It's wonderful to encounter those rare individuals
whose philosophies and arguments are so logically radical and appealing
that they threaten to completely alter your own life plan. Such a man is
Peter Happy of Melbourne music makers Tedium. Quiet and rational of speech,
Peter approaches insanity on stage in his efforts to face his personal
demons, trying to inspire others to do the same.
Peter's response to the shocking nature of the CD sleeve
photos instantly revealed what Tedium is on about. "We're into provoking
thought basically. We're into challenging notions of what people are comfortable
with. We don't directly want to shock, but we like interesting images and
anything that's interesting to me I normally find is challenging my conservative
thought structures in some way. You can call that shock, I'd prefer to
call it challenging and interesting.
Performance wise, Tedium approach those objectives differently
depending on the medium. The studio recording process largely involves
intuitively piecing together unrelated pieces of work. Why?
"Any tracks will work together," explains Peter. "You
walk down the street and no matter what sounds occur, they all get together
somehow."
So art should imitate life then? "I don't know whether
I'd say imitate; it should be life. It should be as real as possible and
as unconstructed as possible. But then again there's beauty within the
structure. It's nice to have a degree of structure which you can live within
and then let everything happen as naturally as possible within that structure."
However the reigning factor of Tedium live shows has
been chaos. Peter likes to completely abandon himself to his emotions and
see where they may lead him. This has led to some pretty amazing spectacles.
"Live performance is very ... you could use the
word shamanic," Peter offers his side of the story. "When I play live,
there's the energy of the audience. There's all these faces sitting there
and staring at you which inevitably I channel. I use it, I feel confronted
by it; there's a degree of self consciousness. I take that and I use it
in an extreme way."
However, I point out, Peter has been quoted as seeing
the audience as voyeurs rather than objects of his performance.
"In life everyone's a voyeur, everyone's sort of checking
each other out. Now you're not performing for anyone, but inevitably that
weight of other peoples opinions is on your shoulder and some people freak
out and life gets a bit much for them. The pressure of everyday life is
basically peoples opinions and I force myself to have experiences dealing
with that weight but I'm not necessarily doing it for people to watch ...
to me performance is crucial to my self-development."
The extreme nature of Tedium's performances has lead
to that occurrence being fairly scarce. Having become better at facing
his own demons, however, and in an effort to perform more frequently, Peter's
shows are evolving to encompass more organization.
"The process of recording for he CD is very different
to what we do live. Now we're getting more into sound and so we're developing
a bit more structure. I'm interested in performing more often and to do
that you need a degree of structure. Well, having it there allows me to
explore different things. The way we've been performing, it's been totally
spontaneous and improvised, totally new music every gig and that's very
chaotic. But now I'm interested in, okay if we have a degree of structure,
where can we go from there?"