A mind behind MESS: Meet Robin Fox

Robin Fox has a reputation that precedes him. Everyone I mentioned his name to had nothing but praise to sing. So, I was delighted when he accepted my interview request.

We met bright and early at 9 AM on a sunny Thursday morning at the new home for MESS (Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio) in Federation Square. Robin Fox is its co-founder and artistic director.

The organisation recently upgraded its facilities, relocating from its previous location in North Melbourne, where the collection had been housed for nearly a decade. 2026 will mark its tenth birthday.

Robin greeted me cheerfully, and we headed to the educational breakout space to conduct the interview. He expressed his excitement about now having a separate area to hold workshops while members can still access the collection, something that wasn’t possible at the old location due to space restrictions.

For those who don’t know, MESS is what Fox describes as a “living” museum for electronic instruments. It’s a place where the public can sign up for a membership and gain access to niche and rare hardware. With an ethos centred on creation, exploration, and education, visitors can bring their laptops and keep the recordings of whatever they make.

Today, MESS acts as a vital incubator for Melbourne’s electronic music community. Local Naarm artists such as Rita Bass, Baby Blood Lotus, and Sachin de Silva have all cited the studio as an essential resource in creating recent projects. Proving that this collection of vintage hardware isn’t just a museum, but a living, breathing part of the city’s contemporary music landscape.

Something so specific it has to have been written in the stars. Yet that is precisely how Robin Fox appears to have brought his dream to fruition, as if it were meant to be.

Fox describes his career trajectory as a “natural progression” of carrying on his parents’ machine music legacy. His mother, Cindy John, made computer & experimental music throughout the 70s & early 80s. His stepfather, Jim Sosnin, established and ran the computer music department at La Trobe University. A few pieces in the MESS collection were even built by Sosnin in the 70s. With his birth father also being a musician, Robin Fox is what I would consider electronic music royalty.

Coming from such a unique lineage of musicianship and instrument innovation, it is no surprise that he eventually found his way to music.

However, it took Fox some time to follow that calling. After three years in law school, he realised his true passion was music and enrolled in an experimental music course at La Trobe University, a program that no longer exists today.

Fox explained that the program began by teaching instrument building, free improvisation, and making music with reel-to-reel cassette tape machines. That unconventional approach was ideal for his musical journey.

“The thing is that you started the course there, it's almost like you started the course breaking all of the rules, and then you spent the rest of the course learning all the rules. And this was perfect for me because I'm not very good at following orders.”

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Through the program at La Trobe, he came to see classical music’s rules as interesting but not necessary. Having tasted the freedom of the creative process, he realised that making things was a vital part of being alive.

After leaving law school, Fox initially wanted to study jazz drumming at VCA. But his own mother, a talented musician, offered some tough love, telling him plainly he wasn’t good enough. Instead, she suggested La Trobe, where things were done differently than at a traditional music conservatory.

Fox was in the last class to graduate from that program; the experimental music department closed in 1999, concluding his honours year. That summer, a lecturer from the closing department offered him a job digitising a cabinet full of old cassette tapes. In the process, he discovered the strange and wonderful music the department had created over the years.

Having studied the European and American avant-garde traditions in his course, finding these tapes helped Fox realise that Australia has its own rich history of experimental and electronic music.

“Understanding that there is a tradition in something that you're wanting to do can be really empowering. It can give you permission to do a thing. In the sense that I discovered a history of Australian experimental and electronic music, I found that incredibly empowering.”

He realised he didn’t need to travel to Europe or North America to learn about and pursue experimental music; he could do that here in Australia.

After graduating and the department’s closure, he went to the University of Melbourne, portfolio in hand, to see about entering their PhD program. The formal institution, however, did not share the same open-mindedness as his previous program and did not accept him.

So he went to Monash University. Although they didn’t yet have a PhD program in composition, they awarded him a scholarship to complete his postgraduate work and earn his master’s degree. By the time he finished, the PhD program was ready for him. His research focused on experimental music made in Melbourne from 1975 to 1979.

But perhaps the most formative event of 1999, aside from graduating, was his inheriting the electronic studio of Keith Humble, who founded the electronic music department at La Trobe and passed away in 1995.

As the department was closing, the university, unaware of the instruments’ potential value, threw them out. In a stroke of fate, Fox’s friend Lisa McKinney pulled a particular synthesiser from the dumpster, inevitably sparking his curiosity about electronic instruments.

“So she pulls out this synthesiser. And it was just a box with dials on it. I didn't really know much about electronic music at that time, and I was looking at it, and it had three oscillators. I could see that. And I thought, oh, maybe this is that particular synthesiser, the VCS3 that I've read about.”

