Michael Terren was awarded the Dr Harold Schenberg Music Fellowship in 2017.
Michael Terren is an electroacoustic composer active in Perth. His music arises from an experimental studio-based practice, and encompasses a technical vocabulary including synthesised sound, field recording, concrète manipulations, and algorithmic procedures.
Terren is motivated by an idea of music as a hermetic puzzle without relying on textual formulae, and dissolving distinctions between “heady” music and “body” music. Fidelity, intentionality, surface, and compositional labour are strong formal thematics in his music, grounded in the rituals of acousmatic listening, cultures of recording and phonography, and social systems that empower or disempower through sound. Terren maintains a research practice that brings these ideas into orbit with studies of the technological and mediatic environment that pervades contemporary life and work, towards recounting the histories, practices, and trajectories of digital sound media.
Terren has released several recorded works on Australian record labels, and will publish an album/installation project with Irish label Fallow Media later this year. He has been artist-in-residence at Listhús í Fjallabyggð in Iceland, Bogong Centre for Sound Culture in Victoria, and Arteles Creative Center in Finland. He also co-presents a weekly radio show devoted to experimental music on RTRFM, and teaches at the WA Academy of Performing Arts, where he is a PhD candidate.