April 2024
Dear everyone,
Writing this from York UK in September 2024 gives me an opportunity to reflect on what a significant year this has been so far, particular going back to the start (tending to much overdue updates).
My Fellowship as announced on the Arts SA website.
While the new year brought major transitions and difficult challenges for me personally, I was also blessed to turn attention to my creative endeavours with the incredible support of a 2024 Arts South Australia Fellowship from the SA Government.
This Fellowship allows a focussed year of skills and creative project development in higher-order ambisonics, a high level surround sound technology, building on my previous experience with the technology in my PhD and more recently my 2023 Flinders University Artist Residency in their new fourth-order ambisonic studio.
In addition to developing a portfolio of new works, the latter part of 2024 sees me head to the University of York in September and the University of Birmingham in October to spend time at their internationally-renowned ambisonic studios, followed by an artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida USA. As you read on, the effects of this generous investment in my practice show themselves in the various projects I’ve been undertaking this year, something I’m very grateful for.
For now, let’s return to early 2024.
From January 8-19, I participated in a Pitjantjatjara language course at the University of South Australia. Working with multiple Aṉangu tutors, and UniSA staff Sam Osbourne and Dan Bleeby, we covered fundamental vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and conversational dialogue, alongside a culture day learning public inma (song and dance) from Elders. Amongst our 50 participants were Her Excellency the Governor of South Australia, Frances Adamson, and her husband, Rod Bunton, as participants. It was a really enriching, nourishing and nurturing two weeks learning language and culture!
Our amazing Aṉangu tutors at our final presentation for the Pitjantjatjara course
I also started a new project with Nadene Thériault-Copeland of New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA, Ontario, Canada), called Weathered Piano Exchange. Starting as a response for the annual Arts Birthday event (first proposed by French artist Robert Filliou in 1963).
Our contribution started with four improvisations by Nadene on a weathering piano at NAISA’s headquarters, which she shared with me to respond on the pianos of the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary. We volleyed our responses back and forth a further two times, result in a complex dialogue between continents, landscapes, soundscapes and keyboards. The results can be found on several albums, released on Bandcamp:
An interview with Nadene and I about the project was recorded by Darren Copeland:
Addtionally, two broadcasts on Canadian Radio of our project were made for Arts Birthday 2024:
Vancouver’s CITR 101.9FM Radio 24 Hour Broadcast for Arts Birthday
Toronto’s CIUT-FM 89.5 on the ‘Electric Sense’ program hosted by James Bailey
Weathered Piano Exchange has had multiple ripples in follow-up projects like sanctuary x mill (more on this below), as well as plans for further exchanges between Australia and Canada and further afield, so watch out for further developments.
In February, I finalised a new work, Soundmap of Karrawirraparri, the long-awaited result of an 2019 Inspiring SA Grant.
The original proposal for the grant would have seen me make a piece in response to the Whyalla Steel Works and local community, but the unfortunate widespread effects of COVID in 2020 made this very difficult. In discussion with Inspiring SA, I decided instead to turn my focus to Karrawirraparri (Red Gum Forest River in Kaurna language), known also as the River Torrens, the major water source of the Adelaide Plains, and develop a soundmap work exploring its terrestrial and aquatic soundscapes.
Charting the river’s flow from source to sea, I spent several months making second-order ambisonic and hydrophone recordings at 10-kilometre intervals along its banks. The piece connects each of these recordings together, blending above and below -water sounds alongside suggestive spoken voice describe various themes and issues facing the river.
Soundmap of Karrawirraparri was premiered by Soundstream New Music as part of Adelaide Fringe 2024 on March 3 at The Loft, Aldinga Beach. Further presentations of the work are planned (especially by the river), so stayed tuned for more info soon!
