schack-Arnott and Ben Panucci, a concert series that draws together historical performance, world indigenous music, and contemporary music into a single concert. Artists and parallels in the programming are painstakingly researched to create memorable concert experiences.

Ben Carey is a Sydney-based composer, improviser and educator. He makes electronic music using the modular synthesiser, develops interactive music software and creates audio-visual works. Ben’s work is concerned with musical interactivity, generativity and the delicate dance between human and machine agencies in composition and performance. Ben has released ten albums, including METASTABILITY (2023), HYPERTELIC (2021) and ANTIMATTER (2019), and has collaborated with a variety of artists including Sonya Holowell, Jack Quartet, Sydney Chamber Opera, Elision Ensemble and others. His work has been performed internationally at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music (UK), Sydney Festival (Australia), IRCAM Live (France), VIVID Sydney (Australia), and elsewhere. Ben is a Lecturer in Composition and Music Technology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. 

Jocelyn Ho is hailed as an artist possessing “a surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” and “drawing unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano”. She is an internationally-acclaimed musician, interdisciplinary artist, composer, and music theorist. Her accolades include the 2021 International Alliance for Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize for her work as art-music-tech director and experimental artist; First Prize and Special Prize for Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart Performance in the 2010 Australian National Piano Award. Her performance interests centre on the two ends of the spectrum: new music and historically informed performance. As a music researcher, she has published in the areas of embodied cognition and gestures, music and technology, and early recording analysis.
As a 2017 Hellman Fellow, Ho led Women’s Labor that interrogates domesticity by repurposing domestic tools as musical instruments, featured in interactive installation, composition, and performance. Winning the Harvestworks Artist Residency, Women’s Labor has been featured internationally, including at MACBA Barcelona and Design Museum of Chicago. In Ho’s sold-out music-art-tech concert project Synaesthesia Playground, which premiered at Spectrum NYC, she commissioned and curated integrated visual and musical works that explored the senses in a musical, bodily journey. Involving fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers, Synaesthesia Playground resulted in an interactive piano recital, involving audience improvisation, premiered by Ho. 
 
Mark Oliveiro is an Australian composer-researcher, performer, and educator working at the intersection of experimental electronics, post-glitch aesthetics, and analog synthesis. His practice integrates field recordings, live processing, and multimedia congruency. His research draws on digital autoethnography to situate composition as critical, practice-led inquiry. Oliveiro serves as President of the Australasian Computer Music Association and lectures at the Australian Institute of Music, embedding emerging technologies into pedagogy. His music has been performed by the Decibel ensemble and collaborators across new-music, EDM, and media-art contexts.

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