Olivia Block Interview

Source: Folio Weekly.

Experimental music offers a rare, if not paradoxical, experience of being able to repel and attract listeners; sometimes in the same passage of time. Pioneering 20th-century composers like John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Meredith Monk explored moments of chance, improvisation and merging acoustic instruments with nascent electronics. In the latter half of the century, artists such as Diamanda Galas, Nurse with Wound, Merzbow and others emerged, ramping up the experiment with even greater investigations, aggression and textural ecstasy.

Experimental music is confrontational and invitational, demanding a response from the listener. Whether repulsed or enchanted, the listener is invariably somehow changed.

Olivia Block is an artist working in the current aeon of audio mavericks. The availability of affordable technology and encouraging precedence offers Block and her peers the power of aesthetic groundwork and a wellspring of once-impossible sounds.