Australian composer and electroacoustic artist Lisa Lerkenfeldt is renowned for immersive, durational performances that intentionally "dissolve time" through a spellbinding blend of bleached piano solos, analogue tape loops, and spatialized musique concrète.
Influenced heavily by Pauline Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening, her live sets manipulate texture, decay, and repetition to cause profound temporal shifts for the audience. Several key performances and bodies of work highlight this spellbinding, time-altering signature.
The Sky Was Like Cellophane (2024–2025)
Influenced heavily by Pauline Oliveros’s concept of Deep Listening, her live sets manipulate texture, decay, and repetition to cause profound temporal shifts for the audience. Several key performances and bodies of work highlight this spellbinding, time-altering signature.
The Sky Was Like Cellophane (2024–2025)
- The Experience: This major electroacoustic work toured prestigious art institutions, following a residency at the legendary INA-GRM studios in Paris.
- Time-Altering Mechanics: Having performed it on the Acousmonium—an iconic 48-channel loudspeaker array—Lerkenfeldt utilized advanced spatialization software to fracture and throw sound across physical spaces. The performance envelops the audience in an multi-layered, evolving atmosphere that completely distorts standard perceptions of time and geographical space.
The Folded Page Residency (2024–2025)
- The Experience: A long-form residency at the gallery At The Above.
- Time-Altering Mechanics: Lerkenfeldt performed intense, trance-like piano improvisations interacting with hand-cut analogue tape loops on a restored century-old acoustic piano. By deliberately letting the tape delay and piano phrases decay and desynchronize over long periods, the continuous looping action suspends the room's sense of linear time.
With water up to her knees / Suite For The Drains / Halos of Perception (2022–2024)
- The Experience: Originally commissioned as a live performance for The Substation (and later released as a companion LP/cassette), this project simulates the deep, eerie reverb of subterranean storm networks.
- Time-Altering Mechanics: The live and extended versions of pieces like Cobwebs stretch out up to 38 minutes long. By anchoring the performance around a single, pristine piano chord that slowly bobs and erodes through a sea of electronic delay, she forces the listener into a hyper-focused, meditative state where minutes melt away imperceptibly.
A Liquor Of Daisies (2020–2021)
- The Experience: Premiered at Melbourne Music Week, this hybrid performance acted as a "poem to the everlasting daisy" and featured an augmented reality component.
- Time-Altering Mechanics: Designed explicitly as "an unfolding fantasy through the field of time", the performance juxtaposes three pianos with mechanical, cyclic tape layers. The performance subverts traditional recital formats by trapping the listener within beautiful, minimal mirages of endless resonance.
A Garden Dissolves Into Black Silk is a spellbinding electroacoustic composition and performance piece by Naarm/Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist Lisa Lerkenfeldt. Originally premiering in October 2020 via Bus Projects and Archaic Vaults, the piece acts as a time-altering durational exercise in "interspecies listening" and ecological intimacy.
The Sonic and Visual Landscape:
The performance and accompanying long-form digital/cassette release explore the concepts of decay, environmental shift, and reciprocal relations with the natural world as night falls:
The Sonic and Visual Landscape:
The performance and accompanying long-form digital/cassette release explore the concepts of decay, environmental shift, and reciprocal relations with the natural world as night falls:
- Time-Altering Composition: Built upon Lerkenfeldt's signature use of tape loops, analogue mutations, and cyclic structures, the composition shifts perception and seemingly dissolves time over its duration.
- Crumbling Textures: The sonic palette relies heavily on the physical erosion of magnetic tape, layered with distant, melancholic melodies and field recordings that mimic a "dissolving world".
- Atmospheric Staging: True to her live practice, performances of this nature are heavily immersive—frequently presented in low lighting with heavy haze, mirroring the transition of a landscape fading to complete dark.
The piece stands alongside her broader body of work—including Collagen and A Liquor Of Daisies—which fuses elements of musique concrète, minimal piano improvisation, and sensory reflections on geography and technology.
Reissue: Me, my label