Name: Amby Downs
Nationalities: Australian
Occupation: Sound artist, composer
Current release: Amby Downs's Ngunmal is out via Room40.

If you enjoyed this Amby Downs interview and would like to find out more about her music, visit her on Instagram.



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in sound?

Yes, I think growing up with my mum listening to Deep Purple and Led Zepplin definitely planted a seed. And then later, in my early teens, my step-dad loved Sonic Youth, Joy Division, Porno for Pyros etc, which was also formative for me.

During high-school I sought out music that gave me new and big feelings, sought out stuff with production styles I hadn't heard before (even though at the time I did not have the language for that), always looking for new things.

I was an avid listener from an early age and it only got more intense as I grew up.

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what are examples for this– and do you feel there is a systematic or logic behind these sensations?

The sounds of the bush in hot weather bring up strong feelings – insects, birds, dry grass.

From the age of 10 I lived across the road from national parkland on Katamorda (the Darling Ranges) on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar. The sound of creeks in the bush always gets me too, there was a creek close to that house I lived in near that bushland and I remember going there when I felt both adventurous or sad. I've heard that the sounds of water reduces stress in humans, and that fits within my experience.

I currently live near a couple of creeks and when I can I like to sit and think about human history on those creeks, find traces of that history, observe the local ecosystems. I taught my dog to collect rubbish from the water, the sound of her splashing around looking for plastic and chip packets is a big nice sound. On the flip side, loud planes and helicopters fuck with me - I grew up with an Oma who was a child during Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, I think that's where that one comes from.

Banging doors and people shouting are from my own PTSD, those things can completely throw me and send my heart racing. The sound of machinery too, associated with destruction of bush land from when I've spent time in environmental protest situations, and living near construction sites during lock-downs, feeling completely fucked because I can't escape the noise.

For some, music equals sound, to others they are two distinct things. What is the relation between music and sound for you? Are there rules to working with sound, similar to working with harmony, for example?

All music is sound, but not all sound is music. I never intended to make music, I set out to create sound works. Sometimes it is musical ...



... but not always.



I try not to pick apart the hows and whys – I am not trained in these things, I just make things and allow the emergence of whatever needs to come out.

What were your very first active steps in terms of working with sound and how would you rate the gains made through experience – can one train/learn being an artist/producer?

I started with sound when I was making a series of short films for a solo exhibition – Kinjarling Studies - while living on Menang Noongar boodjar (Albany, Western Australia).

I was given some cultural and language education by Menang man Larry Blight while I was working on the pieces, which guided their construction. I learnt how to listen more deeply to Country, he taught me the beginning of a decolonial approach to understanding what the sounds I recorded with my camera were communicating. This lead to creating soundtracks for the films, piecing together audio recordings from each area and constructing them to create a layered experience intended to express something about deep time and relationality.

This is the first sound track I made:



I have never had any formal training in music or sound production, but I have picked things up along the way from youtube tutorials and from multiple friends who have those skills – these lessons have been extremely valuable.

But sometimes I kind of long to be back at the beginning stage where I was working things out for myself without any consideration of the technical side of sound production, going off instinct and feel alone.

How and for what reasons has your music set-up evolved over the years and what are currently some of the most important pieces of gear and software for you?

My music set-up started with a digital SLR, my phone's audio recorder, and Adobe Premiere. These days I have Ableton Live and a midi-controller too. These were brought on board once I was convinced to start playing live sets.

I still rely heavily on my original set-up; I barely know how to use Ableton for production. A friend gifted me a set of home-made hydrophones, which I haven't used yet, but I imagine they will become extremely important once I start incorporating them in to my sound capturing process.

Yann Tiersen, in a surprising statement, told me: “I feel more sincere with electronic instruments” - is that something you can relate to?

I'm not sure if I use electronic instruments ... I mean, I use electronic devices and software to manipulate field recordings, but I don't generate new sounds from electronic instruments alone.

Maybe with time and experience I'll come to have a better understanding of what he meant by this.

Late producer SOPHIE said: “You have the possibility with electronic music to generate any texture, and any sound. So why would any musician want to limit themselves?” What's your take on that and the relevance of limitations in your set-up and process?

My only limitations are access to tools, ability to use them, and desire to do so, and that's not limitations I want, just the reality of it.

