Brushbox Mountain by Richard Kennedy
At Diffusion, one of our favourite activities is introducing people who’ve never worked with audio before to the wonderful world of sonic arts and composition! This time, we had the pleasure of bringing Richard into the fold.
Richard was planning a trip to the stunning Northern Rivers region of NSW, Australia, so I handed him a ZOOM recorder and encouraged him to give it a go. His reaction? “What do I do with this?” But since he’s got a knack for snapping gorgeous photos on his iPhone, I told him to think of it the same way—just capturing beautiful snaps, but with sound.
When he returned, we sat down, set up Audacity on his laptop, and I guided him through some basic editing and listened to his piece come to life.
Now, why not join Richard on his journey? It starts at the Brunswick Heads breakwater, heads up river towards Mullumbimby, then meanders around the High Street and Market at the Showgrounds. From there, we head up Left Bank Road towards Mullumbimby Creek, stop by to visit Barry Reeves at his place, “Brushbox Mountain”, and enjoy drinks on the balcony during a tropical downpour. We wrap up by wandering through the bush and garden, and finally ending our adventure at the beautiful beach of Byron Bay.

This is a montage created from the Radio as a Space and a Material community workshop with DiffusionFM held at 107 Redfern. For this event we invited the community to contemplate alternative radio space. We also invited the wonderful Hethre Contant to participate which inevitably included an appearance of The Weekly Dream Report. Also big thanks to Ryan Morris for sharing his other consciousness with us.

Here are the results of workshop participants enjoying performative experiments. During these “Jams” the usual suspects were utilised - extremely low-powered terrestrial radio wave technologies, other electromagnetic and time-based sensing tools, telephones, walkie-talkies, computers, deep sea cables, whatever paraphernalia came to hand and August Black’s telematic browser app Mezcal.

Most of the material was recorded using a very old H1 ZOOM with only one working microphone and mobile phones. The results are delightfully LoFi and in glorious mono!