THE DOUBLE

Jim White and Emmet Kelly are The Double.
Jim plays drums and Emmett strums his electric guitar.
Another fella, James Turrell, is an American artist who plays around with light.
What do these guys have in common you may ask?
Well I went to see The Double play a few years back. They play a piece of music which lasts 45 minutes. Cool rhythmic drums and an E Major guitar strum. No changes. No slowing down. No speeding up, just constant. During the performance I kept hearing other melodies, bass lines, other guitar parts and sounds.
But there was only the two of them. What the hell was going on?
In James Durrell’s Skyspace installation at The National Gallery in Canberra, you sit in a circular room at Dawn or dusk and you look at or through a hole in the domed ceiling. As night turns to day or day turns to night
The light and colours change dramatically. But what I saw, the colours and changes in light were always
Slightly or greatly different to what my friend was seeing.
As with The Double, what I was hearing in my head was probably different to what other people were hearing.
In the light dome I was seeing blue black. My friend seeing orange yellow flames.
With both the music and the art, our minds were adding to the performance.
Twisting and turning.
Out of this world

– Peter Oxley (Sunnyboys / The Aints!)

RISING’s Artist in Residence, Jim White and long-term collaborator and guitarist Emmett Kelly (aka The Double) are joined by brand-new collaborator Jo Lloyd, to create a physically and musically intense catharsis to open RISING.

Jim White and Emmett Kelly bring the background of countless uninvented rock and roll songs, right to the front.

Traversing the space is choreographer Jo Lloyd and her dancers—their intricate patterns loop and persist, working against and with the sound.

In this takeover of a traditionally silent and reverent space—music and dance strike a balance between perpetual stasis and perpetual motion.