Curious, he took the peculiar instrument to his stepfather, Jim Sosnin, to confirm if it was the synthesiser he hoped it was. It turned out not to be the VCS3, but an instrument his stepfather had built in the 70s.

“I took it to my stepfather and said, "Is this a VCS3? He said, I built that in 1976. I didn't know my stepfather built synthesisers at this point. I'm like, okay, that's amazing. And he said, "I've got a VCS3 upstairs”. Because he had inherited Keith Humble's whole electronic studio, which at the time, in the 90s, was considered kind of junk.”

Just like that, Fox was exposed to the world of electronic instruments. His stepfather had kept everything from Humble’s studio, including the beloved VCS3, which Fox eventually began performing regularly with.

After expressing his appreciation for the instrument, Robin’s stepfather essentially said, ‘There’s plenty more where that came from,’ and showed him the rest of the extensive collection, which would be the starting point for the MESS collection.

That collection belonged to Keith Humble. Fox’s stepfather inherited it, eventually exposing Robin to a musical legacy he hadn’t known much about.

“Everyone should be creative.” That was the ethos of Keith Humble, without whom MESS probably wouldn’t exist.

Yet Humble wasn’t the beginning of Melbourne’s avant-garde music legacy. There was also the flamboyant Australian experimental music pioneer, Percy Grainger, who founded the Grainger Museum.

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Located on the University of Melbourne campus, the Grainger Museum houses the many odd and exotic instruments Grainger collected and created throughout his lifetime. One of the most notable is the “kangaroo pouch tone tool”, an instrument that encapsulates Grainger’s idea of “free music” —music he considered unlimited by conventional time and pitch intervals.

Robin Fox explains how Keith Humble, having recently returned to Melbourne from overseas in the late 60’s, reopened the Grainger Museum (then a centre) to the public after it had been under dust sheets for years.

“He set up the studio there, and he started creating music workshops for kids and various things. He just wanted people to get involved. And so I guess in inheriting that collection, I also inherited that legacy in a way.”

After inheriting the collection, Fox kept it in his studio, using it sparingly as he composed for contemporary dance and toured. But he knew he wasn’t doing the instruments justice.

Fox teamed up his colleague, Byron Scullin, who was teaching sound at a university, with his proposal for MESS. Scullin also liked the idea of a place more open and general than a traditional institution—a space where people could experience electronic sound, maintaining a sense of playfulness as they learned. A “living” museum where history and the future collide.

Although Fox inherited a large portion of the MESS collection, many instruments also come from the personal collection of Wouter “Wally” De Backer, better known as Gotye.

After Gotye’s song became a global hit, he used his newfound resources to start his own collection of rare electronic instruments. Knowing this, Fox approached de Backer with a proposal seeking support for MESS.

“I wrote a proposal for Wally because I went down to his place at that time in the Mornington Peninsula, and he had a huge barn that was just full of amazing instruments. And it was kind of like he bought everything that he could get his hands on. Like some really rare and amazing things. So I think not instantly, but very quickly, he had a really significant collection. But then he moved to New York, and so they were not being used.”

Not long after their conversation, de Baker not only lent his instruments to MESS but also helped the organisation secure its first lease at the North Melbourne Meat Market building.

And thus, MESS was born–created from a long history of experimental, electronic, and machine music that is uniquely Melbourne. From the legacies and collections of former local musicians comes this special place of creation, exploration, and play.

At the conclusion of our interview, I asked Fox to show me the VCS3, the machine that, in my opinion, started it all. He happily obliged, giving me a brief tour of some of the other instruments as well.

I could tell that Fox was proud of what he had helped build, and he should be. An interactive museum of electronic synthesisers is not something you come across every day. It’s a unique concept that highlights Melbourne’s long history in electronic music. While it might not be the legacy of house or techno, it is a legacy of innovation, creativity and artistry.

As MESS enters its second season at its new home in Federation Square and celebrates its tenth birthday this coming year, it continues the heritage of music in Melbourne: one of the avant-garde and the unconventional, pushing the boundaries of what we understand music to be.

Ultimately, MESS is a portrait of its founders: a confluence of lineage, serendipity, and rebellious creativity. From a dumpster rescue to a world-class collection, Fox transformed inherited legacies into a public invitation. At Federation Square, surrounded by the instruments of Humble, Sosnin, and Gotye, MESS asserts that Melbourne’s avant-garde tradition isn’t a relic–it’s a living signal, waiting for the next person to plug in and play.

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Crissy “Mothafunk” Collins is a DJ, journalist, self-proclaimed Black music historian and host on Naarm’s Triple R FM. Find her on Instagram.