Rik Rue (born Richard Banachowicz)[1] is an Australian experimental musician,[2] and sound artist, known for his audio collages[3] in recordings and live performance.
[4] He first performed on saxophone with a number of prominent Sydney improvisers including Serge Ermoll, Jon Rose and Louis Burdett[5][4] before switching to live mixing of sampled and pre-recorded sound on audio cassette recorders including the TASCAM Portastudio, describing the relationship between the two instruments, 'The tape is improvised in a sense, by equalisation, adding timbres, adding pitch controls, the various combinations of mixing.
All those areas give you a sort of phrasing not unlike saxophonists altering their embouchure, and I approach the tapes in this manner.
[4][8] In the 1980s he was a member of the group Mind/Body/Split with Jim Denley, Sherre de Lyse, Jamie Fielding, Graham Leake and Kimo Venonen,[4] and in 1989 he co-founded the performance ensemble Machine for Making Sense with Chris Mann, Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley and Stevie Wishart, first performing at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria.
[9][10] Later he worked with performance group Gravity Feed[11] on over 20 projects between 1994 and 2007 in Australia and Germany,[1][12] Urban Theatre Projects,[13] dancer Tess de Quincey, the group Social Interiors (with Shane Fahey and Julian Knowles),[14] musicians David Moss, Eugene Chadbourne,[15] Ikue Mori[16] and released recordings on Extreme Records.