He played 200 days of pure noise. Now he’s performing in Melbourne

As Australia’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 2022, Marco Fusinato played guitar eight hours a day for 200 days straight. But he didn’t play a single song. In fact, he didn’t even play much of what most people would recognise as music.

“I can play chords and stuff, but it doesn’t interest me,” says the 60-year-old, who will perform a shorter version of his durational sound-and-vision work Desastres for the Now or Never festival in Melbourne next weekend (August 30-31). “The dread of a solo coming up, I have no interest, because it’s prescribed. I really want to be free and open to allow what I’m hearing to take me somewhere.”

Fusinato’s chosen medium is noise. Playing a custom-made aluminium guitar, he stands with his back to the audience – or, more accurately, with his face towards the large-scale LED screens onto which a selection of found images are conjured – and he improvises.

His guitar runs through an effects box, and distorts the noise emanating from the strings. Driven by a special computer chip, the box randomly selects which images from a databank of thousands to throw onto the screen, each selection triggered by and in sync with his playing.

What does it mean? Everything. Nothing. Whatever audiences want to make of it.

“Because I can’t control it, I have to let it go and allow others to bring it back to me, any form of meaning or discussion,” he says. “I’m interested in what you experienced, what you bring to it, and that’s always been what the work for me is about – making art and presenting it to the public and allowing for a complete misreading.”

Fusinato has been playing in the noise space since the mid-1990s. He has performed at festivals around the world – some of them niche music festivals, some slightly more mainstream, some art festivals, and some, like Now or Never, strange hybrid city festivals in which the distinction between all the above is rather blurred.

He’s never played at a Glastonbury or Coachella but, he says with gusto: “I’d love to. I’d love to kick Taylor Swift off her stage and take that scale of doing this noise shit. Imagine having those 32 semi-trailers and all that LED and doing this. That’s kind of where I see it.”

His two six-hour sets at Now or Never will be performed at Docklands Studios Melbourne, where he will be surrounded by the world’s largest LED volume screen, a near-360-degree curved wall standing 12 metres high.

“Because of the sheer scale of the screens, it’s quite different to any other versions I’ve done,” he says after his first test run. “Usually the screens are not that big. This is beyond anything.”

Scale has always been integral to the project, though. His starting idea for this performance was a desire to invert the typical trajectory of a musical act. “Usually they start off in a rehearsal room and the stage is tiny, they become popular and the rooms they play get bigger, but essentially, the footprint stays the same. But it’s not enough for entertainment reasons, so that’s when pyrotechnics come in, dancers, or huge LED screens.

“I thought: ‘Can I invent a project that begins at the stadium scale?’ So that’s when I decided I’d use LED screens as the singer in a way, as the focal point.”

Fusinato is resolutely a conceptual artist who happens to work with noise (and, as a collectable spin-off, prints of the found images he projects in his performances). One of his earliest pieces was a recording, Extended EP in E, released on vinyl in the mid-1990s. It contained a single chord, struck into a single groove on the record, which would be played over and over and over until the material broke down. “It was like minimalism that disintegrates into noise,” he says.

The idea that this pure anti-music would eventually find its way to the Australia Pavilion at the world’s biggest and most prestigious art fair is, he readily admits, kind of bonkers.

“A lot of people who came in there said they really couldn’t believe it got up. I think it was meant as a compliment,” he says. “A lot of the time it’s pretty ugly. It was a great honour to present something of sheer ugliness like that.”

And what does he hope audiences get from it?

“I always say exhaustion from confusion and disorientation, these kinds of effects,” he says. “I feel like resistance can be powerful, and something you may never have experienced may open you up to asking questions. We don’t all have to be in a group hug and enjoy everything.”

Now or Never, a “festival exploring the intersection of art, ideas, sound and technology”, runs August 22-31 in the City of Melbourne. Details: nowornever.melbourne.vic.gov.au