Words by Riley Fitzgerald
Graphic by Her Memory Dies with Me

Brisbane’s experimental music scene, and some of this city’s best music, has always thrived in overlooked spaces. These include parks, student share houses, underpasses, and other marginal spaces where rules and regulations thin. As a record‑store owner, people often ask me what this local scene is “like,” and it is hard to explain. It is something you have to be in.

This is not an elitist thing. Anyone respectful is welcome, the gigs are publicly announced, and the music is often free or by donation. But it is not an arcade game or a slot machine. It is not a safari I could drive you to and show you in five minutes. You do not put money in and get satisfaction out. You step into a decentralised, shifting network of people, places and practices. The deepest meaning comes from being a part of it.

Yvette Ofa Agapow’s work in Brisbane’s experimental music scene

I was recently given a copy of the IMA’s September 2025 edition of Town Hall by gallery co‑ordinator Shae Craze. In the paper, I read an interesting article called Flowers in the Gutter about Yvette Ofa Agapow’s recent shows in the Annerley drains. These events have been happening on a loosely bi‑monthly basis since 2023, each drawing steady audiences — sometimes as many as one hundred people — from across the city. Agapow, a local artist whose practice spans sound, performance and community organising, is focusing here on creating temporary public spaces for experimental work outside traditional music venues.

ATOPOS and the 2010s Ecology Of the Brisbane Noise Scene

I had already been watching fragments of these shows, and similar gigs, through Marek Rygielski’s Blend42 channel. As a record‑store owner, it is my go‑to source for almost every DIY show I cannot attend in person. His videos are sparse on context and usually show only an artist’s name, date, and location. Even so, by watching who played with whom, and who was in the audience, I began to make connections. I began to put together what was evolving. In my head, I began to trace a line back to earlier noise‑scene events like Reel Bad Music in Moorooka. This was back in the 2010s. When Breakdance the Dawn’s Matt Earle hosted house shows and recorded hundreds of local artists. Through these videos, I could see that this lineage — informal, prolific, and defiantly outside the mainstream — was still shaping the city’s experimental culture today.

All of this informed my reading of the Town Hall piece. Once it clicked, I checked whether ATOPOS had any music online. They did. A range of CD‑R titles and DIY cassette tapes appeared on the site. I ordered a few for my own enjoyment and for Glitter Records, my store. As often happens, an extra tape arrived by chance. I felt I had to listen and see what it was about.

A shift in the Emotional and Material Conditions of DIY

That tape was I love you, alive girl (HMDWM2), a new release from Oscar Keating and Agapow’s Her Memory Dies with Me series of improvisational recordings.

Before I get into my impressions of the cassette, I should note that Keating’s involvement adds another thread to this lineage. His work with Coo and related projects was recommended to me by a trusted friend years ago when I asked what new music in Brisbane felt vital. It took me some time to make good on that recommendation, but after finding Keating’s recent a body in motion CD, I have come to agree he is an artist worth paying attention to.

As I listened, I found myself thinking about the music’s character. It feels ephemeral, noise that is somehow soothing. It creates a feeling that is hard to name, but I will try to articulate it here. To me, the music reflects a shifting world and captures a moment when the city’s DIY community is quietly reorienting itself. It’s renegotiating its relationship to space, sound and public presence in a landscape that feels more restrictive each year.

Much of the 2010s experimental landscape relied on abrasion. Noise acted as adrenaline. It came through a half‑broken guitar string or a circuit‑broken synthesizer sputtering at its limits in a house‑show lounge. These angular jolts were meant to lift listeners out of the humdrum and everyday.

This tape moves in the opposite direction. Its long, enveloping drones feel less like confrontations and more like a cocoon. It is not the music but now the world that is growing harsher. The material conditions in which this music is being made is changing. And so to are needs we bring to it.

What once aimed to shock now soothes. These sound recordings offer not escape but a kind of protective white noise. This turn toward gentleness is more than an aesthetic choice. It reflects a wider cultural shift.

ATOPOS and the Politics of Public Space

I love you, alive girl sits in close conversation with ATOPOS, Agapow’s label and outdoor performance series. The ATOPOS website makes clear the circumstances this music responds to. It writes that, “On colonially occupied lands, it can be observed that ‘public spaces’ are actually highly regulated and policed by not only the law but also by the indoctrinating values of capitalists. You don’t need to be told – you are raised to understand that the streets are not actually for use or enjoyment by the people but are instead transitional spaces to only be traversed for making money or land occupied by ‘businesses’ which also have strict laws regarding the use of ‘their’ space imposed on them that they then abide by.”

“Draconian decibel-limit laws,” ATOPOS adds,“pearl-clutching conservatives, pig landlords and capitalistic venue-owners continue to decimate art and culture in this city (and probably around the continent) that even suggests a lack of concern for profit, marketability, or generally lauded artistic practices. Choose to stand up against the tyranny of polite/uncritical society that keeps us shackled and sever your ties to the media-machines, aesthetics, behaviors, and values of a world that does not care if you live or die – that does not care if you live your life as a slave to sensation, brain on autopilot.”

ATOPOS responds to this in the present by creating temporary zones where art can exist without permission. In these moments, music making and listening become a political act. I love you, alive girl feels like an extension of that ethos.

A Quiet Reorientation in Brisbane’s experimental music scene

I realise that I am reviewing the object rather than the individual songs, but to me the cassette represents something larger. It reflects what is changing. Within this framework, I love you, alive girl (HMDWM2) reads as part of a broader shift in the Brisbane experimental music scene. The music does not escalate in noise or intensity. Instead, it turns toward spaciousness. In this respect, the cassette becomes both a work of art and a fragment of social history. It documents how communities adapt under pressure. In doing so we can continue to make space for each other and define on their own terms the future they want to exist.

Agapow’s ATOPOS work is part of a long lineage of “Exit” responses

My mind goes back to something I learned from a book by Albert O. Hirschman called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. He wrote that when a system fails to give people something essential, a non‑market space will rise to fill the gap. Brisbane’s experimental music history shows this clearly. From Audiopollen to Reel Bad to ATOPOS, these scenes appear when freedom, space, vitality, and creative possibility are missing in the formal music framework of Brisbane.

In these places, artists have a voice. Their art can exist for its own sake. A work can follow its own inner logic. It does not need to answer to ticket sales, copyright rules, gatekeeping civil servants, venue limits, streaming, or other demands. And when the mainstream ecosystem cannot hold this kind of expression, artists step outside it. They build their own networks. They create temporary zones where music can live on its own terms.

A Final Thoughts on Brisbane’s experimental music scene

If there is a message here, it is that ATOPOS highlights something the city can better provide. It shows what artists must, for now, build for themselves, and it makes me wonder what they might create if they were freer to focus on creativity alone. In this sense, the music becomes a signal. It marks a gap. Beyond the pleasure of community and participation, this music — and the people gathering around it — tells us something important about what is going on in the city we live in. They deserve our attention. We can study and better understand what is going on here.