There was nowhere else to go but inside

On 16 October 2024 musician, composer, visionary and collaborator extraordinaire, Ollie Olsen returned to star dust. Ollie had been a tremendous support and influence to countless. He was greatly respected and loved. We got to know each other over a hectic couple of decades creating sound works, performances and installations in Melbourne, Newcastle and Austria. This is how I came to know about the great man.

Andrew Garton
Oct 25, 2024

Crystalline excretions grew deep underground drip by drop. Timeless. Ancient passageways emerged from glistening rock in all directions. I had been in a reverie of listening and what I heard took me down, way down beneath the Brisbane River where it flowed parallel to Oxlade Drive. Twenty seconds in and a choral-like voice evoked the first tumbling of primal drums accompanying my descent. The pace quickened, and I seemed to be flying into a cavern lit by stars reflected through countless quartz crystals embedded within a nest of barely perceptible shafts riven through bedrock. Then, a voice, as if gouged from coal and ground pestle-like into sentences, emerged from the vast speleogenesis landscape, from the step stomp of beats. Into your mind. The vastness had spoke! Timeless.

This was a strident, self-assured music emanating from everywhere within an ancient, timeless chamber. How it evoked this was as beguiling as finding myself here. And it was here, in the centre of this void of smooth rock and myriad stalactites overhead, a single eye-ball of improbable proportions was suspended. It was big! It blinked and simultaneously I heard a pulse of sorts. A repeating sine wave, hypnotic and primal. Voices invited me to it, the eye. Then! A breath! A pause… It blinked again. There was no where else to go but inside, to.it, the music, the eye.

I was in my bed. It was late. I had headphones on and listening to Third Eye’s Ancient Future. An album I would cycle over and over, mesmerised by it, allowing the music to create spaces I imagined beneath me, beneath the weatherboard cottage I’d spent 14 months in Brisbane in. I was listening to a brooding, yet expansive and seductive electronic music.

Techno had been on the outer periphery of my world of music. Its repetitive beats as meaningless and mournful as the chaotic, senseless wailing I’d thought punk was about; its social story, its political dimensions as lost on me as were the raves flourishing in forests, warehouses and Brisbane’s nightclubs. It was 1993. I’d been living in Brisbane for about a year when I met Kathleen ‘BigK’ Williamson. BigK had been photographing a live interpretation of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. Frankenwein was performed by the Omniscient Gallery at the former Woolloongabba rubber factory where the then Sydney based musician, David Nerlich and I were performing a live and noisy underscore.

BigK invited me to contribute my bare butt in a polaroid photo series of infamous Brisbane bottoms. At the informal launch of her series BigK introduced me to another of her butt models, local electronic music producer, Andy Bagley. She was eager to have us work together on a play she was involved with.

With our butts having had their 5 minutes of fame behind us, Andy and I agreed to work together on a score for the Brisbane based Debacle Theatre Company’s interpretation of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. The book was published in 1962, the year I was born. Burgess had written it up as a play in 1987 and it was this reworking of his well known futuristic classic that would be seen for the first time on an Australian stage.

In the weeks that followed Andy and I set to work on music drawing inspiration from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Hitler’s apocalyptic speeches on agricultural productivity and our distinctively individual music making approaches, Andy’s driven by beats and bass riffs and mine by aleatoric melodies, textures and drones.

Our collaboration took place in Andy’s well equipped studio. It housed the most diverse collection of keyboards and synths I had ever seen. Andy had synthesizers from every era of their making and we would use many of them. But first, before we recorded a single note we would get to know each other through the music we listened to at that time. At our first gathering in the studio I’d brought Andreas Ammer and FM Einheit’s Radio Inferno which remains a thrilling inspiration to me. When it came time for Andy to share his offering he began with a Front 242 album. I recall it being loud, hard and bereft of harmony. I didn’t like it. Then, Andy loaded up Quilombo, the 1991 release from JG Thirwell’s Steriod Maximus project. I was so taken by it I bought a CD of the album the following weekend and listened to it so much I doubt I’ll listen to it ever again. He then played Third Eye’s Ancient Future and I was drop-jaw smitten!

Who’s this, I asked?

This, Andy replied, is Ollie Olsen.

Huh? Ollie… Olsen?

I’d first heard Ollie’s name in 1980 I’d when his song Win/Lose appeared on 2JJ; a desperate appeal for sanity amid deranged and uncertain times. I adored its odd shuffle, its angular motion, its weird organ grinder aesthetic. Win/Lose was one of those pieces that changed the way I listened to music and what I would look for in it.

I told Andy that throughout the 1980s Ollie’s trajectories in music somehow found me in many of my own. Bands such as Orchestra of Skin and Bone, Whirlywirld and No would feed my curiosity for this man’s bewildering creativity. But Ollie Olsen writing, producing and releasing techno? On a label of his own making too! At first, it didn’t make sense, but here was a music that was not only infectious it had cadence, harmony, an orchestral kind of approach to its arrangements and it had a dynamism that I could listen to. Yes, I actually could listen to Ollie’s techno as I would Bach or Bowie.

Andy loaned me the album and that evening I rode back to my Newfarm cottage, parked the bike, slid off my helmet and leapt up the wooden stairs, opened the door, changed into shorts and a t-shirt and lay in bed with a pair of headphones plugged into a portable CD player I kept atop a stack of books. I flipped open the player, inserted Ancient Future, pushed down the lid, pressed Play and Repeat. I laid back and closed my eyes.

Just as The Clash and Elvis Costello eventually led me to the wide world of punk, Ollie’s Third Eye tuned my ears to techno that was musical, that had history to its making and a creative dimension I’d not heard, nor understood before. Here, embedded within Ollie’s Ancient Future, were elements of Stockhausen, Noi, Can, Ligeti, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Gorecki.

In the years that followed I would dance the fuck out of Ollie’s music and we would work together on any number of projects – Terminal Quartet, Regenerative/Generative, D3 Derive to name but a few – and share in each others deeper thoughts and aspirations, but back then, it was all about laying on my bed in an old Brisbane weatherboard, a crisp evening in 1993 with possums scampering across corrugated iron, fruit bats camped in the trees outside and the Brisbane river nearby as I lay listening, going nowhere else but to Ollie’s third eye suspended there

Rest in Love Ollie.