Andrew Garton was born in Guildford, NSW, Australia, in 1962. He began producing and performing music in the late 70s as synthesist, saxophonist and spoken word performer. Bands of note that Andrew performed with include the punk/soul group Private Lives (1979 – 1983) and fusion/impro outfit Lingo Babel (1985-1987). In the late 80s he formed the acoustic based White Punks on Hope and the jazz-punk trio, Return from Nowhere.Andrew has composed numerous documentary soundtracks, conceived and produced interactive installations, both on and offline; published articles on independent media, generative music and radio art; and worked with pioneer community internet provider, Pegasus Networks.
He has contributed to several international and Australian collaborations with artists such as Stelarc, Ludwig Zeininger, Kazayuki Null, Hank Bull, Ollie Olsen, Brian Eno, Tetsuo Kogawa, Martin Breindl and Jimi Chen. Andrew has performed with the International Theremin Orchestra and continues to be commissioned to produce sound works for both radio and Internet. He produced perhaps the first generative sound piece for Australian radio and internet in 1997, a collaboration with Stelarc, for The Listening Room (now off-air) and co-produced a series of live audio-video collaborations commencing in Melbourne in 1998 and culminating in a series of works for the the opening of the Taipei International Arts Festival in 2001. From 1997 – 1999 he co-founded, wrote, produced and performed with the Austrian based Electro-Pathological Consort and in 2005 Garton curated the innovative generative sound series, Frequency Post, for the Vienna based, KunstRadio.
His published works include articles in Journal of New Musique Australia, Fibreculture Reader, RealTime, 21C and he co-authored the landmark Pan Asia Networking Report (1994) – a comprehensive report on early Internet usage in the Asia region commissioned and published by the International Development and Research Centre, Singapore. His most recent works have been published in At a Distance (MIT Press), the online journal Sleepy Brain and Filter (Australian Network for Art and Technology).
