Looking back to when the first curtain was drawn on TDM, or Tedium as it was known then, it was "a feminist performance art group at Melbourne Uni for which I was doing soundtracks for", explained Peter. "I got more involved until I actually started doing my own pieces, and it eventually got to the extent that I really wanted to take it out into the pubs rather than just performing to elite theatre audiences. Basically we took what we were doing in the theatres and started doing it in pubs, and at first we had backing tapes, but we'd also be making noises on stage. The emphasis has always been on having an experience as opposed to rehearsing anything, so we would conceptually talk about ideas that we wanted to portray, then go on stage and just be as spontaneous and as intense as possible in living through these ideas".
Act 2 saw the growth in the importance of music, and consequently of Peter, in the TDM experience. Our humble narrator went on to describe how "gradually, after going through all this really dark imagery that we were involved in at first, the music started to become more and more important. Now the music's very important to what we do, and that's why the name has changed". Maintaining the desire to outwardly express that which is within rather than inwardly expressing and experiencing what occurs outside the project, Peter noted that when his music began to dominate the performance, "I was pretty much just creating sound in my bedroom, I just experimented and saw what came out, I was just into making noise. A lot of people started dropping names to me, so I had a listen to Psychic TV and Coil, which I really liked, and some of the Throbbing Gristle, the really funny stuff, like 20 Jazz Funk Greats, but they weren't really influences".
With such dramatic changes taking place within genres, lineups, names and even artistic `categories', it is perhaps a little difficult to pin point where the continuity in this chameleon project is. To Peter, the unalterable essence of TDM is that it is "like a collective, in which various people can work at various times. It's a vehicle for people to express various things, whether it be political or personal, but then again we don't really see a distinction between political and personal; we see it pretty much as the same thing". Peter seems to have the driver's seat of this vehicle at present, having taken charge of the follow up album to Electronic Lovesongs. "This next album I'm predominantly doing by myself because I've just bought all this gear, which everyone else in TDM doesn't know much about. I'm really keen to experiment and see what I can do on my own, so it will probably come out under the name TDM, although it's probably predominantly going to be just me. It's heading into a more techno based direction in that I'm using lots of technology, whereas the last album was done with very cheap gear just in my bedroom that was just an experiment".
While Peter may seem to be the lead actor, director, producer and scriptwriter for the TDM theatricals at the moment, this will almost certainly not remain the case. "This album I'm doing a fairly techno thing, whereas in a year's time I've got no idea what we'll be doing. TDM is all about change. A lot of it's to do with meditation and magic, and the emphasis in meditation and magic is change, always changing, going beyond the old self and developing with every piece of wisdom that you find. That's why what we are doing now is nothing like what we were doing 8 months ago; we don't really know where it's going to go...".
Trish
From Beat Magazine 19 April 1995
BEAT MAGAZINE Home Page