release date: 26 april 2022
listen on soundcloud
Eugene Carchesio is an artist – self-taught, self-generating, self-contained, forever producing and presenting. We’ve been friends, collaborators, colleagues, fellow travellers for roundabout four decades.
Eugene lives in Brisbane, Queensland – always has – and has forged a humbly extraordinary path across, through, around, outside of and beyond contemporary art. He’s fearlessly lost, an enigmatic poet, a serious practitioner, a self-deprecating and droll-funny man with a penchant for mid-20th century jazz, dub, geometry, watercolour, solitude and silence.
In late 2021 – December 27 – I met up with Eugene at his studio in an abandoned paint factory in the southern suburbs of Brisbane, to record a conversation about his relationships with sound. In the 80s he formed and played in various underground and art bands, made and published his solo works on cassette and vinyl, performed improvisationally, collaborated with non-musician artists on curious projects and was always making from nothing with found materials, his paintings, small objects and drawings – which he still does. Today, you can find a dozen or more of his releases on bandcamp under the Room 40 label.
Eugene has been producing art music, sound works and generally exploring the sonic possibilities of conventional instruments, outdated computer programs and everyday things for decades. His discography is long, with many surprising connections.
This, the 60th episode of the sonic sketchbooks podcast combines and collides fragments from that summer conversation with a very few selections from Eugene’s catalogue and concludes with a collaborative piece derived from a brief improvisation we enjoyed that afternoon using his paintbrushes to sonify a drum-kit piled up in a heap in the corner of his studio. He spontaneously titled them Drum Drawings.
mystics and prophets 2016 – works in ‘Fieldwork: Artist Encounters’
Milani Gallery artist page