The Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC), also known as the Organ Factory, was an artist-run music and performance art space in Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Located in a 19th-century factory used to construct the grand organ in the Melbourne Town Hall, it was co-founded in 1976 by composers Warren Burt and Ron Nagorcka, and ran concerts on a near-weekly basis until 1983. It closed the following year.
The CHCMC was guided by anarchist principles, with no money being charged of audience members or supplied to performers, and no restrictions on access to the space. This alternative set of values fostered a highly eclectic and experimental scene involving "a strange mix of Melbourne intelligentsia, music academics, and precocious post-punks".[1] Bands that frequently performed at the CHCMC include Tsk Tsk Tsk and Essendon Airport, co-founded by Philip Brophy and David Chesworth, respectively. In 1979, the pair established both the magazine New Music and the record label Innocent Records as a means of documenting the CHCMC scene.[2] Other CHCMC regulars included composers Paul Schütze and Ernie Althoff as well as art critic Paul Taylor, whose journal Art & Text served as an outlet for critical post-structuralist discussion of CHCMC performances.
Today the CHCMC is "one of the better-documented scenes in Australian experimental music history",[3] and is regarded as both "an important place in the history of new music in Australia"[3] and "a significant site for the development of Australian cultural postmodernism".[4]