Wound Without A Tear is a compilation of “Australian” Ambient and Experimental Music; an area so often overlooked and misunderstood because it does not easily fall into historical context. However, the fifteen years (1993-2008) the collection cites–a period of early 90s post-rave ethereality defined by pleasure-centred spaces (chill-out rooms) and the personal computer’s emergence as a popular tool for file-sharing and secondary-living in the 00s–is befitting of closer examination.

The recordings were sourced from artists, labels, corrupted disk drives, CD-Rs, the WWW and archives of Melbourne’s 3RRR community radio station.

During the 1990s, as new technologies emerged and mass digital culture flourished, artists explored the emergent possibilities of the Internet with a utopian fervour, viewing the web and its plethora of images and information as a site of boundless potential. In the 2000s, file sharing connected people around the world directly to one another, and this incorporation of online experience into material objects, meant there was an increasingly porous border between the online and offline worlds–if there remained a border, at all.

What is remarkable from this collection is that so many people, working (mostly) on their own came up with such remarkably similar ideas. In most cases these similarities can be related to the inherent qualities of the medium, though often any distinction is decidedly blurred at the edges. The compilation seeks to make the works of these various artists available as a means of “demystification”. No specific destination is intended upon. Perhaps by the time you have reached the end, you will have forgotten where you began.

Endnotes:
How do you pronounce the title? Wound /waʊnd/ Without /wɪðˈaʊt/
A /eɪ/ Tear /teə(r)/

1. Wound. Furl. Twist. Wrap. Surround. To Move Back or
Forwards to a Desired Point.
2. Tear. Interruption. Disruption. Imperfection. Rupture.
3. Two words evoke a chain of events.

TRACKLIST :

A1 Peter Ball - Drawn From Sleep

A2 Paul Schütze - The Lotus Voltage

A3 Sense - Eb Ni Twein

B1 Kazumichi Grime - Rounded

B2 Kaputnik - Sleepers Sleep

B3 Sarah Hopkins - Kindred Spirits

B4 Ros Bandt - From Under The Sacred Oak

C1 Pretty Boy Crossover - Audio Letters

C2 Melbient - Narla

C3 Random Acts of Elevator Music - Waiting In The Foyer

D1 Didjitalis - The Abyss

D2 Tim Jackiw - Composite Memory 7

D3 Linga Sarira - Void Calm

D4 Pelican Daughters - Aurascape