The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Thursday, February 13, 2014
From 7pm
Facebook event

The Auricle presents its inaugural Record Club night.

We would like to offer you the opportunity to share a recording of particular sonic interest with fellow listeners in our intimate gallery setting. You are welcome to discuss or comment on content/ context of your selection, or simply “play it straight”.

We look forward to hearing a variety of 22nd century classic hall music, junk sounds, left of field recordings and more or less musics of (un)convention.

There will be a vinyl only set up for this particular evening.

It was a wonderful first night with a diverse selection of vinyl on the turntable, some of which is pictured here.

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Saturday 8th February 5-6pm
Facebook event


Join us the afternoon of Saturday 8th February for the The International Step artist’s talk, panel discussion and Q &A with John Chrisstoffels’, Dr Barbara Garrie and David Khan.

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Tuesday 4th February 6-8pm
Facebook event

Join us the evening of Tuesday 4th February for the opening of John Chrisstoffels’ exhibition The International Step – a mesmeric and enveloping quadraphonic, audiovisual installation, within which one encounters a veritable chorus sounding the tension between, variously, the aural and the visual, reality and illusion, time and being, transience and permanence, place and non-place, difference and repetition.

The Auricle Sonic Arts Gallery
Thursday, January 16 at 6:00pm
Facebook event


The Auricle, the South Island’s first dedicated public sonic arts gallery, officially opens on 16th January with its inaugural exhibition, Ekklesia by local artist, Matthew Scobie.

Posing the question: “What is the biggest problem you face living in Christchurch right now?” Ekklesia is a dynamic electroacoustic installation created from public responses recorded both before and over the course of the exhibition. The voices of the city’s people are both its medium and its message, with visitors invited to contribute their concerns to the work, which over the two weeks of the show will build in intensity to reflect the size of the problem collectively faced by the community. The interactive and constantly evolving nature of the work reflects the idea of the ekklesia, where everyone gets an equal say and everyone has to listen.

Matthew Scobie is a Christchurch artist whose work reflects his interest in political, environmental and social justice issues and has seen him collaborate across genres, including work with the designer, Elle Plank presented at Auckland’s Art in the Dark. His musical background is diverse: from playing percussion and participating in more traditional ensembles in his youth, to performing in numerous rock bands, such as T54 and Planet of the Tapes. He studied sonic arts at the University of Canterbury, where he won the Lilburn Award for composition in both 2012 and 2013.

Friday, December 6, 2013
8:00pm until 11:00pm
$15 entry
Facebook event


The Auricle is proud to present a double bill of local legends, Bruce Russell and Roy Montgomery plus guests on Friday 6th December. This is a fundraising event with all proceeds going back to help set up The Auricle.

In a rare performance, Roy Montgomery (guitar) will be presenting a new work: a live improvisation for electric guitar, two violas and floor toms. He will be joined by long standing collaborator, Dunedin drummer Peter Stapleton on percussion along with guest viola players (to be announced).

Bruce Russell will be deploying his patented ‘mock stereo’ electric guitar set-up, pushing ice-floe-sized bursts of sonic debris through a fine-grained electronic mesh of circuitry. Light blue touch paper and stand well clear.

Roy Montgomery is an occasional guitarist/composer and a very infrequent performer. He has recorded some sixteen albums either as a solo performer or in collaboration with others in groups such as The Pin Group and Dadamah. His work is predominantly instrumental and filmic in orientation although he sometimes strays into lyric territory. He is rather too obdurately situated in a low-tech recording aesthetic for his own good at times but his “less-is-more” motto is not entirely an exercise in laziness-deflecting sophistry.

Bruce Russell is a practitioner in sound, who since 1987 has been a member of the Dead C. This genre-dissolving New Zealand trio, mixes rock, electro-acoustics, noise and improvisation in equal measures. He has also been active as a solo artist, and directed two of New Zealand’s vanguard labels, Xpressway and Corpus Hermeticum.

The crowd gathers

Bruce Russel

Roy Montgomery, Peter Stapleton and friends upstairs