Maximum Anything #3 is happening today (March 23rd)!

Come to Cross St from 2:30 for an afternoon of music and games! Here is the line up again:

• 2:30pm - Basketball

• 3:45pm - Radio play Act 1

• 4pm - Building Blocks

• 5pm - Radio play Act 2

• 5:15pm - The Mind (all invited!) + musical accompaniment

• 5:45 - Radio Play Act 3

• 6pm - Trivia!

There are drinks available and some amazing food close by - Lygon St could be closer! Feel free to bring a book or CD to swap also.

There is also a trophy for trivia later in the evening!! Hand made by Ronny Ferella!

Find out everything you need to know here

$20 / $10 tickets (on the door)

For our first event of 2024, Maximum Anything presents “Let the Games Begin!”, an afternoon extravaganza featuring a smorgasbord of performances, game pieces and communal activities, culminating in an epic round of musical trivia (Melbourne jazz themed) and the musical showdown of the decade where Melbourne’s finest improvisers battle it out for supremacy in Shaun Rammers’ “Building Blocks” with live and scathing commentary from quiz-master Emily Bennett.

This is an interactive event featuring a mix of game-related performances as well as traditional games where everyone in attendance is encouraged to join in.

Maximum Anything welcome individuals from all backgrounds, identities, and experiences to come together in a spirit of unity and respect. We strive to create a safe and supportive environment where everyone feels valued, heard, and empowered to be their authentic selves.

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Emily Bennett

Emily Bennett is a vocalist and sound artist led by narratives; those both banal and significant, portraying landscapes that bleed into the fictional and subjective. She has collaborated with visual artists, dancers, theatre makers and journalists to construct works for live music performance that fuse sound design and composition with future directions in real-time improvisation.

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Shaun Rammers "Building Blocks"

Watch a group of musicians battle it out for glory in a heated game of Building Blocks. A concept created by Shaun Rammers, Building Blocks is a game where musicians work as teams to stack blocks on top of each other and create the highest tower. Each block contains musical information, used to create a soundscape of improvised music. The game goes for 1 hour with the winning team having the highest tower! Strategy, drama, blindsiding and double crossing - this is a game of survivor meets music.

Featuring

• Commentary by Emily Bennett

• Gemma Horbury - trumpet

• Niran Dasika - trumpet

• Holly Moore - saxophone

• Andrew Saragossi - saxophone

• Elliot Lamb - trombone

• Shaun Rammers - saxophone

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Improvised Radio Play Sessions (led by Ronny Ferella)

In the 1940’s Radio Plays were the “leading international popular entertainment” and Pierre Shaeffer gave birth to the idea of musical sampling through his Music Concrete experiments.

Maximum Anything is bringing it all back and mixing it up with its Improvised Radio Play Sessions. 3 acts of15 minutes each in the Cross Street Library. Voice actors create an ongoing dialogue and drama from the written word only. Novels-Popular Mechanics-The New Scientist-.. Whatever, as long as it was written down and they are reading it.…. Comes with live musical accompaniment- that of course, will be improvised….

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Event starts at 2:30pm and will be over by 7:30pm

Maximum Anything is an initiative aimed at presenting new and exciting music, art, ideas, anything. Artists are free to be who they want, as is the audience. It also aims to create a place for our community to share, experience and enjoy with each other.

Artwork is "Musicians Fighting" by Pieter Jansz Quast

Lineup

• 2:30pm - Basketball

• 3:45pm - Radio play Act 1

• 4pm - Building Blocks

• 5pm - Radio play Act 2

• 5:15pm - The Mind (all invited!) + musical accompaniment

• 5:45 - Radio Play Act 3

• 6pm - Trivia!

Ronny and Shaun chat with Emily Bennett for the Maximum Anything podcast!

Emily Bennett is an improvising and experimental vocalist who works with all sorts of amazing people, including choreographers, dancers, theatre folks and instrument builders. She is a member of I Hold the Lion’s Paw and performs under her own “Great Rack and the Empty Club Reverb”.