I can always learn stuff, I do always learn stuff, but dopamine difficulties guides a lot of my interests in learning things, so if I can get dopamine from it, i'll do it, and I'll do it a lot, until the dopamine runs out. And if I don't get dopamine and it's not something I HAVE to do, I won't bother because it will exhaust and upset me very quickly.

I think sometimes it can be useful to choose limitations though, working within a particular set of parameters can lead to interesting results. Everyone makes their own choices.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your sounds, pieces, or live performances that's particularly dear to you, please?

Ngunmal is a work that was commissioned by Room2 for Bleed Festival in 2022.



Working with a loose theme of “boundaries”, I focused in on the violence of fences in the colonial context. I filmed a stretch of land I have spent time with on Boonwurrung Country, land cleared a long time ago for the sake of cattle grazing, the fences stark, the clearing stark.

These days the fences keep the cattle in, stop them from trampling nearby gardens or wandering on to roads, but originally fences were built to keep out blackfullas too, built by the settler colonists to claim the land for themselves and give themselves permission to shoot anyone who dared jump the fence.

Lawrence English gifted me some recordings he made of sounds of fences, I made my own recordings of the fences I filmed, and I used sounds and music samples from multiple youtube videos of Australian fence builders showing different ways to build and fix fences, nighttime surveillance footage of dingos, and videos of people hunting dingos. I constructed the work as a meditation, layered loops of different lengths with the intention to softly hypnotise.

[Read our Lawrence English interview]
[Read our Lawrence English interview about sound]

Joel Spring collaborated with me on the project to make it interactive in its presentation; he came up with a brilliant strategy of bombarding the audience with quick-fire statements and questions to get them thinking about their relationship to colonialism, the division of land, land ownership, land theft.

His text was displayed at the top of the video, and in the presentation during the festival, audiences both in the room and online were able to write or draw their responses, which were shown on top of the video itself.

We decided on the name “Ngunmal” for the work, because it is a word shared by our languages (mine Yuwaalaraay / Gamilaraay, his Wiradjuri) for fence, or boundary.

In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like?

I use the word “construct”, because I feel like a builder, but the building rarely has a set plan to it. I build off feel, in response to feelings that come up as the piece takes shape, working towards a particular atmosphere the emerges organically.

To some, the advent of AI and “intelligent” composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?

I've been experimenting with what I call AI toys a lot this year, readily available AI things that have been released for easy public use. I'm interested in their chaotic nature, I like to play with slightly abstracted inputs to see how the system responds, and will happily include these responses in my work if they feel suitable.



As with all new technologies, humans will adapt it to their needs and desires in many different ways. There will be some who use it to exploit, for greed, others who use it for fun, to play, and other who use it to help, and make things better / easier, and probably a bunch of other ways of using it too.

Technology changes have always lead to the loss of some jobs and the creation of others, and they have always generated cultural responses to these changes, with some people not wanting to engage with the new technologies and others devoting themselves completely to it.

I'm interested in playing with it, but also interested in learning about how and why it came to be, what other things it's used for, the political and economic implications etc. These ethical questions will guide how I use it, or don't use it, in the future.

How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the “acoustic health” of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health? What importance does silence hold in this regard from your point of view?

I'm not sure that natural environmental silence is ever truly possible, I feel like there will always be some sound in any given area.

When I started making “music” in 2019, I kind of stopped listening to music, and spend a lot of time listening to environmental sounds. In my local area, I feel the acoustic health isn't too good, and it definitely has a negative impact on me. I know there should be more variety of native birds and insects, but the most common ones I hear are doves and introduced myna birds.

It is frustrating and in the wrong mood, with not enough sleep or too much other stressors going on it can make me incredibly sad. I don't hear as many magpies as I would like to. I hear too many people yelling angrily at each other or themselves on the street late at night. These, to me, are signs of unhealthy society, unhealthy Country.

Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?

I have felt my hearing degrade as I get older, but I haven't yet done much to take precautions other than limiting my interaction with damaging levels of sound.

I don't go out to gigs very often anymore, I keep my headphones at a decent volume when I'm working on sound, etc.

Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?

I don't know much about the science of hearing, and I wonder what members of the deaf community would have to say about Horowitz's statement.

But in terms of listening more than looking, I'd like to direct readers to the concept of Dadirri, from the Ngan'gikurunggurr and Ngen'giwumirri languages of the Aboriginal peoples of the Daly River region of Northern Territory.