Bundanon

Thomas Smith works primarily in the field of contemporary electronic and sample based music. Producing music since 2003, Thomas has released his music through four different independent labels in Australia, both solo and collaboratively, and have performed on over 150 occasions over that period in a range of contexts. Thomas also directs a Serial Space in Sydney, which has provided a valuable place for experimental musicians to develop and perform new work.

During his 2013 residency at Bundanon, Smith developed new work which is conceptually derived from his interest in the cliches of film scoring. At Bundanon he worked on his fifth release with which he endeavours to ‘interrogate the conventions of film scoring in an effort to reclaim emotive musical cues from their usual function as agents of cynical manipulation’. Smith analysed ‘moments at which film makers use music to manipulate audiences’. By isolating the musical cues used to create emotions in viewers at moments of [attempted] heightened empathy, and by putting those conventions under a musical microscope, Smith attempts to extrapolate, or perhaps extricate, emotive music from the banality of film cliche.