Emily will be commentating and performing for most of the next Maximum Anything session - Games day! On Saturday March 23rd.

Music Featured

• I Hold the Lion’s Paw - Big Bois

• Shaun Rammers Open Home - How I Like My Eggs

Ronny, Andrew and Shaun chat with Brodie McAllister in the first ever Maximum Anything podcast!

Brodie McAllister is an improviser, trombonist, composer, teacher and runs Made Now Music, a beautiful record label based in Brisbane. Maximum Anything and Made Now Music are presenting a mini festival on December 9th to celebrate 5 years of Made Now Music and to present some stunning music.

We chat with Brodie about running a label, the tight-knit community of musicians in Brisbane (and why they are so creative!), a bit of a deep dive into the festival and all in all have a bloody good chinwag!

We will present more podcasts as Maximum Anything continues to grow, but please enjoy our very first one!

Music featured

• Franklin | Carter - First Light Master

• Helen Svoboda - A Soft Glare

• Brodie McAllister - Wattle

• Brodie McAllister - Muliplicity

Check out Made Now Music on Bandcamp

$15 entry for the whole day!

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Maximum Anything in collaboration with Brisbane-based independent label MADE NOW MUSIC present a Mini-Festival at the Merri-Bek Bandroom celebrating another year of creative music and new releases (happy 5th birthday to MNM 🥳 ), with food, drink, community activities and most importantly performances from the Melbourne contingent of the MADE NOW MUSIC family.

The festival features performances from Melbourne based MNM artists who have released music on the label in 2023, as well as friends of the label. As a special treat, MNM founder/director Brodie McAllister will be presenting his latest work for large ensemble “Wattle” with a cross-city lineup featuring artists from Brisbane and Melbourne.  

MADE NOW MUSIC is a Brisbane-based independent music label, concert series and community of artists dedicated to music of quality and heart.  We are committed to putting out art from artists that we believe in.  MNM focusses on releasing music being created now from artists not categorised by genre, but by common ethos - quality, honest music, made now.  

Lineup

• I Hold the Lions Paw

• Wattle (Bris/Melb) - large ensemble work by Brodie McAllister 

• The Rest is Silence

• 蛾 Ga (van der Schyff, Lee, Saragossi, Doo) - Album Launch

• Franklin | Carter 

• Andrew Doo Trio

• Mortlake

• Ash Ballat (solo)

• Pat Jaffe (solo)

• Helen Svoboda (solo)

Maximum Anything a new initiative aimed at presenting new and exciting music. Artists are free to be who they want, as is the audience.

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madenowmusic.com

Made Now music on Bandcamp

Sunday November 12th was the first performance presented by Maximum Anything, and we think it was a great success! Thanks to all who attended and enjoyed the afternoon. There was Basketball, CD’s, books (and records!) were swapped and some great music was performed. Thanks to Oliver for putting together a great group of people to write and perform some really beautiful music.

Here’s a very short snippet!

The next event is planned for December 9th so feel free to pop that into your diary! It’ll be a big day filled with lots of music and fun. More info to come soon, so stay tuned.

Last night I watched on youtube a lecture delivered by Stan Grant. This took place last week, so a couple of weeks after the referendum, which was not the main theme, but it was also not, not, the main theme. The title of the lecture, The Witness of Poetry, The Silent Breath. Throughout this lecture Stan Grant spoke on how it’s ok to be silent after bruising times and to admit one doesn’t know about things, but is trying to find out. If you don’t know…….

He spoke about and shared with us some words from the great poets and asked us to consider their view. Consider the poet’s view- where there might be some truth to be found. Because, as he suggested the rest is really just noise and has become an industry delivering noise to the voracious public, taking in anything to escape what it is the poets are trying to get us to listen to.

For example, second story of the Guardian feed yesterday… Tony Abbott debunking climate change during a speech in the UK- that’s not news, that’s the water we swim in. An idiot expresses an idiotic thought and we then have to wade through it.

I do want to be “in the world” but I’m kinda tired of that type of discourse.

