Jim Denley (JD): Clare Cooper and Clayton Thomas started the whole thing in 2001. There was little opportunity for emerging and submerged experimentalists and improvisers to play in Sydney, so C+C started putting on concerts and then had the first festival in 2002. Mostly it took place at Space 3 an artists run collective in central Sydney.

JD: Gabe was involved but she left, and now we are all musicians. We seem to be sharing the curation. I am the treasurer, and I wrote 2 recent grant applications, but Peter wrote another one with Monika. So I think we are sharing the roles. We are working it out. In the past Clare and Clayton did allot of the work, we are still in a transitional phase.�

Peter Farrar (PF): The organizers of the NOW now are all musicians. I am a saxophonist, Dale Gorfinkel works with the vibraphone and instrument building, Monika Brooks plays accordion, piano and laptop, Jim works with woodwind instruments, primarily sax and flutes, and Lloyd Honeybrook plays a range of instruments, primarily saxophone.
One of the reasons for quite a large group of organizers was because we wanted to expand the idea of what the NOW now is about. Between us there is quite a range of interests and we felt like this is something to embrace. Everyone in the current team all curate events for the NOW now series throughout the year, and consequently we have seen some diverse concerts.
Having a larger group means that it is easier to spread the responsibilities to other people in the organization when people go away for gigs and tours. It makes it less stressful for everyone. Naturally having a larger group has its problems when it comes to curating a festival. Luckily we are all nice people. Often the decisions come down to gut feeling.

JD: The NOW now has a specific interest in improvisation and audio visual collaborations. Clay's curation emphasised this, he would often create groups for the festival. I think for next year this will change, we are keen to put the power back into the hands of the musicians. The festival has had a distinct community feel to it, it feels more like a seminar. All the musicians dedicated to improvisation on the eastern side of Australia seem to come.
If one looks at all the Australian festivals, Liquid Architecture, Unsound, i audio, What is Music?, Totally Huge, Electrofringe, I think these festivals are often an expression on the curators ideas, and even personalities. I guess in this age of individualism you wouldn't expect anything less. But for me this is problematic. I hope that the NOW now can evolve to have a much more communal organizational structure and hence achieve a truly communal result.

PF: The NOW now festival has always had an emphasis on improvisation. This is not really the case with any other music festival in Australia. This emphasis probably reflects Clayton’s outlook on music. He was the main curator of the previous festivals, and was interested in putting performers in uncomfortable settings with unusual instrumentations, where no one really knew what the resultant music would be like. Clayton is also very community minded, and this approach to the festival was also a good way for artists to meet and socialize. This approach sometimes achieved mixed musical results, but always succeeded in bringing the community together over the course of the festival. I feel this has always been the NOW now’s strength.
For next year’s festival we intend on having a different approach where we choose an artist to come up with their own group or performance idea. We also intend on having an after-hours space where festival artists can perform in more spontaneous settings, hopefully retaining Clayton’s community sensibility.

