Rik Rue
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1950 (age 75–76)
Rik Rue | |
|---|---|
| Also known as | Richard Banachowicz |
| Born | Richard Banachowicz 1950 (age 75–76) Sydney, New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation | Experimental musician |
| Instruments | sound collage, soprano saxophone |
Rik Rue (born Richard Banachowicz)[1] is an Australian experimental musician,[2] and sound artist, known for his audio collages[3] in recordings and live performance.
Born in Sydney in 1950 [4] to Polish refugee parents, Rue began constructing sound collages on tape from the age of 15,[4] later encouraged by Australian painter and collage artist Carl Plate.[4] He studied part-time at the Slade School, Camden Art Centre and Royal College of Art in London.[4]
He first performed on saxophone with a number of prominent Sydney improvisers including Serge Ermoll, Jon Rose and Louis Burdett[5][4] before switching to live mixing of sampled and pre-recorded sound on audio cassette recorders including the TASCAM Portastudio, describing the relationship between the two instruments, 'The tape is improvised in a sense, by equalisation, adding timbres, adding pitch controls, the various combinations of mixing. All those areas give you a sort of phrasing not unlike saxophonists altering their embouchure, and I approach the tapes in this manner.'[6]
After releasing material on the Fringe Benefit label, in 1983 he created his own label Pedestrian Tapes,[7] releasing his own and works by Michael Sheridan, Jim Denley, Jo Truman, John Gillies, Ian Hartley, Ernie Althoff and others.[4][8] In the 1980s he was a member of the group Mind/Body/Split with Jim Denley, Sherre de Lyse, Jamie Fielding, Graham Leake and Kimo Venonen,[4] and in 1989 he co-founded the performance ensemble Machine for Making Sense with Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley and Stevie Wishart, first performing at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria.[9][10] Later he worked with performance group Gravity Feed[11] on over 20 projects between 1994 and 2007 in Australia and Germany,[1][12] Urban Theatre Projects,[13] dancer Tess de Quincey, the group Social Interiors (with Shane Fahey and Julian Knowles),[14] musicians David Moss, Eugene Chadbourne,[15] Ikue Mori[16] and released recordings on Extreme Records.[17]
In 1995 his recordings were included in the exhibition Sound In Space: Adventures In Australian Sound Art at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney.[18] The major sound work Things Change, Things Remain The Same commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, was exhibited as part of the major contemporary art exhibition Australian Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature. It has been described as an 'outback road-trip of the mind'.[19] His video and sound work Fire and Water was shown at SNO Gallery Sydney in 2014.[20] A number of Rue's early cassette recordings were re-released by Shame File Music from 2014.[21] In 2018 the exhibition In-Formalism at the Casula Powerhouse, included a survey of his tape works.[22]
Rue has multiple sclerosis and is now no longer active in performing or recording.[1]
