From footpath chatter to tracks: an Australian composer profile

In a foam-paneled back room of a Brunswick share house, a Melbourne-based composer builds entire songs from the voices of strangers. No instruments are played in the traditional sense, and no lyrics are written. Every chord, hook and vocal line on her debut EP was lifted from a tram argument, a market haggling, or a long arvo catch-up at a South Melbourne cafe. The tracks feel strangely intimate, like overhearing a phone call you were never meant to hear.

She is part of a small but growing cohort of Australian sound artists who treat the everyday chatter of the country as raw material. They are part field recordist, part composer, part archivist, and their work raises fresh questions about consent, authorship and what actually counts as a song. The results are often surprising: footpath banter that lands like a pop hook, a queue at the post office that turns into a four-on-the-floor banger.

A practice built from the everyday

The composer at the centre of this story, who performs as Iris Bekele, started collecting recordings in 2019 as a side project while studying composition at the Victorian College of the Arts. Her first portable recorder was a battered Zoom unit bought second-hand from a Cashies in Fitzroy for less than a slab's worth of pocket money. She began capturing snippets of conversation on the 96 tram, at the Queen Victoria Market deli halls, and during long afternoon walks through the back streets of Carlton.

Five tracks from her debut EP, and the conversations behind them:

Track Source Material Original Location Standout Element
"Greengrocer" A vendor explaining his markup Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne Rhythmic call-and-response
"Bondi Bus 333" Commuters debating the route change Bondi Junction, Sydney Layered, overlapping voices
"Post Office Blues" Seniors queueing at the GPO Melbourne GPO, Bourke St Slow, swaying tempo
"Kebab Conversation" Two chefs trading jokes after close A Brunswick kebab shop Laughter used as percussion
"Rooftop Smoke Break" Builders on a high-rise North Sydney construction site Ambient city hum as bed

Each track began as a long, unedited field recording. Bekele then sifts through the audio in software like Reaper and Ableton, chopping phrases, stretching syllables, and pitching the human voice into melodic shapes. The finished songs are sometimes unrecognisable as speech, sometimes left almost untouched.

The work sits somewhere between musique concrète and pop production. Where Pierre Schaeffer's mid-century experiments treated recorded sound as sculpture, Bekele's tracks lean warmer and more melodic. Critics have drawn loose parallels with the conceptual playfulness of Gotye, with a touch of Lawrence English's field-recording patience.

How a footpath chat becomes a chorus

The technique is deceptively simple. A field recorder runs for hours in places where Bekele expects rich conversation: a busy bar, a polling station, a sausage sizzle outside Bunnings. Back at her Brunswick studio, she listens back at half-speed, marking moments where the cadence of speech suggests rhythm, or where the pitch contour feels melodic.

She is quick to point out that nothing is added. No synths, no drum machines, no overdubs of her own voice. If a track needs a bassline, she finds it in a passing car horn or the hum of a West Gate Bridge cycle lane. The challenge, she says, is listening with the patience of an engineer and the intuition of a songwriter.

The results have landed surprisingly well on Australian radio. Triple J gave early spins to "Greengrocer," built from a market trader explaining his pricing. The track became a left-of-centre staple on the station's Home & Hosed rotation, with presenters describing it as the kind of song that makes you stop mid-task. Bekele credits a chunk of her audience growth to that early support from the ABC, and to a handful of independent Melbourne blogs that picked up the EP.

The Australian soundscape as collaborator

Australia offers a particularly rich palette for this kind of work. The country's multicultural fabric and dry conversational style produce a sonic environment that is hard to replicate elsewhere. A queue at a suburban post office in Reservoir might include Greek, Vietnamese, Mandarin and broad Australian English all in the space of two minutes. That density of voices, layered over cicadas and distant traffic, gives recordings a built-in harmonic richness.

There is also something about the cadence of Australian speech that lends itself to rhythm. The clipped vowels, the upward inflection at the end of a sentence, the way whole sentences shorten to a word or two: all of it produces naturally musical phrasing. Bekele often talks about how the rising terminal pitch of an Aussie question gives her unexpected melodic material. A simple "yeah, nah?" at the right moment can carry an entire verse.

Practical realities shape the work, too. Studio rent in Sydney's inner west makes long, patient projects difficult, so many artists in this space operate out of bedrooms, share houses and converted warehouses in places like Marrickville, Brunswick and West Footscray. The relative scarcity of major-label attention means Australian experimental musicians often build audiences through grassroots channels: Bandcamp, community radio, festivals like Golden Plains and Mona Foma. That DIY infrastructure has been quietly encouraging a more adventurous approach to songwriting for years.

From solo project to shared sessions

What began as a solitary exercise has slowly grown into something more communal. Bekele now hosts occasional listening sessions in Fitzroy, where she plays raw recordings and invites other musicians to respond in real time. The format borrows from jazz workshop culture and from the structured improvisation favoured by Australian experimentalists like Jim Moginie.

She has also started collaborating with dancers and movement artists, treating the recorded conversation as a score that bodies can interpret. Some of these sessions have evolved into a recurring weekly gathering in Melbourne's inner north, where musicians and dancers trade improvised responses to Bekele's archive of field recordings. The meetups sit at the intersection of performance, dance and sound art, and have begun to attract a small but loyal crew of regulars. Anyone curious about the format can read more in the weekly improv guide.

These sessions are changing her own practice. Bekele admits that hearing dancers interpret her recordings has revealed musical relationships she would never have noticed alone. A pause in conversation can be a perfect cue for a slow turn across the floor. A burst of laughter becomes a signal for collective movement. The feedback loop between listener and source material has become part of the work itself, and the next phase of the project will lean even further into that collaboration.

How to listen, and where to follow the story

Bekele's debut EP has drawn thoughtful coverage in Australian press, with longer features in The Guardian's music section, The Saturday Paper, and a recent profile on ABC Radio National's The Stage Show. International interest has begun to creep in too, with small write-ups in The Quietus and a handful of European community radio stations picking up the tracks. Readers who want to follow that momentum as it builds can keep an eye on the Mass Musings press page, which collects recent coverage and platform updates in one spot.

For listeners approaching this kind of work for the first time, a few practical suggestions help.