John Blades was an experimental music artist and member of The Loop Orchestra, radio broadcaster, award winning radio documentary maker and civil engineer, from Sydney, Australia.

Experimental music bands

From 1980-1981, Blades was a founding member of The East End Butchers band. He was also a founding member of The Loop Quartet, which was formed in 1982, along with ex-Severed Heads

Severed Heads

Severed Heads is an Australian electronic music group based and founded in Sydney in 1979 as Mr. and Mrs. No Smoking Sign. The original members were Richard Fielding and Andrew Wright, and were soon joined by Tom Ellard. Fielding and Wright eventually left the group, leaving Ellard as a singular...

 member, Richard Fielding

Richard Fielding

Richard Fielding was a founding member of the Australian electronic dance group Severed Heads in 1979 in Sydney. He has been a member of other experimental, avant garde music groups such as Z-Glutz, The Loop Orchestra and Budgie Woops! He has had a career as a radio presenter on various New South...

, Ron Brown and Jaimie Leonarder

Jaimie Leonarder

Jaimie Leonarder also known as Jay Katz is an Australian musician, archivist, social worker, film critic, radio announcer, and DJ.-Biography:...

. During this year, the quartet performed a radio studio live to air experimental performance using loops on reel-to-reel tape machines. Other bands Blade formed and performed in included War Meat and the Dictator in 1982, and Men Like Licorice in the same year.

The Loop Orchestra was formed in 1982 by Blades and fellow founding band members Richard Fielding and Anthony Maher. In 1983, Peter Doyle

Peter Doyle (writer)

Dr. Peter Doyle, BA, Phd is a doctor of Media and Mass Communications, author, musician, and visual artist. He lives in Newtown, and works for Macquarie University where he teaches Print Media Production, as well as being a part-time as a curator of Sydney’s Justice and Police...

 also became a member. The band launched their first release, Suspense at the AFI Cinema in Sydney in 1990. Annette Shun Wah from SBS' The Noise programme interviewed the band and Blades described the work,

for the piece, Suspense, the sound sources were all concrete, that is, all pre-existing sounds, and it was a study of the way sounds and music is constructed for suspense in horror movies. So it's all taken from scores for those films - generally untreated sections of the scores from those films, from the 1940s, through to films like Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a 1954 monster horror film directed by Jack Arnold, and starring Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Denning, Antonio Moreno, and Whit Bissell. The eponymous creature was played by Ben Chapman on land and Ricou Browning in underwater scenes...

 of the 1950s, right through to Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the 1970s and Evil Dead in the 1980s, and so they're fragments of sound. It's like deconstructing an existing sound source and reconstructing - or structuring - something else out of that deconstruction.

Radio

Blades first radio programme, broadcast from 1982-85, was called Hot Dog You Bet. Fielding had suggested the name of the show, inspired by a flexi disc released with a New York art magazine called Smegma, an audio collage.

Since 1998, Blades presented a fortnightly radio programme called Background Noise with initial co-host Fielding, and from 2003, another ex-Severed Heads musician, Garry Bradbury

Garry Bradbury

Garry Bradbury is an Australian electronic musician active in Sydney's experimental music scene since 1979 where he was an early member of the pioneering post punk / industrial band Severed Heads, from 1981 to 1985, appearing on the albums: Since the Accident, City Slab Horror, Blubberknife and...

 on Sydney FM Radio station, 2MBS

2MBS

2MBS FM is a Sydney music radio station operated by the Music Broadcasting Society of New South Wales Co-Operative Limited.Launched in 15 December 1974, it is Australia's first fully licensed FM radio station....

. The programme features "mainly experimental music with innovative film soundtracks, radio plays and spoken word".

In 2010, Blades' documentary, The too hard basket, broadcast on ABC Radio National

Radio National

ABC Radio National is an Australia-wide non-commercial radio network run by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.Radio National broadcasts national programming in areas that include news and current affairs, the arts, social issues, science, drama and comedy...

, 360 documentaries programme won The Walkley Award for Social Equity Journalism - All Media, and also the Radio Documentary of the Year Award from The Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union

Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union

The Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union , formed in 1964, is a non-profit, professional association of broadcasting organisations. It currently has 200 members in 57 countries and regions, reaching a potential audience of about 3 billion people....

.