Brabury: Severance Play.

Bradbury plays Straight Out Of Brisbane on Wednesday at Club Oops, downstairs at the Elephant & Wheelbarrow Hotel.

Long serving Aussie musician Gary Bradbury has been at the forefront of experimental Australian sounds for years now (23 to be exact). He's one of the founding members of Severed Heads, as well as their old artistic director. Club Oops is playing host to the man in Brisbane this Wednesday night, and it should be a memorable show. We had a brief chat earlier this week.

How long have you been creating music in Australia?

“Since 1979.”

Can you give us a brief run down of the bands you've played in?

“Early Wet Taxis, Hiroshima Chair, Severed Heads, Battleship Potato, Target Audience, Size and quite a few more.”

How does your industrial past relate to your current musical endeavours?

“I still use the same massive dirty kick drum noise, or variations of it, that I came upon back in 1981 using the Electroharmonics Big Muff. I've held onto all my analogue gear over the years (Korg, Roland, Moog, and my best friend the Kawaii Synthi100f) and it still forms the basis of my sound. But things have changed much more than they've stayed the same.”

 How was playing in Severed Heads?

“Hilarious. Often thankless, small audience for weird electronic stuff in those days - I worked with Tom Ellard from 1981 thru to 1984. Since then I've directed and designed three videos for Heads on separate occasions.”

Can you run through how your video work fits in with your music?

“It's all a matter of layering, cutting together disparate elements, whether that's an visual image or a sound. It's all driven by the compulsion to collage; to extract something remarkable from the vast junkyard of banality that we inhabit.”

You described your current music as Molecular Glam. Please explain?

“Tiny clickety crystaline detail sprinkled over chunks of crunchy fat mutant boogie.”

Can you describe your studio set-up for all the nerds out there?

“A huge dusty pile of junk in various states of repair with a three year old PC sitting in the middle of it being furiously tinkered with by a wild eyed chain smoking aspiring alcoholic.”

How do you play when you perform live?

“I prepare fresh mixes of my sequenced material and layer either live analogue or samples over the top. The whole issue of playing live is problematic in that I like my music to be fully automated and I'm not the least bit interested in the idea of ‘self expression’.”