I am currently playing alot of music outside of the always monicker i adopted over four years ago.

The Projects i'm involved in are two different bands: GUGG & GAUNTLET.
Gauntlet is the premordal clash of Always & bleak metal outfit krystoffkrvstoffiston
(http://www.myspace.com/krystoffkrvstoffiston). krystoffkrvstoffiston contains Christopher lg hill and Simon Taylor from melbourne bands whitehorse, collapsed toilet vietnam, eye off, moffarfarrah, galactic locksmiths, paeces. We have released one tape which is available through Pete Hyde's distribution/ blog/ label "Sweat lung" and played live twice.

GUGG is myself and Christopher LG Hill, (myspace.com/guggisgogg) a meeting of two old friends + collaborators creating the sounds of a basketball game courted by intense lemmings + trolls. We have a cd out entitled "Gutangs" plus a release on Matthew p.hopkins' new tape label "Near tapes" + a cd out through another melbourne label (but is a secret for now) coming soon.

Photo of gauntlet performing:http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=321572633&albumID=905762&imageID=7802612

small reviews of Always from Guy Blackman LP Launch at Toff In Town with Laura jean 31st May 2008

"Appearing on stage hunched over on his knees & looking like a younger, incredibly bedraggled Jean Reno, Alex Vivian's Always cut a decidedly derelict figure against the nominal opulence of 'The Toff'. No longer the fresh-faced 'boy genius' sporting an Asian pre-teen's basin-cut, the new Always forgoes lyrical acapella sleaze for a continuous looped collage of unintelligible vocal gymnastics. Performing three of what he called "pieces", the night gets slightly medieval when 15 minutes in Alex strips off to a leather vest & I finally twig to the chains lying around the stage as props. With no lutes around to compliment his sequestering of vintage fashions to their logical archaic conclusion, Always instead deviates into a brief loop-delay menagerie of animal noises.... "

from fasterlouder.com.au

Always @ Utopian Slumps, Melbourne (13/12/07)


Australian experimental musician Always (Alex Vivian) has developed a strong following locally and internationally for his unique and innovative music. His latest album, F.I.S.T. (Freedom in Shit Together), was launched on December 13 to an appreciative crowd at Melbourne's Utopian Slumps artist-run space, with support from Hi God People and Rohan Bell-Towers.

The idiosyncratic Hi God People opened with a relatively reserved performance, devoid of their usual aptitude for full-costumed fanfare. Combining moments of acoustic folk with electro-acoustic interludes, Hi God People created a musical atmosphere that was at times humorous, at times moody, all drifting in and out of fleeting traces of shoegaze. The performance, however, suffered somewhat from what seemed to be an unintentional incongruousness, with passages entering and exiting the mix seemingly inappropriately, in a fashion that suggested due consideration was not given to the piece's internal musical logic. That being said, Hi God People delivered a unique listening experience, which was both memorable and bound with enjoyable musical moments.

Next up, Rohan Bell-Towers performed a synth-laden fusion of retro-pop and psychedelia, shrouding his audience with smoke machine mist. Resting somewhere between Talking Heads and Tangerine Dream, Bell-Towers' performance satisfied with a lush palette of synthesised musical textures, all laid against a steady drum-machine pulse and coupled with his own likeably blithe vocal phrases and psychedelic lyrics. Thoroughly entertained, the crowd eagerly anticipated the headlining performance of Always.

With an astonishingly contemporary approach towards minimalism, Always chanted into a microphone and delay pedals, his vocal utterances looping repetitively and consequently morphing from human generated noises into unidentifiable 'sound objects'. Seated modestly with his legs swaying, he gradually developed a rhythmic, pulsating wall of sound that shifted and evolved seamlessly. A unique improvisation that made for an entrancing and engaging performance.

Jared Davis

Always makes a future kind of phonic music exclusively composed of vocal sounds. Like Brion Gysin's Dream Machine, his spinning tracks seem to affect the alpha rhythms of the human brain, allowing listeners new access to hidden imaginative capacities. Throughout F.I.S.T, segmented pieces of voice are slowly run through endless, looping possibilities of order, creating layer upon layer of hypnotic, implied meanings. Wholly improvised using two delay pedals and a vocal microphone, these sounds are intricately woven together in geometrical progression, slowly building like a Rave wind-up toward climaxes of near psychotic intensity.

All the themes of the Sydney-via Melbourne artist's recent work are here - states of infantilist un-thought, heavy-camp come-on, throwaway junk magick and consuming ethno-trance - but the way they've come together is truly enchanting. The genius of the whole thing is that, while Alex Vivian in person is a highly recognisable, irrepressible figure of the underground, these new tracks permutate him beyond recognition, somehow and startlingly into the ether. It's a bold and dextrous artistic coup pulled off with all the cool humour of a Monte Cazazza or Paul McCarthy.

