Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has announced the winners of its inaugural NSW Creative Industries Residencies scheme, and one is the annual Electronic Music Conference. The residency will give the event workspace at Powerhouse Museum's facilities in Ultimo over the next two years, and there will also be opportunities to join forces with the museum in collaborative projects.
Held over two days every November, the Electronic Music Conference has grown to become the one of the leading international get-togethers in its field, and certainly the biggest such event in the Asia-Pacific, since it started seven years ago. What began as a small artist-led gathering in 2012 now attracts key figures from around the globe and more than 7,000 people to its five-day public program called ECM Festival. This has helped make the Conference a recognised counterpart to other notable events such as Amsterdam Dance Event, the Winter Music Conference in Florida, and other electronic music conferences in Dusseldorf in Germany and Alberta in Canada.
This year's ECM concluded on 17 November and brought together some 100 local and overseas speakers including musician, composer and producer Paul Mac (Severed Heads, Silverchair, Powderfinger, Grinspoon) and Scott Cohen, Chief Innovation Officer at Warner Music Group. Titled The Next Now, it ran sessions on a gamut of issues dealing with technology, education, artists' wellbeing and the future of festivals. In his keynote Cohen challenged many widely held views about music distribution and the effectiveness of social media platforms. Read about what he said here.
Another residency at Powerhouse Museum has gone to Julian Wessel, a sound editor at Sydney's Sonar Sound (now called Unison Sound) production studios. His work includes audio creation for a range of TV shows and immersive installations. Other winners of residencies announced by the Museum come from design, illustration, writing, film, fashion and installation art. All are engaged in work that relates in some way to the Powerhouse. More than 65 expressions of interest were received when applications closed in September.