Ambisonic recording at Birdwood SA for Soundcamp of Karrawirraparri
In early March, I co-conducted with Stuart Patterson a new piece, Lawrence English’s Proximities, as part of the Inner Sanctum exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia for the 2024 Adelaide Festival. From the AGSA website:
Lawrence English invites us to consider our understandings of place and the body by drawing attention to our ears – the act, sense and power of ‘audition’ – and how we might come to know the world through listening. Proximities, 2024, tests this by means of a sound object, in the form of a 712-kg bronze bell. In collaboration with bellfounder Anton Hasell, English has created the bell using a technique that eliminates the minor third tone, a trademark of old-world European bells, in favour of an equal temperament tuning, pioneered by Hasell to produce a harmonically pure and uniquely Australian timbre. It is presented in the Vestibule. It is rung daily throughout the exhibition as a companion form of timekeeping.
Apart from its use as a marker of time, locality, worship and labour, the bell has played a role in long-distance communication and as a warning signal. Proximities engages these multiple functions and interests to consider how sound operates within cities more broadly and how it might once again become a unifying agent. During the opening weekend of Inner Sanctum, it is the centrepiece for a series of public activations, in which multiple bell towers and handbells are utilised to create connections between bodies and locations across Adelaide. These events feature local participants, including members of the Adelaide Bellringers and the public, who are invited to collectively create a ‘sounding event’.
Utilising multiple bells rung in a variety of multitude of ways by community performers, the piece filled the North Terrace cultural precinct with the peals of clappers large and small
March 16 saw four back-to-back performances of my piece, Whispers as part of Floods of Fire in Adelaide Festival 2024 at Elder Conservatorium, The University of Adelaide.
Commissioned by Chamber Music Adelaide and MOD. for their 2022 Invisibility collaboration, this new version of the work featured octophonic surround sound and die-in choreography by Extinction Rebellion South Australia members.
As the program note mentions:
Endangered species are often rendered invisible as a result of low population numbers. With the advent of inexpensive long-duration field recording equipment, instead these species can again be found through listening for their calls. ‘Whispers’ is an encapsulation of the vocalisation endangered species in South Australia, marking their discovery and decline since the founding of the colony in 1836 to the present day and beyond.
Performed by Bridget McCullough, Clara Gillam Grant, Elinor Warwick and Ebony Bedford within a surround sound octophonic array, the work featured new choreography by members of Extinction Rebellion, and an opening speech by ecology honours student Gemma Dawe! Thanks to all who attended and were involved!
April saw the first of my large-scale travels for the year, where I drove from South Australia to Harrigan’s Lane, home of the Piano Mill, on the NSW/QLD border (via Bendigo for a friend’s 30th, then Melbourne – Wagga Wagga – Dubbo – Inverell and Ballandean) for an artist residency.
I had previously been to Harrigan's Lane in the Piano Mill for the Channelling Dulcie's Piano project in May 2023, but instead of a piano, I travelled with my octophonic surround sound system, with the intention of developing a new work, sanctuary x mill (pronounced ‘sanctuary by mill’).
Following from the responses I made on the Murray Bridge Piano Sanctuary pianos for the Weathered Piano Exchange Arts Birthday project in January, I sent these recording to Piano Mill co-artistic directors Vanessa Tomlinson and Erik Griswold, to record some further responses. The result of this exchange is a wonderful tapestry of weathered and ruined piano soundscapes from South Australia.
Further layered on top of this for sanctuary x mill is a concatentive synthesis (using the software Audioguide) of each of the piano recordings, comprised on sounds from their respective soundscapes (think of the piano tracks as being reconstructed/recomposed of bird song, frog croaks, tree creaks and reed rustles). Recycling soundscapes that I recorded for The River’s Way project in 2015, I made new ambisonic recordings of the Granite Belt bush at Harrigan’s Lane, replete with currawongs, lyrebirds and cockatoos joining the ensemble.
The first showing of the work was presented to a small group outside next to the Lagavulin concert hall, and I’ll be further developing the work in higher-order ambisonics whilst in the UK this coming September and October.
At the end of April, alongside piano performances by Gabriella Smart, I presented Soundmap of Karrawirraparri at the Friends of Willunga Basin Fundraiser in Willunga.