As someone involved in making music with others- often quite strange music- are we also poets? Trying to find a truth by weaving together things we don’t quite understand. I like to think so and I have for a time now, but how do we listen to that sound? Where is the guide for the understanding of this dialogue? In the same lecture Stran Grant also spoke of the brokenness of words in our modern discourse, words no longer operating as they once did. We now have speak-not words but code.

Have we done the same thing to music? Can we still hear the words or do we just recognize the “code” the particular model we are already familiar with? Some will argue music has always operated like this… genre/style/fashion. But some music is meant to not operate like this- the spooky stuff, the stuff that can mix your insides up and change you forever-

Who’s job is it to help us recognize the difference?

speaker -listener-convener-critic

Maybe that’s too hard to get to right now and maybe it’s ok to not know and to let a breath of silence take the space.

Maximum Anything aims to create an open dialogue with other interested folk- “the curious”. We want to know what is going on, what is being thought about, where the action is. Be it music, art, science, tech, books, films, whatever-let’s share.

I’ll start….

If one wants to “be in the world” then there’s no escaping the digital version that we all have been enmeshed in- I’m not going to tell you what I think that world has become but I’m pretty sure we can do better. There are others with much clearer thinking than mine on this topic- Here is a link to an interview with the sci fi writer, future thinker Cory Doctorow. I particularly like the title-Platform capitalism and the curse of "enshittification".

And why Maximum Anything?-

The name was inspired by my light research into an early 90’s Punk scene that took place in East L.A. Creative, energetic people with a DIY approach making the art that felt important to them. When that scene was ticking along nicely (before the money got too big) they had the support of a local venue, a radio station, and a magazine (Maximum RocknRoll) nice… There is a fun doco that tells this story. It’s on Kanopy - a great free streaming service. This book SELLOUT by Dan Ozzi is also an interesting insight into that time and place.

And this brings us to here….

Substack might be the future. It’s essentially a platform that allows readers to subscribe to (and yes, pay for) writers of their choice. The subscription payment goes directly to the writer not the platform- It is free to “publish” on Substack but it does take a 10% commission on paid subscriptions. The difference here is that the platform is not curating the content in any way. There are also free subscriptions- but it is the writer’s choice.

Once again there are others who know much more than me on this. Here is an article on Substack from the Gaurdian. It’s a couple of years old but the good news is that things haven’t changed much in the way things work on the platform.

Thoughts….?

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Maximum Anything a new initiative aimed at presenting new and exciting music. Artists are free to be who they want, as is the audience.

This is just the beginning. Or is it? You might remember Lebowskis, you might be thinking “hang on, I go to Cross St a lot!”. These are all true thoughts! But this is the beginning of Maximum Anything. A new once a month curated evening of music (as well as food, drink and other fun activities) at The Merri-bek City Bandroom (AKA Cross St). This venue is and has historically been such a hub for the creative community in Melbourne and we want to help it grow more.

Oliver Ledi Hanane's C.A.G.E Squares Project: '4 Plus 2'

C.A.G.E Squares (Chance-Assisted Generative Exercise) is a method of generating stimulus for musical composition by incorporating a degree of chance within the creative process. It is comprised of several categories of pre-prepared prompts (squares), which participants blindly draw from prior to composing, directly informing the outcomes of the final composition. The ensemble convenes just prior to the performance and each member is allocated a 30-minute timed period to complete a playable piece of music using the this process. The compositions are then immediately performed to a live audience. The pieces are not rehearsed, only a verbal description accompanies the physical score. The concept aims to showcase the musical and compositional sensibilities of the musicians as they navigate new musical terrain and relationships without preparation.

The ‘4 Plus 2’ iteration brings together six improvisers; four voices and two rhythm players. The musicians will collaborate to write a suite of music in the aforementioned manner, that showcases the interconnected relationship between vocal expression and rhythmic instrumental playing within an improvisational setting.

With the talents of:

Greta Williams - Vox
Callum Mintzis - Trom/Piano
Oscar France - Keyboard &Synth
Ali Watts - Bass & Effects

Cross St is such a hub for the creative community in Melbourne. We want to help it grow more.