JD: For two years, the festival was held at the artist run gallery, SPACE 3, in Chippendale. In 2002, it took place over 4-days, involving 54 musicians from Sydney, New Zealand, Brisbane and Melbourne. The 2003 event had 8 musicians from Melbourne amongst included 74 musicians over a 6-day period, a contingent of these were from NZ. In 2004 two German artists, (Johannes Bauer and Thomas Lehn) played. The festival moved down Cleveland Street to the Lan Franchis Memorial Discotheque. Six free-range acts a night for six nights were jammed into the over-crowded hothouse atmosphere. Nightly there were 100 paying public and at any one time 60 musicians listening and grappling with international trends and local influences to find methodologies for making improvisation work in the 21st Century.�2005�saw the festival moving to a bigger, better facility in @Newtown audiences were terrific; over the 4 nights we averaged 400 a night. There was great excitement about the experimental film component of the festival curated by Brisbane based Sally Golding. 2006 was once again @Newtown. It was bigger and better than any previous festival. International guests Xavier Charles (France) Jeff Henderson (NZ) Peter Rehberg (Austria) and Cor Fuhler (Holland) delighted audiences. The fantastic experimental film program (curated by Sally Golding and Joel Stern) ran in a separate space upstairs, but also spilled out into the main space with brilliant collaborations between musicians and moving image. Robin Fox, Louise Curham and Botburg presented powerful audio visual events. We were able to cover the travel for 6 Brisbane and 14 Melbourne based artists. 2007 − the festival moved to The Factory in Marrickville. The venue was even bigger that @Newtown, and provided a better separate space for the film program. In many ways the festival had a similar ambition to the previous year, 77 artists were involved, 12 from Melbourne, 3 from Brisbane, but without any proper funding. International artists Robin Haywood, Werner Dafeldecker, Martin Brandlmayr, DJ Olive, Dean Roberts, Manon Lui Winter, and Jamie Fennelly all made interesting contributions − and made great collaborations with local artists.

PF: There is a separate film program that is run by Joel Stern and Sally Golding who are both from Brisbane. The films in the program I think are chosen if there is an interesting sonic element. There have also been live performances to silent films. Probably the most interesting part of the festival has been the live audio/visual works from artists like Botborg, Robin Fox, and Louise Currham, where both sound and visuals have been fully engaged with one another in performance.

PF: “The NOW now series" is a concert series held every fortnight on a Monday night. Each of the organizers curates two or three of these concerts throughout the year. We also get many artists from Sydney or out of town wanting to play at these concerts, so we try to fit some of these in as well. A priority of the series is to give local musicians working in improvised and experimental music a chance to perform and try something they might not have a chance to do anywhere else.

PF: The funding situation changes from year to year. When the festival has been funded well it means we can pay all of the artists a humane fee and perhaps bring out international artists. The festival always seems to scrape through money-wise no matter how much or how little funding the NOW now has. I think this is because people know the value the festival has to the community and are willing to help out.

JD: We get some small amounts sometimes. This year none at all, so we had to self fund the festival. It's tough.

JD: I don't know why, but sound art/improvisation/experimentalism are vital scenes in Australia now. Thembi Soddell, Natasha Anderson, Amanda Stewart, Monika Brooks, Emily Morandini, Clare Cooper and Anthea Caddy are some names you should try and catch. The Splinter Orchestra from Sydney, which includes most of the interesting new and old musicians is doing great work, a new Cd will be out of this on splitrec soon.�

PF: There are many creative people doing things in Australia. In terms of the music I would tentatively say that in particular Sydney musicians are more instrumentalists, by that I mean musicians who improvise, exploring the sonic possibilities on their instruments. Some good examples that come to mind are Dale Gorfinkel and Robbie Avenaim’s vibraphone duo, Clayton Thomas prepared double bass, Jim Denley and Peter Blamey saxophone and no-input mixing desk duo.
Other great Australian musicians I would mention are Matt Earle, Adam Sussman, Joel Stern, Thembi Sodell, Anthea Caddy, Anthony Pateras, Natasha Anderson, and Amanda Stewart.
There is a problem in Australia where there is not a strong continuation of what has gone in the past. For the majority of younger musicians who have come up in the last five years, it feels like we are starting from scratch even though there is a long history of experimental music in Australia. In Sydney I feel the NOW now has given the community a sense of something solid to build on, and this is mostly through the work of Clayton.
The Splinter Orchestra has also been a strength in Sydney experimental music. This is an improvising orchestra with around 20, 25 musicians. The group started about six years ago and has strengthened its concept over this period greatly. Even though six years is not a long time, the Splinter Orchestra is one of the few groups in Australia who are regularly performing and have been doing so for this amount of time. It means that the members who are initially less experienced get a chance to try things out and learn from the other musicians in the group, and that the music never stays the same.