By Mark Gomes

Tuva is a relatively small patch of dirt, inhabited by around 300,000 Europeans and organised into a republic down the arse end of Siberia, Russia. It's pretty cold there too, with summer "temps" averaging around 18 degrees centigrade and you don't want to know how many marks below zero it goes to in winter. Needless to say, it would be important to be able to make your own fun in this environment. This numbing situation (and possibly some fermented potato juice) has lead to the Tuvan people mastering something called "throat singing". "Throat singing" involves producing different pitches of sound over a base note. I've heard that up to six different pitches can be made from one Tuvan's wind-pipe! The result is an intensely hypnotic, chanting tune the likes of which are really hard to find, unless you're a monk of some denomination. That was until Always came along with his album "F.I.S.T" (Freedom In Shit Together). Now THIS, is some crazy shit to be together in.
Let me paint a picture to aid this explanation, cos' it 'ain't easy.

So you're a Spanish conquistador (it's a random picture I'm painting), wandering through the rainforest in what would later be known as South America, wearing pantaloons and an upside-down tin toy boat for a hat. Imagine quietly wandering into an Incan village and seeing a human sacrifice taking place (to appease Supai the god of death of course) over a stone alter smeared with the congealed blood of past martyrs. Now, what would you, as this intrepid conquistador, hear? What sounds would come from that ritual? It'd be "F.I.S.T." by Always. I can't put this any other way. This music is just so terribly intense, it'll make your face screw up in ways you thought only a story about your parents' acid-fuelled sexual escapades with dead animals could make you. Anyway, enough of the geography/history lesson. Alex Vivian (who is Always) gets super experimental with this CD, using only his voice and a heavy dose of delay loops to create possibly the weirdest thing I've ever heard. Everything is apparently improvisation, with only an idea to provide a pathway for the music.

What you will get if you listen to this CD is a preternatural tribal experience. Some will find it too avant-garde to listen past the first track, or half-way through it even, but others will listen intensely to the strange nuances that exuded from F.I.S.T and allow themselves to travel somewhere far away. Then there are those who will try to listen to it and will appreciate the massive precipice Always is walking yet won't drift away. I fall in the third group. Vocal noises (not even words) that are looped back over themselves, with no other input (I mean none, no rhythm, no melody, this is all looped vocals) is really hard to listen to. Track 3 'Pigg Playe' starts with a vocal sample that, as the name would suggest, sounds like a pig. And 'Slimed Aztec', which runs it's twisted self over a 25 minute course, utilises a range of noises that I'm unable to even spell. It's all a bit much for my poor little head.

I can't begin to compare this CD with anything I've ever heard, which is why I love and hate it simultaneously. I love it because it's awesome that someone has the balls to produce something this whacky, and I hate it because I cannot conceive when I would ever want to listen to this style of music. "F.I.S.T." is so far away from what I see as conventional modern music; it's almost as if time-space has been warped to get it to 2007, which bothers me because something this rare should be almost sacred. I'm torn.

Always
The Hopetoun Hotel, Sydney, Sep 20 07
Posted Monday, Sep 24 2007

Always is Sydneysider Alex Vivian, hunched over two effects pedals, eyes glued to his gear, with a microphone fixed to his lips. His act is a capella with a twist: his vocals are fed through a short live-negotiated loop, so that every noise he makes is locked into a dizzying rhythmic pattern. There are no lyrics, only the rapid accumulation of odd vocal contortions that fasten into densely complex textures, containing apparently accidental rhythms and occultist chants.

The result is breathtaking at times; especially when the sounds attain an astonishing resemblance to painstakingly structured electronic music. The vocal melange can take unexpected turns: often it only requires one grunt for a rhythm to split in two, or for previously stifled subtleties to leap to the forefront. As well as being technically impressive, it's totally danceable: the unabated repetition provides for the same undulating, hypnotic effect as techno, and surprisingly – being the Hopetoun – one or two audience members let these strangely compelling textures get the better of their bodies.

If it lacks anything, it's the ability to maintain your attention, especially when, during glimpses of brilliance, Vivian will pop or click into the microphone and the aural tide will change, leaving one stranded for a few moments before the mess pulls together again, a bit like a Transformer's ineffectiveness mid-transformation. It's a concoction Mandelbrot might be proud of though: the music is widely governed by the machines, to the point where Vivian might be unaccountable for some of the results. There is a sense of artistic control however, though the extent to which Vivian pre-plans these sounds is interesting to consider – the truth could blunt the alchemy.

by Shaun Prescott

"I'm mint and shiny-new to the Always phenomenon, but my companion in observations is an old hand and is able to provide the 'long view' of whats I'm hearing. basically, Always is fantastic. Aptly named, he performs a 40 minute or so single piece that uses vocal and synth parts looed and develops into a hypnotic near-stasis reminiscent of Phillip Glass spliced with Matthew herbert..."