Julian Knowles is a composer, performer, media artist and researcher, specialising in new and emerging technologies. His creative work spans the fields of composition for theatre, dance, film and television, electronic music, sound design and media arts, popular music and record production.
His practice-based research demonstrates a long-standing, high-level engagement with technologically-mediated music and sound practices and the relationships between audio-visual media. This has resulting in the creation of more than 50 innovative works that have been disseminated by high profile record labels, broadcasters and art institutions internationally. In the course of his career Julian has worked with many of Australia’s best-known musicians in the experimental music scene and has been a member of the Australian electro-environmental audio group Social Interiors since the mid 1990s. As a solo artist, Julian’s music and audio/visual works have been presented at events and venues such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Experimental Intermedia in New York City, What is Music?, Australian Perspecta, Liquid Architecture, the Melbourne International Film Festival, VIVID Sydney and the Sydney Opera House.
Julian has an extensive background in the Australian and UK independent music scenes, playing in and producing records for bands from the late-1980s onwards. One of his bands, Even As We Speak, achieved significant chart success in the UK and was one of only four Australian bands ever to be invited to record sessions for the prominent BBC Radio 1 DJ, John Peel.
Current creative projects include an Australia Council funded audio-visual work in collaboration with Tim Bruniges and David Trumpmanis from The Dead Sea, and the development of a new work for guitar and digital signal processing entitled ‘The Flashcard Sequences’, funded by Arts Queensland. Other projects include engineering and co-producing an album by esteemed Australian musicians Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey, founding members of The Saints, and a new solo album for Ed Kuepper entitled ‘Second Winter’. Julian is a founder and leader (with Donna Hewitt) of the mediatized performance group Macrophonics.
Julian is a Professor of Music and Media in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, where he is also the Research Leader for the Music and Sound Cultures Group and the Creative Ecologies Lab.
