Bucketrider have distinguished themselves as one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary music ensembles in Australia. Founded nearly a decade ago by David Brown, Sean Baxter and Tim O'Dwyer, the group has been at the forefront of experimental music in Melbourne since its inception. As adept in the rarefied realms of improvisation and new music as they are with the raw energy of free jazz and punk rock, bucketrider fuse these disparate styles into a coherent and exciting whole. Intent on breaching the artificial boundaries that exist between so-called serious and popular music, they have successfully introduced rock audiences to the energy of free jazz, jazz audiences to the vibrancy of punk, and classical audiences to the delights of contemporary improvisation. In addition to this specialised repertoire, bucketrider have also gained a reputation in Melbourne's pub music scene as a dynamic and exciting live act. They have been instrumental in cultivating a creative dialogue between the avant garde and indie rock scenes in Melbourne and are just as likely to perform alongside alternative rock bands as they are to appear at jazz and new music festivals.

Their collaborations with new music composer Kate Neal (Hyrax) and the contemporary dance group, Dance Works (Funky and Freezing) at the 2000 Melbourne International Festival were runaway successes, highlighting the band's adaptability and talent with captivating and passionate performances.

The group has also been involved in recent performances of John Coltrane's Meditations (November 2001, Wangaratta Jazz Festival; January 2001, Melbourne International Jazz Festival) and Om (December 2001), and the work of free jazz luminary, Sun Ra (January 2000, Melbourne International Jazz Festival; February 2001, Continental Café, Melbourne). bucketrider's interest in the formative expressions of free jazz is supplemented by an equally reverent interest in the traditions of twentieth-century modernist experimentation.

They have a number of compositions which exploit the formal innovations of modernism such as serialism, stochasticism and aleatory.

However, these systems, designed to furnish the musical composition with total control, are given a contemporary edge, subverted through the application of practices like improvisation, arbitrary closure and strategies of guerrilla disruption.

This conjunction of modernist and postmodernist musical techniques and preoccupations significantly informs three of bucketrider's most adventurous compositions: Art is a Beautifully Rhymed Curse (1998) adopts the modernist song-cycle (most notably expressed in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire) and subjects it to multiple levels of disruption from outside forces, designed to destabilise the form itself while producing a meta-composition that is irreducible to the individual techniques animating it; Nun (1999) is a Cagean work which exploits the traditions of aleatory and improvisation, forcing these antithetical approaches together in order to produce new expressions unique to both approaches; finally, The Bucketrider (1997) is a game-piece in the style of American composer John Zorn's Cobra, employing a process which progressively limit the capacity of the performers to play even though they are required to play nonetheless.

http://www.snuffpuppets.com/bucketrider/

User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License and may also be available under the GNU FDL.