Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Wednesday, Nov 15th, 2006 at 3:26 pm

Believe, and Be Happy: An Interview with John Ryan, George Dunford and Simon Sellars

by Andres Vaccari

Illustration by Mik Ruff, taken from Micronations: The Lonely Planet
Guide to Home-made Nations.
Welcome to Part Two of Sleepy Brain’s Micronational Bonanza, in which we continue to shine a spotlight on Lonely Planet’s new guide to Micronations: Home-made Nations. According to the book’s introduction, the guide is “a journey across the world and into […]

Saturday, Sep 2nd, 2006 at 6:26 pm

John Foxx: Seductive Whirlpools, Part 2

Interview by Simon Sellars

John Foxx live at Shrewsbury, 1998. © Extreme Voice.
This is part 2 of my interview with John Foxx, former lead singer of Ultravox before the band’s Midge Ure era, and an on-and-off solo artist for the past 25 years. Foxx’s Ultravox purveyed a damned, dreamy, paranoid — and often playful — weave […]

Thursday, Nov 11th, 2004 at 3:17 am

Playing With Light: Martina Mrongovius

Interview by Rebecca Cannon

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>Melbournian Martina Mrongovius is a holographer; an artist working predominantly with holograms. Her exhibition Hover was recently featured in the Next Wave Festival, accompanying her Honours Thesis in Applied Physics. A darkened gallery space – so dark that it took several minutes to adjust to the little light emanating from the holograms […]

Monday, Oct 25th, 2004 at 7:43 pm

Space Monkeys: Newton Armstrong

Newton Armstrong is a composer/performer, ex of Melbourne, now ensconced in research at Princeton University in the US. His recent project for kids, SPACE MONKEYS, focused on interaction design and performance. It involves rethinking and reconfiguring generic game controllers as tools for facilitating alternative forms of conversation.
In its first incarnation, SPACE MONKEYS was the work […]

Sunday, Sep 5th, 2004 at 6:20 pm

Melanie Chilianis: Punk-Arse Flute

photo: Michael Shaw
Melanie Chilianis, a Melbourne flautist, has sallied forth in recent times with a successful union between the instrument she made her name with, the flute, and technological mixes, patches and crunchy electronic treatments.
Melanie has an honours degree in music performance from Monash University and shares a close working relationship with notable Australian composers […]

Tuesday, Aug 17th, 2004 at 9:47 pm

Wayne Mammone: His Nerfball Is In Tatters

Interview by Symon Brando

Wayne & Shandeece in happier times
The now-defunct sport of Nerfball always suffered image problems. The fact that it was played with a kid’s soft toy didn’t help. A Nerf ball is a round foam ball, designed in the 1970s for kids to play with indoors – without smashing any of mum and […]

Saturday, Jul 10th, 2004 at 3:45 am

Polyester Boy: Paul Elliott

Interview by Andrew Garton

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Melbourne’s Polyester Books, on Brunswick St, is a phenomenon, not least for its hardy resilience in the face of narrow-minded attacks from authorities and certain sectors of the community alike. Now it faces a new threat – the extinction of the artistic culture it grew up in. Andrew Garton spoke with the […]

Friday, Jun 4th, 2004 at 8:23 pm

Enemies Within: Jill & Jeff Sparrow

“In Melbourne, the legend of the Cave Clan helped inspire a more directly political link between the drainage system and the unemployed with the celebrated Dole Army hoax” — Radical Melbourne 2, p. 136
Going underground in Melbourne Town, photo © Peter Ewer
Ever since its foundation, Melbourne has had a “wowser” reputation: stuffy, boring, conservative. […]

Thursday, May 20th, 2004 at 3:36 am

Kate Cawley: External Manifestations of Interior States

Interview by Meredith Badger

photo by Simone Lee Egger
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Melbourne animator Kate Cawley teaches scriptwriting at RMIT in the Centre for Animation and Interactive Media (AIM). Her graduate film, Les Grenouilles, has won a slew of prizes and has been shown in numerous festivals. Kate has also worked for a number of Melbourne-based animation companies, including, most […]

Tuesday, May 11th, 2004 at 10:18 am

Amsterdam Weekly: Connoisseurs of the City

Recently I was in Amsterdam on a writing assignment. I hadn’t been there for years and I had the usual backpacker’s memory of the place: hash, beer, Red Light District, canals…all the old cliches. This time around, however, I gained a deeper understanding of this quite incredible pocket of Europe. I’m no expert, but Amsterdam […]