Perth experimental music organisation Tone List continue to present some of the most interesting sounds to reach Perth in this, the organisation’s fourth, annual Audible Edge festival.

In the three of the five nights of live performance which I attended (TuneNoiseTune#2 at Ellington’s Jazz Club, New North at Fremantle’s Old Customs House, and Goolugatup Sounds at the Goolugatup Arts Centre), I moved across a delightful range of materials including complex audiovisual explorations (Mahagonny at New North), controlled and measured Cagean percussion and ‘lowercase’ amplified sounds (Unfold at TuneNoiseTune), neo jazz-fusion (Rif Mountain at Goolugatup), abstract, chromatic jazz piano (Tom O’Halloran at TuneNoiseTune), and freak out post-jazz noise mixed with banal but beautiful poetry (Noise and Vibration Council at Goolugatup).

The opening night at Ellington’s was a restrained affair. O’Halloran translates phrases from the music of Olivier Messiaen into short piano improvisations, and especially in the first two of these, one could hear a dash of jazz or blues in the use of stride and the bass rhythms of the left hand. The latter two studies he offered were more shifting and hard to pin down, closer to Messiaen’s own work.