IONIC

Ionic emerged in Newcastle in the early 2000s as a sample-driven electronic project, built almost entirely from found recordings. The work moved slowly — downtempo, rhythm-led, drifting from one idea into the next without interruption. Tracks folded into each other, refusing clear beginnings or endings, favouring progression over resolution.

The source material came largely from vinyl: jazz records, orchestral and classical recordings centuries old, fragments of spoken word, poetry, and incidental dialogue. Much of it was unearthed through discarded broadcast archives — record libraries being dismantled at the ABC in Newcastle and Melbourne — revealing a dense and often overlooked musical history. Disco was avoided. Groove and texture were not.

Live, these pieces were performed in unlikely contexts: rock pubs, outdoor festivals, temporary shopfronts, daytime park events. At the time, the work sat slightly out of place, and that dislocation became part of its identity. The music asked for attention rather than spectacle, and audiences responded.

These recordings were released as physical artefacts — CDs produced in small runs, each one hand-painted or colour-printed, no two quite the same. They circulated briefly, mostly among collectors, or among people who happened to be paying attention during Newcastle’s early-2000s pub music drift. None of it ever migrated to streaming platforms. What remains here is the music as it existed then — finite, local, and unrepeatable.

Ionic formally disbanded in 2016. The work, however, didn’t stop. What follows are recordings made during and afterward, collaborations with other artists, continuing the same line of enquiry in different forms.