The Music of Barbed Wire

In this video of Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor, the two violinists saw, rattle, yank, and otherwise torture fences all over Australia. The noises they draw from the wires are exactly what you would expect to hear from the materials at hand, and that's perfect.

The Australian violinist Jon Rose has fiddled with fences for some years now. THE FENCE(1998) saw him bowing fences dividing disputed territories in Belfast, Golan Heights, Bosnia and Berlin, with surprisingly affecting results. Here, he and Hollis Taylor travel their native land banging and scraping various fences, long and short, famous and unknown. In Cunerdin, they coax celestial tones from Rabbit Proof Fence No 2; in Nullarbor, the Dog Fence, built to stem the migration of dingoes, rattles and hums; at the close, a fence specially built at the Melbourne Festival throbs and drones for nine disorientating minutes, before an aeolian splutter of the Dog Fence's last grid, in Tambo, echoes the vastness of the delineated continent. This luxuriously packaged item comes with a free piece of barbed wire.

There's a lot of art critique about the Fence; much studious pondering on the subject of borders and barriers and linear this and that. But the project has a nostalgia to it that brings to mind the vast amounts of time I spent as a child, rattling fences, gates and walls with hands, feet and whatever weapons I could procure, often producing noises just like Rose and Taylor's. The best bit is not the noise so much as the physical feedback of the material itself, the whirring and thudding and the rain of dust and particulate from the crannies. But for that, you'll have to get your own fence n' sticks.

Great Fences of Australia [Jon Rose]