Snawklor

Contemporary visual artists Dylan Martorell and Nathan Gray have been making improvised electro-acoustic audio as Snawklor since 1996. Their unique sensibility constantly shifts it’s instrumentation while retaining a character based around a shimmering palette of metallic percussion, tones, accidents, interruptions and animal noises.

Snawklor began as the curatorial premise for the 50 Record Players exhibition, a series of gallery sound art shows focusing on Australian emerging, outsider and ultra-amateur compositions presented on lathe cut records. Their own musical practice began by DJing these records (each of which ended in a locked groove) and combining them with sound sculptures, broken CD players and found instruments.

Eventually they settled into a sound based around randomising samples from their diaristic collections of personal field recordings epitomised in their 2003 release It Would Have Lived Here and 5 other albums recorded between 2001 and 2010. Recent times have seen the duo living in different hemispheres and perversely increasing their creative output. In 2021 they released the EPs Perfumed Ground and Ceaseless Sun (digital / silkscreen) and in 2023 will release Materialising Distance.