Rik Rue (born Richard Banachowicz) is an Australian experimental musician, and sound artist, known for his audio collages in recordings and live performance.
Biography.
Born in Sydney in 1950 to Polish refugee parents, Rue began constructing sound collages on tape from the age of 15, later encouraged by Australian painter and collage artist Carl Plate. He studied part-time at the Slade School, Camden Art Centre and Royal College of Art in London.
He first performed on saxophone with a number of prominent Sydney improvisers including Serge Ermoll, Jon Rose and Louis Burdett before switching to live mixing of sampled and pre-recorded sound on audio cassette recorders including the TASCAM Portastudio, describing the relationship between the two instruments, 'The tape is improvised in a sense, by equalisation, adding timbres, adding pitch controls, the various combinations of mixing. All those areas give you a sort of phrasing not unlike saxophonists altering their embouchure, and I approach the tapes in this manner.'
After releasing material on the Fringe Benefit label, in 1983 he created his own label Pedestrian Tapes, releasing his own and works by Michael Sheridan, Jim Denley, Jo Truman, John Gillies, Ian Hartley, Ernie Althoff and others. In the 1980s he was a member of the group Mind/Body/Split with Jim Denley, Sherre de Lyse, Jamie Fielding, Graham Leake and Kimo Venonen, and in 1989 he co-founded the performance ensemble Machine for Making Sense with Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley and Stevie Wishart, first performing at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria. Later he worked with performance group Gravity Feed on over 20 projects between 1994 and 2007 in Australia and Germany, Urban Theatre Projects, dancer Tess de Quincey, the group Social Interiors (with Shane Fahey and Julian Knowles), musicians David Moss, Eugene Chadbourne, Ikue Mori and released recordings on Extreme Records.
In 1995 his recordings were included in the exhibition "Sound In Space: Adventures In Australian Sound Art" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Sydney. The major sound work "Things Change, Things Remain The Same" commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, was exhibited as part of the major contemporary art exhibition "Australian Perspecta 1997: Between Art and Nature". It has been described as an 'outback road-trip of the mind'. His video and sound work "Fire and Water" was shown at SNO Gallery Sydney in 2014.
A number of Rue's early cassette recordings were re-released by Shame File Music from 2014. In 2018 the exhibition "In-Formalism" at the Casula Powerhouse, included a survey of his tape works.
Rue suffers from multiple sclerosis and is now no longer active in performing or recording.
Discography.
Radiophonic Works
Compilations
with Social Interiors
with Mind/Body/Split
with Machine for Making Sense
References.
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